Basketweave

I am the insatiable wolf
whose hunger you fear
yet whose domain you desire.
Step off the path, my dear
why are your eyes so big?
Have you never felt
the earth with bare feet
have you never smelled
fresh flowers so sweet?
Your mother warned you
to stay away
your grandmother
told her the same
yet here I stand, welcoming
and you come to me.
I am freedom. I am the door
that opens new paths, your small fingers
holding onto the basket till it breaks
like glass. What big ears you have
did you hear the wind in the leaves
or a star shooting across the sky?
What big lips you have? Better
to speak, better to eat
and my, what big teeth, you say
but they’re necessary
to clear the way.

After “Sugar House,” from Lisa Andrews’ The Inside Room.

Red Riding in the Wood

From the moment I stepped upon the path
	I knew I was meant to leave it
after all, what’s the worth of a warning

if it could never come to pass?
	so I stepped beyond the bricks
let my toes impress upon the earth

bits of dirt and morning dew
	clinging to my flesh, my flesh
as much earth now as the ground.

I tread more lightly in the wood
	than I would upon the path
for there the ground is paved

and garish, cracked and strewn with weeds
	but here the earth abounds
with green vines and blossoming flowers

of pink and lilac and white, soft yellow
	like the ethereal bricks of other
paths that women were meant to follow.

I shall not follow. I shall step freely
	decide my course, my own way
to whatever ends I aim at.

After “Gretel in the Forest,” from Lisa Andrews’ The Inside Room.

Insistent

Content warning: This poem contains graphic sexual imagery.

After After

I have thought many times about what I shall do after I write this. But now is still before, and this is before, but having said such, it is also after. I have spent many months thinking about before, before before, when things were better. Except things were never better: I was only blinder, before I knew, before I knew that I didn't know, before I knew what I now know after. I spend equally as much time imaging after after. I had a dream: I have a dream about after, after I can see whole faces again, after black faces and brown faces aren't held after white faces, after my faces face each other and I face each of them after my before is after, when I am after my before. I wonder about the weight of holding hands, how light they felt before, though before before when holding his hand was like holding a mine somewhere beneath our feet, set there some time before, and maybe it would detonate after we set upon if if we didn't hold still. And after after, I wonder how heavy our hands will be, when I haven't held a hand in so long, not since before. I remember before when I ate better and ran often and lost thirty pounds. And I think often after before when I gained back forty and I wonder now what I'll wear after after when people see more than my upper torso, since my shoulders fit about as well in my shirts after as before even if the bottom seams ride up my stomach after I switched to only elastic waistbands before. There is too much before to be mindful of what was before before, and I know there is too little after after to be certain of what will still exist after what happened before and after what killed before kills even more even after who was here before is replaced with the person after him. I have spent too much time staring after after, ignoring before before, and I commit, I cannot linger, must admit there is no after after when what I am, where I am, when I am is neither before nor after but now, and now, after before but still before after, I have neither before nor after to look for.

“After After” is after a poem in Jameson Fitzpatrick’s book Mr. & called “The Genius of Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With,” which is itself after a paragraph in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. Even poems, not only poets, can have their own lineage.

Reimagining Dragons

I’ve been writing poetry since I was ten or twelve. That’s nearly twenty years of writing poetry. I like to think time has sharpened my words, chiseled rough stone into smooth sculptures. I’ve progressed so far in my craft that I actually felt I had some good ones to submit to journals recently. They were all rejected, but the fact that I haven’t really submitted poems to any place since I was like 16 or 17 sending in awful poetry to prestigious literary journals and contests has got to mean something, right?

It’s also been a very long time since I’ve posted on Silent Soliloquy. I could name a dozen excuses, but one reason I’d like to highlight is the strange juxtaposition of writing as hobby and hoping to be published someday. This creates tension: If I post my best work here, then it’s automatically excluded from nearly everything that could result in getting published. So if I save my best work for submissions and post the rest here, then I’m sharing only dribble. That’s not what I want for my readers or for myself.

In the past, this site has almost been run like my own e-zine, periodically delivering short stories, series, and poems for readers to peruse without subscription fees.

Now, though, I feel I need to take this site in a different direction.

Consider the name: Silent Soliloquy. A soliloquy is an “act of speaking one’s thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers,” and the description of it being silent adds in just a hint of contradiction (you can’t silently say anything) and a touch of wordplay (since I’m writing, not speaking aloud, it is actually silent).

Just having a blog to be a depositing place of old writing may not be objectively bad, but that’s no longer what I need. I want to grow my craft. I want a place where people (maybe future fans of books I’ll get published) can come to see that I wasn’t always as great a writer and possibly learn about the craft through my journey as an author.

So here’s the new direction I’m considering: I’m going to begin taking snippets of poetry or short stories I’ve written and either analyze it in order to do a rewrite, or I’ll ask some targeted questions with the hope that readers can provide feedback.

I think a realistic schedule for this is maybe twice a month. That’s a slow drip of content, but if it’s more meaningful content, then it’ll still quench our combined thirst.

To start us off, I’ve dredged up literally the earliest dated poem I ever wrote: Dragons.