Minisode 36: Jin and Collins – She a Long Boi

Poetry by Jacquie Burckley in the style of Ha Jin:

Gone
I don’t fit in my car and the light’s
orange. The R on my keyboard is sticky
with something and everything I write is
-amblings and -oses; I am sure as well
it is how I sound. My blacks are unlatching and
my rest is never well and you’ve been gone three days.

Every sock match has jettisoned itself.
My water tastes like gunpowder with
no regard for springs, cliffs, glaciers
or sinks. A thin film of scum wraps
around me at night and I shower in sludge.
I think my washer is made of sludge; my toothpaste
certainly is. My jumpier is too warm and my tank
is too cold and I can’t get tanked and I can’t move out of
the tank’s way and you’ve been gone seventeen days.

The ink in my pen has frozen over and the trees
are yelling at me. They spit on the ground where I
walk and the chairs are all too small. My doorways
are slanted and short and the washrooms switched with
the bedrooms and I don’t know where I am. No longer
do my candles stay aflame and my notebook has
gone missing and you’ve been gone thirty two days.

The wind is quiet and the walls are quiet and
the trees are still and so am I. The tides have
pacified because the moon is gone and even
though the stars go on, I cannot. I think soon
even the stars will expire and the dirt will
swallow me whole because I am still.

The sky’s gone and the ants are gone and the
bloomers are gone and the seas are gone

and so am I.

Poetry by Chrissy Schreiber in the style of Billy Collins:

Betty White
Over chicken wings in a new part of Louisville,
as my mouth burned slowly hotter,
my friend Claire told me about a game
she likes to play called Betty White.

The rules: she gives you an item like Cheerios
and asks, “Do you think its older
or younger than golden Betty White?”
and you have to use logic to decide for yourself.

If you win the game, she says,
you’ll live as long as Betty herself,
and if you lose, you must speak
only in Betty-isms:

Get at least eight hours of sleep,
nine if you’re ugly.
It’s unlike any game I’ve ever played,
but it brings joy, just like Betty.

If you want to be tough, grow a vagina. Those
things can take a pounding.

Coaching Session
We set up boundaries for
ourselves and we call them guardrails,
using them to keep us on track,
invisible rails that barely exist,
winding through places that exist
only in our wildest imagination.

We practice the gut check:
breathe in (life), breathe out (pain),
sense what your body tells you, repeat,
combine Feeling and Thinking and
create the perfect imbalance,

and then lean in. Lean in, change stop to start
and recognize
what your internal battle is
raging on about, then honor it.
Check in with your touchpoint,
Mind, body, soul, energy. Slow down.

Lake Shadow
Today is the kind of day that makes me want
to sprawl out underneath
a live oak tree and count the branches
that leisurely trace patterns through the sky.

I’d like to capture precisely the colors-
the leaves have turned
from crisp and crunchy forest green
to a softer, paler pear sheen,
interspersed with piecemeal tawny.

Instead of scratching at each other,
they caress like a feather, and conspire,
tell secrets, whisper to the wind,
furtive and unseen.

The damp earth calls,
and I sink into soil that smells faintly of rain.

Three days have passed,
and there’s a small snake burrowing
beneath my head as I trace shapes in the clouds
drifting lazily across my view.

They pass like ships on the sea, carried
by a current I cannot sense,

while I waste away hours neglecting
the letters and forms that have piled up
soaking in the sunlight
until they’re drenched and gone.

I bury my brain among the lives of
adventurous men.

Today I’d like to be the finch that flits
from branch to holly branch,
plucking ripe red berries bursting with
flavor and staining my beak.

I have frightened the lizard,
resting in the shade and trying to evade
the claws that poke through
and the ears that soar above,
and I wage I’d like to be him today too.