Next Line, Please: A Hole in One [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Last week, we were invited to play a game of word golf, a prompt which lets our imagination go as we try to solve a puzzle composed of slightly altered end words. Who had the lowest score and the win? Well, let us begin:

In “To Tell the Tiller From the Tail,” Eric Fretz managed the task in seven lines:

Bukowski said “the moonlight always seemed fake”
through the plastic thatch of my faux-Samoan fale
in California, just before the fall.
But in that time the tales we told were tall.
Now facts have changed, there’s nothing left to tell.
See: two black birds fly above the bright teal
sea, as if a simulacrum of the real.

Dr. Lehman applauds "the attention-grabbing opening line and the daring use of “simulacrum,” a piece of academic jargon that means fake in one context and is fake in another." I myself enjoy any poem that is set in a car in California.

“Apophasis at the End of the Year” by Steve Bellin-Oka’s offers crisp imagery and several dives into the Bukowski-esque. 

I half-tried to love this makeshift life: a woman’s fake
pearl earring falls off. She rattles in her purse for the fare,

the bus hiccupping ahead. Carbon monoxide fart
of the tailpipe. Always we are gone and there, “fort”

and “da,” as in Freud’s grandson’s game. To ford
a river, to find good footing, I run my fingers beneath the fold

of your crisp white shirt. You tell me my hands are cold.
In six weeks, we will leave this town. One December story I told

you: a pregnant woman side-saddle on her camel, the toll
of the jostling through sand. Another the stars might tell—

our compulsion to repeat, to wander. To forget the desert’s teal
flowers and hail. This makeshift life, half-pretending it’s real.

Christine Rhein employs the image of a ladder to exemplify the work of this exercise. Here is her “Act of Betrayal”:

Precise, a painted forgery: fake
love. The portrait (that gazing face)
in a museum-house you pace
around all night. Yes (hell yes), pack
up (your sorrows) the dreamy peck
of still-life fruits. Sun-kissed wine. Peak,
scentless blooms (that laughter peal).
Brushstrokes to your heart, wildly real.

And a quick tip-of-the-hat to Louis Altman's brilliant couplet in the "underrated manner" of Alexander Pope:

How skeptical we are, how hard we think to make
A phony work of art for avarice, just for lucre’s sake.

For more poems, couplets, and noteworthy commentary, please visit the American Scholar's page for the full post! And as always, a new prompt will arrive next week.