This week's post shows off poems that made clever use of phrases with multiple meanings, phrases such as "red eye" or "blue moon" or "working stiff" or "grass widow." As always, there were droves of impressive responses to the prompt, and much else to be admired. Shall we jump in?
Steve Bellin-Oka’s “Red Eye” won deserved praise from discerning readers:
Bright crimson smear in the sclera. Over-
flow of a miniature river’s cataracts into the ovoid pool
of black pupil, blue iris, and lens. I almost never look
at my face in a mirror: so someone asks, what
happened to your eye? What hasn’t. Violent sneeze,
burst vessels. Once I abraded the cornea when by mistake
I rubbed sand into it. Maybe I was trying to make
glass. On the all-night flight from Vancouver to Baltimore
where you lay dying, I took a window seat so I
could both see and not see, hologram of the reading light
fixed above the jet wing. In Polaroids of us at the beach
as kids, our eyes burn red as coal embers, as unchecked fever
Diana Ferraro said it best when she wrote, “I like very much the almost medical, precise descriptions that create a cold distance, then slowly build into all the meanings of red eyes until we fall into the painful abyss of the unexpected.”
Christine Rhein shares first place with “Working Stiff,” the soliloquy of a man wearing a “man bun” (gross) and “Armani suits” (very nice if you can get it):
I’m serious. Fourteen hours a day. My neck, shoulders hurting.
My laptop heating up. Like business. I own a mall, a dance club,
three coffee shops. And on paydays, we all chat—my employees
happy,
able to buy the hippest clothes, great bodies, expensive hair—the
kind
that bounces when they walk. For myself—it’s a man bun, six-pack
abs,
Armani suits—in Second Life, Kona Karl raking in the lindens, and
me
designing logos for the coffee cups, bikinis for the dancers. To top all
that—
I’m getting married soon. But hey—don’t tell my wife. She thinks I’m
just playing “some stupid game.” She’d never understand Kona Karl
needing a tuxedo, a honeymoon. Or the 55,000 lindens—260 bucks
I’ve spent on special animation, making sure that, yeah, I’ll be
working
magic on my wedding night. And on any night when my bride,
Cloudberry,
shows up, logged-in, to shake cocktails, fill the hot tub in the beach
house
she picked out for us—the mortgage, like in real life, costing me
plenty.
"Blue Moon" proved to be a very popular jumping off point for NLP contenders.
Patricia Wallace earns high marks with her poem of that title:
I like the moon, the way she hangs around
when everyone else has split, sick of my caterwauling,
my complaints, my sorry love life. Sometimes she’ll slip in
an extra appearance at the bar and shine her full attention
on our conversation. We talk about dark sides and tattoos,
joke about the gossip: the black-out nights, how secretly
she’s a man, the dog-eared rumors people spin out drunk
with daylight, wanting to be hip and clever by claiming
we’re looney. She says she gets the blues from wildfires
and volcanos. Been there. I know the feeling,
Once in a blue moon, if she’s had a few too many,
I’ll walk her to the corner, lift her to a lamppost and watch her drift
into a dawn sky. There’s that little tidal tug as she disappears.
Taking advantage of the unusual terms used to keep score in tennis (where “love” equals zero) Allen King contributes the clever and economical poem, “Love-Love”:
Watching tennis
on t.v.
she turned
and asked,
“What’s love?”
Boy did
that make
me think.
There's plenty more to see, so visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post!
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