12-4-2018
Lisa Dordal
To Say Something Is Alive Is Not Enough
Because everything is in motion:
bone, ivory, shell. And blood
doesn't hold on to anything
but itself. Because there are worlds
within worlds-geometries
of ant and whale, girl and boy.
And some infinities are larger
than other infinities. Because iron filings
can reveal invisible lines of force.
And my mother's last words were:
help me. Because my father loved
Lincoln's general-the one who drinks
and still wins the War-and the past
is a fine skin that does not protect.
And I did not know that loss could be
so ordinary: my mother reaching
into a cupboard for a glass, saying
take something, anything.
And I don't know if memory
is a place or a map of the place.
Only that I did not come this time
to find her. And I never did ask
what war.
For the Cashier at T.R. Wolfe's Toy and Candy
To enter the pinched interior
of T. R. Wolfe's Toy and Candy,
was to risk her squint
that branded every kid
a thief. Her hair pulled back
into a coarse, gray stone,
her face bony and sad-
as we'd tap our fingers
against the counter glass
to pronounce our choice
of pink cigarettes cloaked
in sugary smoke. Or,
from the sundry collection
of jigsaw puzzles lining
the store's high-shelved
perimeter: our choice
of Barbie and Ken's
dream house, the cockpit
of a Concorde, UFOs
over a Midwest wheat farm.
Puzzles that would spread
like sea garbage
across our bedroom floors.
How can it be that this
is what was given her?
Not a pursuit of quiet,
brainy labor: reading the ash
in Nile River mud.
Or probing the loss
of an ancient grave-
head to head, a girl and a boy,
and beads too many
to count. Only this, the daily repetition
of warm coins passing
from our hands into hers.
And how can I not admire her
for her refusal to feign
contentment?
Whatever it was she wanted,
getting us instead.
Amanat
-On the night of December 16th, 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student boarded a bus in New Delhi to return home after watching the film Life of Pi.
The hyena kills the zebra,
then the orangutan.
The tiger kills the hyena.
And the boy survives.
Pi is an irrational number.
And a woman boards a bus.
If horses could draw,
they would draw one god
in the shape of a horse.
Oxen would draw many,
each with a body like their own.
And the bus is not really a bus.
The relationship
between the width of a circle
and its circumference
continues infinitely without
repeating. And Pi is a boy
who just wants to love
God. If dark matter could draw,
it would not draw itself.
The human intestine
is approximately five feet long.
Only five percent of hers
would remain. They would be called
joyriders. The instrument used was
metal. The instrument used
was flesh. And the woman,
it was said, died peacefully.
-from Mosaic of the Dark, Black Lawrence Press 2018, selected by POW Associate Editor, Amie Whittemore
PROMPT: In "To Say Something Is Alive Is Not Enough," Lisa Dordal creates a powerful and appealing structure of fragments with alternating "sentence starters" "Because" and "And":
Because everything is in motion:
bone, ivory, shell. And blood
doesn’t hold on to anything
but itself. Because there are worlds
within worlds—geometries
of ant and whale, girl and boy.
And some infinities are larger
than other infinities. Because iron filings
can reveal invisible lines of force.
And my mother’s last words were:
help me..."
Take a poem you already working on that is lacking in structure and see if there are any patterns already in the poem that might extended throughout the poem. If there isn't much there, choose two words to repeat throughout the poem like Dordal or come up with a totally random structure like limiting yourself to seven words per line or starting the next line with the last word of the line above it (a poetic form of anadiplosis), or...it is entirely up to you! Whether or not you determine to keep this new structure in the final draft of your poem, playing with various structural approaches in a poem you are working on is sure to pay off in unexpected ways.
BIO: Lisa Dordal holds a Master of Divinity and a Master of Fine Arts (in poetry), both from Vanderbilt University, and she currently teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Robert Watson Literary Prize. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals, including Best New Poets 2015, Cave Wall, CALYX, Vinyl Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod, Sojourners, and The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.
