Final Reflection!

to get the words to fit within the beat.

It must have been so hard for this poet

To scrawl this soundless solitary stock.

I do not have the imagination

to get past the fifth line of a sonnet.

And yet here we are moving on to eight.

How long can this go on without a draft?

Could a rhyme occur without any craft?

I can already hear the final line!

It strikes the reader as carefully spare,

As the indefinite end to a prayer.

Here I go, the completion of the square:

Have I seen myself writing this somewhere?

Murder

There is something lovely about the position

of your taut waist and your shoulder, in addition

to the perfect authentic cadence formed from your

hairline to your chin, but listening to you snore

often makes me draw our semi-automatic,

and consider whether it would be pragmatic

if you expired with your excess artlessness.

Is there no way, or superhighway, to suppress

Your snorting laughter and your barbaric sneezing?

I cannot tell you to simply stop your squeezing

While we repose in our connubial harbor,

Since frankness has not replaced the early ardor

We so enjoyed two weeks ago when we first met.

Now, may I remind you, you bought that awful pet

You named after me, expecting me to love it.

I find its looks the incarnation of your wit,

which is as scatological as your tastes.

You stained the splendiferous score I had encased

As our wedding gift, and then out chugged the gardener

Who inquired, “if I would ever pardon her.”

Now observe me as I thwack you with a girder.

- Robert Frost

I like this poem quite a bit, because of course the tent is the poem itself, and that is a lovely idea. It is remarkable to me that, as cliched as a sonnet to an unidentified woman is, Frost seems to renew it, simply in the elegance of his construction. The sonnet is one sentence: “She is…” Realizing all of the constraints Frost placed upon himself, and still managed to make it flow, the poem seems like one-in-a-million. How often do miracles like these come along?

I tweaked the flashbacks after referring to William Trevor, and tried to clarify or cut some things. It should read differently! Thank you thank you thank you for everyone’s advice.

A stench has come over the house in your absence. Bookle-duck died. I think I’m going to run away with that lawyer Alexander. Alexander shot Bookle-Duck with a rifle. Actually, we both did. Oh, and I’m drunk.

Much love,

Su Ann Yomo

Before the bomb exploded, an obese woman in high heels dawdled on her cane, choosing the perfect blueberry muffin from a tray of identical blueberry muffins. A man in the last phase of attractiveness stood behind her. His hair was ashen, but his waist was still firm, clasped by a belt that could still be greedily undone. Pimples formed a constellation on a boy’s face. The hurlyburly of a middle-school field trip marched past the dumb communion of saturday activists. A little girl apprehensively twirled a rotating postcard stand and in a spasm of delight she snatched the right one. She did a little dance, jerking and twisting her fingers in the air. The goddesses were wringing their hair after a bath, so it rained in clumps that targetted old hags crossing the street.