Day 2 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2026 / Stafford 76

Hello again! Today's Day 2 poem is #76 in the Stafford Challenge this year (and #441 overall). Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion: “For today's prompt, write an express poem.” Okay, here we go, merging the two prompts today, in a Shakespearean sonnet. My First Poetic Expression I’m sure I titled it “The Sun”—my very first poem. I was probably six or seven. I was on an outing with my dad on a ferry boat, a bright morning with a blazing sun. I remember looking up at the cloudless sky, intensely blue, and musing, wondering, what the sun was. I knew it was made of gas, though I didn’t know “plasma” or “hydrogen” yet. When we got home, I wrote a poem in three quatrains, alternate rhymes, ABAB. My mom sent the poem to my elementary school, and they published it in the family newsletter. Fascinating I was at that time already a formalist, maybe from nursery rhymes. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Photo by alimison on pixabay.com. Here is Alan's poem today, also merging both prompts. P O E M   R E M O V E D while being submitted for publication.   Please come back later. The poem may return at some time in the future. Thank you!     Wow, that's quite an incident, Alan. The last line is brilliant . . . yes, quite a distinction between "family" and "blood." Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

Day 26 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2025 // Stafford 100

Can't believe we're hitting 100 poems in the Stafford Challenge today. I'm still on schedule and only 265 poems to go! Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something 'sonnet-shaped.' Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want.” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a hermit crab poem [that] takes on the form of another type of literature. So a hermit crab poem might be a poem that looks like a to-do list, footnotes, obituary, spam messages, or a message on a postcard.” Today, I offer a Pushkin sonnet, which uses elements of the Shakespearean, Clarean (couplet), and Petrarchan forms, rhymed abab ccdd effe gg. The Pushkin sonnet form is very snooty about stressed and unstressed rhymes at particular points, which I'm ignoring, so that's where I'm being "not strict." Merging both prompts in a hermit crab poem that focuses on my sciatica health problem right now. Shopping List avocados, grapes egg noodles for lo mein crepes cool, hip cane gabapentin tizanidine Tylenol extra strength Tylenol! physical therapy Mayo visit epidural shot surgery? goal: pain relief sciatica-free life —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Here's the "cool, hip cane" I got from — can you believe it? — Ace Hardware! Here's Alan's poem today, also a Pushkin sonnet in iambic pentameter. Bravo! I hope you feel better soon. Checkup Interview I have the April crud, my head’s on fire, my chest feels full of cotton fluff, I cough but never quite enough, and I perspire like marathoners in July. I’m off my feed, Doc, too—now just a whiff of food can make my insides turn, and that’s not good. No ma’am, I don’t smoke any cigarettes, and I don’t drink a bit—no vice regrets, the ones the state can tax or otherwise— it’s just the job. I feel as if I’m trapped. I push for weeks, and energy gets sapped away for stupid reasons. I despise the insincerity of social “thanks” that land as true as stage magician blanks. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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Day 15 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2025 // Stafford 89

Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion: “For the third Two-for-Tuesday prompt:  1) Write a poetic form poem, and/or . . . 2) Write an anti-form poem.” Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: You'll have to go to NaPoWriMo HQ to see Maureen's presentation of a rock warm-up by Brother J.C. and a small poem by Jane Kenion. The prompt is: “While Brother J.C.’s warm-up and Kenyon’s poem might seem very different at first, they’re both informed by repetition, simple language, and they express enthusiasm. They have a sermon/prayer-like quality, and then end with a bang. Your challenge is to write a six-line poem that has these same qualities.” Okay, merging all three prompts with a sonnet/not-sonnet. Ars Poetica To write a sonnet, you first have to think in sound, words with particular flavors, similarities. You may have a topic to demonstrate, but ground yourself in rhymes, echoes, and the magnolia trees in the background. They are singing arias to the wind. Hear their rhythm, their meter. Write your topic, but don’t forget the jazz then head resolutely for the volta— Forget that shit. Just write the fuck out of the verse, kick out the jams. Forget about rules. Rules are for armies and board games. There are no rules! Write whatever comes into your head. Let it flow! If you don’t think it’s any good, write it anyway. Fix it later, on the run. Write like a motherfucker! —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Photo by Seidenperle from Pixabay Here is Alan's poem today. Very subtle political satire. What do you think he's doing with the prompts? Won’t Get Fooled Again The provost called me in, perplexed, excoriated me an hour, and my response left her more vexed, annoyed, pissed off, aggrieved, and sour— my band alluded to Who’s Next around our campus’s clock tower. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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Day 14 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2025 // Stafford 88

Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt is based on Kay Ryan's poem "Crustacean Island": “[T]ry writing a poem that describes a place, particularly in terms of the animals, plants or other natural phenomena there. Sink into the sound of your location, and use a conversational tone. Incorporate slant rhymes (near or off-rhymes, like 'angle' and 'flamenco') into your poem. And for an extra challenge – don’t reference birds or birdsong!” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a losing poem. Losing often comes with negative connotations, like losing a game or a family pet or socks (seriously, where do they all disappear to?). However, a person could also lose some weight, bad habits, and/or negativity. ” Here's a small Shakespearean sonnet in short Kay Ryan–like lines. Merged both prompts but cheated on the characteristics of the place described — no plants or animals — all human sounds. Losing the Earth on the Moon Actually, you don’t. If you expect to hear something, you won’t. You have to wear a space suit, and all of the earth’s manifold sounds are in there: breath, the loud rumble in your stomach, the distant crackle of your left trick knee. All those live noises — you’re alive! —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Photo oF Spacesuit on th3 Moon from NASA Alan's poem is a beautiful evocation of sound in a snowscape. Pinnacle View Road Impassible; Pinnacle Overlook Sound If I could stand there, where just last spring I watched hawks circling but always below me and felt rising warm air as the green musk reached even that vantage point, if I could permit time to lapse until the access road became impassable to ice, and I had only a moment to withstand the cold in the clothing appropriate for late spring, I would hear downy impact as quarter-sized flakes layered upon themselves, the plop when branches dipped to their weight, the soft white noise of erasure, even as the flakes caught my lashes, my curls, and brought me to shiver, a vulnerable human sound lonely, only to me perceptible so high above the huddled who cannot hear it. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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Day 9 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2025 // Stafford 83

Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “[R]ead Robert Hillyer’s poem, Fog. It uses both rhyme and uneven line lengths to create a slow, off-kilter rhythm that heightens the poem’s overall ominousness. Today we’d like to challenge you to try writing a poem of your own that uses rhyme, but without adhering to specific line lengths. For extra credit, reference a very specific sound, like the buoy in Hillyer’s poem.” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite an ekphrastic poem. An ekphrastic poem is a poem inspired by another piece of art, whether that's a painting, photograph, sculpture, mixed media, or some other medium.” Brewer provided several examples of artwork for ekphrasis. Here is the one I chose to write on.  Unwavering by Martin Klein Here's the poem, merging both prompts. To satisfy the NaPoWriMo prompts, it's a sonnet with lines of varying length, rhymed Shakespearean style. In response to the Poem-a-Day prompt, it's an ekphrastic poem as well as a concrete poem! Uneven Sonnet —after Unwavering    by Martin Klein My hair blows sideways in the harsh wind unwavering always. My shoulders bear the layering weight of my tattered clothes, windstorm torn and shredded, blades of seaweed bared in a hurricane and stretched out, wedded to the typhoon’s locomotive, the long train of buffeting air behind. I stand, also unwavering, daring the gale to blast its hardest derecho wind. I am still, a pillar a boulder. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Alan's poem today also merges both prompts . . . an ekphrastic poem with rhyming couplets of varying line lengths. The Wound After Thomas Hart Benton, The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley (1934) The image winds. One finds a spiral from the bottom left that carves a cleft between the man blowing harp and the fiddler, whose sharp fingers look like claws as he draws his bow across the fiddle’s strings, and a young man as he sings, his vacant stare into some space before him, a glare at violence he’s describing in his verses, which makes us wonder what the trio is imbibing from the corked jug and the two mugs on the table (where’s the missing mug?). These corner atmospherics distract us for a moment from the image that the lyrics are conjuring, how a jealous lover, knife in hand, still seems to hover over one he thought he had possessed as she presses her breast from which he’s pulled his bloody knife. Is she his wife or fiancée? Who can say? Could she have violated vows to cheat on an unwitting spouse? It doesn’t matter. Everything’s so out of kilter that it’s difficult to filter out conventional murder ballad morality semi-justifying how the lover watches her dying; the landscape doesn’t make any sense— the kneeling cow’s outside the fence, there’s stumps left in the furrowed field, the sinking sun can barely wield from its own furrow light to backlight what’s not even been a fight but an unexpected mortal wound that does not make a sound because the action’s in the corner, where the trio can’t think of anything forlorner than a barefoot woman, a broganned man, the starting of a rhododendron hell, and an old-time ballad meant to tell about deceit, the sweet belief in having been loved by someone dear, the bitter sorrow once it’s clear that when somebody wants you body and soul, it’s the soul they’re after, never you whole. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Thomas Hart Benton, The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley (1934) Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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National Poetry Month • Day One, NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2025 • Stafford Challenge 75

Well, friends, we're back! Going to be working NaPoWriMo and Poem-a-Day (typically merging their poetry prompts into one poem), plus continuing with the Stafford Challenge, all in that one poem. Also, Thomas Alan Holmes will be joining us again this season. Hurray! Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “As with pretty much any discipline, music and art have their own vocabulary. Today, we challenge you to take inspiration from this glossary of musical terms, or this glossary of art terminology, and write a poem that uses a new-to-you word. For (imaginary) extra credit, work in a phrase from, or a reference to, the Florentine Codex” (an encyclopedia of 16th-century indigenous Mexico). Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion: “For the first Two-for-Tuesday prompt: 1) Write a "Best of Times" poem, and/or . . . 2) Write a "Worst of Times" poem. . . . Write a poem about the 'best of times,' 'the worst of times,' and/or 'the everythingest of times.'” Alan's poem today is a Petrarchan sonnet, with an unusual closing sestet that brings back the a and b rhymes. He said, "I call my variation of the Petrarchan sonnet the Uvalde sonnet, because the expected terminal couplet occurs prematurely." Alan merges all three prompts: both the best of times/worst of times ones along with the musical terminology one, using the word waltz. First the Right Foot, Then the Right Foot, Then the Left Foot It is the worst of times, three-four, the waltz that trips misstepping, like a misspent text, a signal sent corrupted. What comes next is slipping, old denial, placing faults on those who speak only the truth. Trump halts analysis, in his denials vexed by probing questions, even more perplexed that these, his best of times, when as he salts the wounds of those descrying villainy and also those caught in his calumny, ransacker of our nation’s courts and vaults, should be series of days of infamy, diminishment through stumbles, slides, and halts dismissed, denied through obvious pretext. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] You may have noticed that the word "waltz" in the first line is, by coincidence (or perhaps not), the National Security Advisor's surname. I was also successful today in melding all three prompts: like Alan, both the best of times/worst of times prompts as well as the musical terminology prompt — the first term was somewhat familiar but the second term was completely new to me. Bass No Pain When I’m on stage playing my bass it’s the best of times, my sciatica pain in diminuendo. It’s the worst of times when I’m not playing bass. Sometimes I can barely walk. Basso profondo . . . bass as musical medicine, a miracle. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

https://vincegotera.blogspot.com/2025/04/day-two-napowrimo-poem-day-2025.html

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Fighting Kite (page 15)

This seventh poem in Fighting Kite is a Petrarchan sonnet. I'm not certain now when it was written but it might have been in MFA school, like some of the first poems in the book. I was certainly working at that time on achieving a good sonnet. (By the way, there's an earlier blog post on this poem.)         Papa said, "You know I would have to kill you," to Mama, who sat quietly, head bowed. I was just a kid — five or six — and cried deep gut-wrenching sobs. The moon, like a new coin in the window, sliced in half by blue knives of cloud. "You're too young to understand, Vin," he smiled. "It would be my duty as a man." A tear on her cheek, Mama whispered, "That's true." To this day, I don't know if there was another man or if they were only talking possibility, in case, for example, Mama felt her face begin to flush downstairs with a repairman. Her only safety net then — Papa's motto, A place for everything, everything in its place. Page 15 In the earlier blog post mentioned above, here's some of what I said about this poem: [T]he incident recounted in the first stanza did happen. I remember my parents talking in these words or something very like them. I was indeed five or six, and you can draw whatever inference you want from parents talking about such matters in the presence of a kid in kindergarten or first grade. The event certainly stuck with me. I think this was probably, from my father's point of view, part of my indoctrination into maleness, into machismo. Part and parcel, I think, of US Army training as he saw it, from the dual perspectives of trainer and trainee . . . father and son, in the way his father (my Lolo) taught him to be a man, through hard knocks and a thick belt. I mentioned above that this is a Petrarchan sonnet; in the previous blog post, I wrote, "I am using this form because of the tradition of sonnets as love poetry. In this case, though, the sonnet is being used as a vessel for 'anti-love,' for control and oppression in the name, allegedly, of 'love.'" I continued: To be more specific, this is a Petrarchan sonnet with an octave (or eight-line stanza) rhymed abba acca, a small departure from the norm, an octave made up of two envelope quatrains (abba abba). The second stanza is a more standard Petrarchan sestet (or six-line stanza) rhymed cde cde. There is also the usual turn (or volta) at line 9 . . . in this case, a change in time: the opening octave set in the speaker's childhood and the closing sestet set in the present. If the poem was in fact written while I was pursuing my MFA, this is pretty cool experimentation for a student. By that point, I had written quite a few sonnets before grad school, but usually Shakespearean ones, so this Petrarchan sonnet is nice journeyman work. Of course, this is all surmisal . . . I may have written it when I was more experienced as a poet. Sorry I can't be more precise here. In any case, do check out the earlier blog post about this poem. Lots of other interesting material there, such as the Salvador Dali allusion in the poem. Pretty heady stuff! As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Day 2 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2024

Day 2. Lots of "two-ness" today: April 2 and also a 2-for-Tuesday PAD opportunity. Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion: “For today's prompt, we have our first two-for-Tuesday prompt, which means you get two prompts. . . . 1) Write a happy poem, and/or . . .   2) Write a sad poem.  Two sides of the same emotional coin.” Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “[W]rite a platonic love poem. In other words, a poem not about a romantic partner, but some other kind of love – your love for your sister, or a friend, or even your love for a really good Chicago deep dish pizza. The poem should be written directly to the object of your affections (like a letter is written to 'you'), and should describe at least three memories of you engaging with that person/thing.” Here goes, melding all three prompts — ain't Tuesday grand — plus the three memories Maureen prompted.  Bass Love I first saw you, EB-3 knockoff bass, blank headstock (probably made by Global), on my birthday in 1986, as a gift from Mary Ann. A beautiful Heritage Cherry red finish, silver hardware. I remember learning the theme of Barney Miller for a video Mary Ann shot for a class . . . what a sweet bassline! I played you every week in church, double- horn body and all. You recall that picture where you posed with Amanda, three years old? Well, I’m sad I’ve had you disassembled for 15 years, your repair and refinish undone. But happy to restart work. We'll play again soon! —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] A slant-rhymed Shakespearan sonnet with an ending couplet of alexandrines. Also, there's the photo mentioned in the poem of my oldest daughter with the bass, probably from 1990, in Arcata, California. (Click on the photo above to see it enlarged.) Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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Day 20 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2022

Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “write a poem that anthropomorphizes a kind of food. It could be a favorite food of yours, or maybe one you feel conflicted about.” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a poem using at least three of the following six words. Or go for extra credit and use all six. Here are the six words:   1. Content   2. Double   3. Guide   4. Meet   5. Pump   6. Suit  ” Okay, mashing up the two prompts today. I use all six words; not just meet but also the homophone meat (said seven times in the poem — eight if you count the title), and I cheat by replacing pump with a sound-alike word, in consonance. A monorhyme sonnet, plus a Shakespeare quotation! Meat Speaks Using all of the six words: meet, double, suit, content, pump, guide That’s me, folks! I’m glad to meet ya. My girlfriend says, don’t eat so much red meat. I can’t help it! I’m all meat. I’m double meat, triple even. Sorry to all my veget- arian friends. Sorry if it doesn’t suit you, no salad here, no kale, dang it! Nothing, nothing, nothing as sweet as prime rib. I’m content to toot my own horn. Chicken, snake, rabbit, it’s all meat! Friends, take a seat, no pomp and circumstance — pffft! I’m your guide to everything meat. Did I say meat, already? I did?  MEAT! —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]             Image by artist 14070813 on Pixabay. I think this is the first time I've done this kind of sonnet in the blog. I've written here Clarean sonnets, curtal, English (also called Shakespearean), Italian (also called Petrarchan), haiku sonnets, hay(na)ku sonnets, even hybrid sonnets, but this is the first time I've done a monorhyme sonnet (where all the lines are rhymed to one sound . . . though I do use a bit of slant rhyme or half rhyme for variety in this one). Did you get the Shakespeare quotation? Othello says, "“Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!” The words pomp and circumstance have taken on an importance beyond Shakespeare's coinage. It's a very common phrase now, referring to ceremony (sometimes said dismissively); in fact, the music that's traditionally and familiarly played at graduations is called "Pomp and Circumstance." In three weeks, I'll hear it twice: first, attending graduation as a professor at our university, and second, when my daughter Melina graduates from college the next day! Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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Day 26 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2020

Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “write a change poem. This could be a poem about something that has changed or something that will change. Changing tires, clothes, or perspectives. Change left over when paying for something with cash. Feel encouraged to change it up today.” Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt today asks participants to fill out an “Almanac Questionnaire” as a basis for a poem. Example items in the questionnaire ask for answers to “Found on the street: _____”; “Hometown memory: _____”; “You walk to the border and hear: _____”; and the like — some items mundane and others strange. My poem today is a hybrid sonnet for the aswang novella project. This time the son, nine years old, at the point of change, with a couple questionnaire items sneaking in. Malcolm and the Bully, Fourth Grade His ugly mouth, with jagged teeth, it seemed, sprayed spit on my face as he screamed insults so close I could bite him if I wanted. My shoulders itched with the budding of wings. His friends formed a ring of yells around us: Fight! Fight! Fangs began to lengthen in my mouth as blows fell on my face, upraised arms. Only thing I could see in squinted eyes was a red haze. In my mind I walked up to the edge but heard Mama’s calm voice, Resist, Malcolm, hold on. Knocked down to the street, I saw a blue bird’s wing on the asphalt, torn, beautiful. And then it was over, laughter fading as they left. I whispered. Yes, Mama, resist resist. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] After finishing the poem, I googled “torn bird wing street” to find a possible illustration and found this image, not beautiful exactly but arresting and . . . blue. Someone saw this outside their front door and sent this photo to an Extension “Ask an Expert” website inquiring what predator might have done it. Intriguing. I wrote another aswang poem today, a curtal sonnet from Clara's perspective, a change á la Brewer, a turnabout from the "dark night" poem yesterday where she is feeling overwhelmed and desperate about the future for her and Malcolm without Santiago. The Future: Clara's Change After Tiyago died, I started welding at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Don’t ask me how I got the job. It was like my man was guiding my steps from the afterworld. I love the intense heat and light of the gas when metals do my bright bidding, melt and fuse, flow and meld, the acetylene blue blaze from hearts of stars lighting up the dry dock where we repair Navy ships. I feel like I’m a virgin planet in the cosmos, brand-new                 sun, electric aswang. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Alan says he's going rogue today. Though on second look, this poem seems to me about change. Bravo, friend! Excellent Petrarchan sonnet. Poplars Before late April dawn, a storm blew hard and broke the poplars’ jointed limbs. I find their impact-shattered branches. How the wind that flailed them whistled through our eaves! Our yard has petals dropped from dogwoods, cherries bared of blossoms, too. The honeysuckle, twined stems bending, bowing, newly blown, have joined the English ivy near our fence, prepared for mutual defense against my saws and clippers. Though a poplar branch looked dead, I found some buds at twig ends. O, what draws life’s urgency, please work through me and spread renewed creation, what the poplar knows: let go; preserve the green new life instead. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don’t find the word “comments” in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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Day 25 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2020

Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “write a remix poem. That is, take one (or more) of your poems from earlier this month and remix it. Make a free verse poem into a villanelle. Or condense a sestina into a haiku or senryu. Or forget form. Just completely jumble up the words . . . or respond to the original poem(s).” Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt today can only be described, not quoted. She suggests following Hoa Nguyen’s exercise called “Writing After James Schuyler’s ‘Hymn to Life.’” This poetic algorithm is based on the Schuyler poem named and includes such instructions as “Bring your perspective and verbs back to the present tense, even when addressing memory,” and “Introduce a swerve or observation that serves as interjection, non-sequitur,” and “Animate the landscape or nearby object, imbue it with expressiveness of action or address,” and so on. One of the options in Robert’s prompt today is to “respond to the original poem.” Today’s poem is a response to my aswang poem from April 22, “The Truth.” The NaPoWriMo prompt that day involved including a proverb. My curtal sonnet today begins with the proverb I used, echoing that earlier poem’s ending in this current poem’s opening. (A bit of background on the aswang poems here.) As far as today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is concerned, I haven’t fully engaged the Nguyen exercise, but I did incorporate the three instructions I cited above as examples. The Future: Clara’s Dark Night While there’s life, there’s hope. But I have Malcolm to raise by myself now. Although we aswang are not known here, there is still the danger that he is seen as aberrant, like some Frankenstein monster. Susmariosep, putang ina! Villagers attacking the stranger. I must find a job. I must feed my boy. The clock on the wall, its face is smirking, mocking, “How can you escape your nature? Like Tiyago, you’re both aswang. No joy                 ahead, just pain there.” —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] How I followed the selected Nguyen instructions: (1) I restricted myself to present tense; (2) Clara interjects by swearing: susmariosep is an abbreviation for “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” (common cuss words in Filipino), and putang ina is equivalent to “son of a bitch,” literally meaning “whore mother”; and (3) I’ve animated the clock on Clara’s wall, even giving it some dialog. Today, Alan is remixing "Ode to the Shop Vac" from April 18. Click here to revisit that poem. Ode to the Oldsmobile If it was out of courtesy to clean the Oldsmobile I gave away last year, despairing we could not find a repair for that ill-used, short-circuited machine that gave two schoolkids rides between their classes near and far, and our home here, where I could check the oil and tank, and swear that they may never do it. I’d seen the floorboard detritus, leaf-mulched rugs, headliner blown loose and hair-brushing low, receipts tucked curled between cushions, unread and unrecorded, desiccated bugs, while in one ashtray, something tried to grow out of all that junkyard refugee, dead. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]     So interesting to compare the two poems; the earlier poem is in blank verse and this one is a Petrarchan sonnet. Details cross over between the poems but the thematic focus is so different between them. I wrote a second poem today, a remix of the tanka I composed for Day 7. Since it's small, here's that poem again: Hydroxychloroquine Tanka Aren’t we lucky Trump has friends and money in big pharma? No, we’re not. So he can make a few bucks he’ll cash in millions of us. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] I've remixed this tanka into a hybrid sonnet, mostly Shakesperean but with one Petrarchan envelope quatrain. Follow the Money Trail Only hope we got is that we stay well, that somehow we can keep out of the curve at the same time that we flatten it. While we pray to stay safe, what do you think the Perv- in-Chief desires — besides grabbing kitties — he’d like to make some moolah, gravy, cash, greenbacks, from this profit opportunity called a pandemic. Why do you think he was pushing hydroxychloroquine so hard for weeks? Turns out he and some of his cronies have financial dibs in the French company that produces the drug. What if the world’s cure was HCQ? Bankroll for this POTUS! For that payday, he’d cash in millions of us. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don’t find the word “comments” in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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