Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

Next to The Bangles, I think I loved Belinda Carlisle and The Go-Gos the best--OK, well, I still do... Dear Belinda Carlisle For as many weeks as you are on Dancing with the Stars I’ll give all my votes to you though I’ll forever think of you all in black, maybe a pair of gold hoop earrings, nothing like the spangles and colors the producers will make you wear as you dance with a gentleman instead of the women I remember.

I don't suppose I was ever exactly a "grrrl" because I was busy watching old movies when others were going to concerts and making zines and stuff. But I'm hoping this new poem will fit into a series I've been working on for some time now that involves different first-person perspectives... When We Were Grrrls Ears ringing, all smiles in the mosh pit, the opposite of violence, sweltering in the crush of strangers’ bodies in our pact that nothing but silence can scare us that it’s best to shout all we have into the static of voices that shout back at us.

I've been reading about this winter's weather troubles, and here's a very tiny poem on the subject. After Swans gather on lakes formed in the flood. Horses step from their trailers. Pruning blueberries, we ignore our strawberries gone under.

Impossible If mirrors would cease reflecting—a relief not knowing if my hair is askew or graying, only proof of me existing in heaps of worn jeans and clean underwear, warm sheets where I must have been sleeping.

Foreclosure Next door is the property of pests. It used to be a family’s we never met but waved at. Nobody’s home but rats, black widows, brown recluses, poisonous plants, an unmown lawn of allergens, irritants to skin. We call the bank, the city, the county. No luck reaching anybody.

I just read (and totally recommend!) Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith, a retelling of the myth of Iphis. I dug out my copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology to look up Iphis; she doesn't retell Ovid's myth, alas, but I've always had a soft spot for Hamilton's book, so I've been reading bits of it. And the bits from Hamilton gave me an idea to work on a poem, which is good because I haven't had many ideas in that department at all. Our Neighborhood At pick-up games, Apollo shows off the same arms, legs, chest of the athlete he used to be, maintained with twenty minutes a day on his Bowflex machine as Hermes lugs boxes up and down the street for UPS, and artists who watch from windows don’t know they’re sketching the gods in our image, everyone’s weekend one tableau of overtime and basketball.

I haven't been posting because I haven't been writing poems. Enough said. But I did work on this poem earlier this week. Brown Corduroy, seared surface of well-done beef, skins of russet potatoes, upholstery of old sofas and cars, nutshells, chocolate bars, certain parts of darting bodies of flickers and chickadees, fifteen feet of tree trunk, patchwork of dirt and dry grass, slats of our privacy fence.