Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

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.

I was sitting on the patio and noticed some ants, and so it goes... I was glad to work on a poem as I've felt kind of stalled out, probably because of being super-busy with teaching lately. Weeds, Anthills Did they crack our patio or did cracks come before in one or more earthquakes before we lived here? No one cares. It’s an old slab of cement with no one to repair it. Only I can see it with spring filling out the neighbor’s hydrangea and our mock orange.

I haven't been posting because I haven't been writing much, just a few notes here and there, hopefully toward a project that will ultimately come together in a more satisfying way, but too early to tell. I finally wrote a little poem that I felt I could post, so here goes. Tidy Goodbye, flickering lamp, mismatched towels, threadbare sweaters and jeans. The van for donations comes today. Mom calls it Tobacco Road if we store boxes on the porch even temporarily. Goodbye, sturdy boxes from the liquor store.