Poetry & Prose by Carol J Forrester
It’s best to count inwards from the outer rings,
all these layers of bark around my bite
too often gone unseen by those deserving
of my sharp teeth or even sharper words.
Evening is the best time for taking stock.
When sunlight settles softly across my back
and you have to really look to find
the lost marbles rattling loose in drawers.
I can reorder the library as much as I like.
It will be out of place soon enough.
Each new volume stacked into shelves
I will never truly fill.
She was legs, hips, breasts, and bone.
Same as a cow,
worth less perhaps.
Dredged up words
from the dark well of your mouth,
not ancient, just old.
“Ace”
a hiss,
curled around the syllable.
Careful,
you are wearing history
with no place here.
Tonight’s Quadrille prompt from the bar is the word ‘Ace’. I did a bit of a google search and discovered that in the middle ages, the word ‘ace’ could be used to be ‘of no worth’ or ‘bad luck’.
March turned into a slower month than planned for me and I’m not entirely sure why that was. Perhaps it was the expectation for April and NaPoWriMo, or the relief of getting my submission in to The Poetry Business for their Book and Pamphlet Competition. Either way, I didn’t really write much in the second half of March and I feel a little guilty for letting myself slip into old habits for those two weeks. On the other hand, I’d managed to be pretty productive during January and February in terms of submissions to journals and competitions, and March isn’t particular busy when it comes to deadlines, so if you’re going to pick a month to kick back, March would be it.
April has been busy with NaPoWriMo kicking off and the first week is just about to come to a close. So far I have managed to post a-poem-a-day for the prompts provided and unlike some years, I’ve found myself connecting with the official prompts. Previously I’ve sat there staring at the screen wondering how on earth I’m going to come up with something but this year I seem to have found my flow. All my NaPoWriMo poems so far can be found under the poetry category of this site, and I even preformed my response for the Early Bird Prompt at the Shrewsbury Poetry Night. My sister was brilliant enough to video the set so if you want to take a look you can see it below.
I would like to do some more poetry readings this year as I’d forgotten just how much I actually enjoy them. They are a fantastic space to voice poetry in, but you also get to connect with fellow poets and listen to some amazing work from other writers.
While I’ve signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo, the actual amount of writing I’ve done it pretty minimal. Each time I sit down to the computer I seem to hit a wall and pushing past is proving to be troublesome.
Overall I’m trying not to beat myself up about my lack of progress with my novel as I’ve been writing more poetry and it looks like I should have a full length manuscript by the end of the year if not before then. If I don’t get anywhere with the pamphlet competitions I’m going to look into self-publishing again. I self-published ‘Before The Words Run Out’ so I know I can do it, I just want make sure that I’m 100% happy with the content this time. Either way, there will be a poetry collection coming soon. I just hope there will be people who want to read it.
We did not so much fall as…
saunter vaguely downwards,
wrapped up in each other.
You brought the sky along,
strung like a child’s balloon.
We did not so much fall as…
Drifted like seeds let loose,
wandered a little lost,
wrapped up in each other.
Settled, we marked here
a strip of green we’d found,
we did not so much fall as…
Play house and families.
Make believe until made real,
wrapped up in each other.
Whispered this is what souls
are made of.
We did not so much fall as
wrap up in each other.
Day Five’s prompt is to include one of the following (1) the villanelle form, (2) lines taken from an outside text, and/or (3) phrases that oppose each other in some way.
Now I’m aware that this is not a perfect Villanelle. I was halfway through the draft before I’d realised that I’d forgotten about the rhyming scheme but since I’m not a fan of rewriting to make something rhyme I decided to just run with what I had.
The lines taken from an outside text are “did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards” (Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett ‘Good Omens’) and “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (Emily Bronte ‘Wuthering Heights’). I didn’t quote the second exactly as I couldn’t quite work out how to without wrenching the tone of the poem completely.
*In addition, the Good Omens quote also fits nicely with phrases that oppose each other in some way, so two birds, one stone, two prompts, one quote.
I’m weighing words.
Counting them
like beach glass.
Trying to judge
how you might distort
the light through them.
Most
I will slip back inside
my hollow throat.
Swallow,
like tablets
or seeds.
Ignoring the fizz
as they hit my gut,
sprout up,
and wrap around
anything else there is
to say.
