Jessica
Photo credits, clockwise from top left: Old Man from The Sea by Ex-In Transit, Detail of a House by S I G U R, Ava by Emery Co Photos, Untitled by Jenasa, and Scarf bobbles – detail by poppalina
Our Marriage
I’ve grown up with your body
beside me. I am used
to your wrinkles and weight.
We wait together through work days,
through flu seasons when we cradle
each other in feverish dreams.
We pull each other out at the seams.
We unravel the other’s wool. We
arrive each day undone.
I carry inside me the hum
of your song, sing it to myself.
I count beats until I glimpse you again.
We bear the stain of our days
together. The dye sinks in our skin
and blooms in every pore.
And yet, we want more. We measure
our minutes together, long for the hush
of our nights. I would have it no other way.
***
6 poems down, 24 to go.
(4 on prompt, 2 off prompt)
Oh, the tricks I play on myself in order to get writing poems. Today, I took a very circuitous route to this poem.
First, I started with Rhiannon’s prompt from Read Write Poem. She suggested that we assemble a group of pictures, write words or phrases from our impressions of these photos, and find the poem in those words.
I didn’t want to use my own pictures, because I might be too literally connected to them. I knew I wanted to use Flickr to find some Creative Commons licensed photos to use. But how to select them? Well, I used a nifty random word generator to pick some interesting search words. My words were: Firstborn, Outworn, Reaffirm, Bobbled and Fluidly.
Then, I plugged those terms into Flickr’s advanced search terms to find photos or illustrations that used those words anywhere in the post and were licensed via Creative Commons.
Once I found the beautiful pictures above, I used my Picasa to make them into a collage. Then, I put the collage on full screen on my laptop and began writing down words that occurred to me as I glanced at it. My words included: stain, crackle, glow, afield, cradle, wrinkle, distance, undone, hush, wool, weight, wait, glimpse, and hum.
From those words, I realized I had words that were appropriate to a love poem, so I wrote the poem above. As I was writing, I tried to create stanzas with individual images and link the stanzas through sound, rather than narrative or extended image. And then, after all that, I had a poem. Whew.
Even though this seems like a lot of work, this process captures almost everything I love about writing on the internet. I used a prompt from an online community of writers, I referenced other artist’s work, and I pushed myself to a poem that I may not have ever written in a style that I rarely use. Hooray for technology.
