Burial plots for frogs: a micropoetry exchange
Four months ago, over at Identica, Patricia F. Anderson and I traded poems based on recent news stories. I started off, and we alternated thereafter. I believe Patricia kept a list of links to the news stories we drew upon, if anyone’s curious. —Dave
The mayor of Kiev raffles off his kisses & sells burial plots for frogs. He greets protesters with a song, saying: only God sings better.
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A Renaissance monk scribes the sacred and the sexy, chortles with courtesans, singing “you are all that is left of me.”
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Imagine how reporters for the Life Morning News felt when they found their distributor had been taking it straight to recycling.
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Life, death, that’s right - the morning-shift warehouse worker sliced in the cardboard recycling shredder. It’s over. He is.
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Exiled from mainland Singapore, the seashore bat lily & pink-eyed pong pong tree take refuge on a manmade island of garbage.
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Pollinate the elastic plastic, yeah, trashman, jazzman, your absent music haunting the gyre like twisting in the guts.
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In Lahore, the Movement for Decency bombs juice shops where couples cuddle. Now illicit whispers hide behind Koranic ringtones.
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In Chicago they resell the chill graves of urban children. Babyland, Babyland, where is your lullaby? Where are your bones?
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Japanese scientists studying turtle embryos pinpoint the moment when the body wall folds in, origami-like, to make the shell.
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The embryo folds a tube 2 create the spine. Folds & knots another 2 shape the heart. Some things unfold that are not stories.
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Even those who bought leases below the cancelled storeys wax wroth at the lost value, no longer the tallest tale in the land.
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Cher Monsieur Butterfly with his devalued pearls, his mythos worth so much more - the bodice rippers, the diva, so delicious.
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The Colonel bristles at the word “drone.” Real people control it, he says, be it Predator or Reaper. Let’s not dehumanize them.
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Buzz was second, but no drone, a real person, he says, touching down on another body. No romantic, he pissed first, he says.
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On the 40th anniversary of “one small step,” astronauts in a space station unit called Destiny repair a toilet pump.
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Make destiny a bit closer, space a bit smaller. From YouTube ask astronauts questions. They answer like God from the skies.
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The wind has died, its spots have cleared up, and the only thing now marring the sun’s perfect day are these 8 circling gnats.
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The sun naps in the quiet between storms. Jupiter, our bully-proof big brother, wishes we’d learn celestial self-defense.
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The winner of the Ernest Hemingway contest at Key West, sweating in a sweater, says he only writes checks and text messages.
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The moveable feast has become transparent film, memory slicing the century into pats like butter. Never enough, the chef says.
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A man in a gorilla suit runs out the back door with the hibachi chef’s cleaver buried in his arm.
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Mother of grief cradles her babe in hairy arms, gives suck, turns away from death 2 rub her sturdy flat face against new life.
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Chernobyl: doves and palm trees on the walls of an abandoned flat. Irradiated wolves chase irradiated deer through the streets.
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Reject unborn children, damaged children, the damaged thyroid & liver. Reject Pripyat, tanning beds, power plants. Reject.
