Hurrah for Spring (a rhyming poem in cursive)

i found this poem while helping unpack mom. i love that she saved it. i wrote it when i was 8 and when i knew cursive. my kids think my poems aren't poems because they don't rhyme. this poem rhymes! and it also has 4 exclaimation points in 2 stanzas so there! 

everyday

how do you be
what you are not -
everyday
putting yourself on
like an ill-pressed suit?

losing all day-hours
until you unlock the door
and smell the decay
of what you left

you take yourself off -
settle in a pile
to lay in wait
like a backyard opossum

until the alarm of dawn
reminds you again
of who you are not

Dreams of her Dad

Nothing has changed. His notes still come to her on yellow, legal sized paper, torn neat at the perforations. With black Flair ink, he mixes equally  his capital and lower case letters, his cursive and print. The notes start the same  - Hey! How ya doing partner? - and always contain a twenty dollar bill – got lucky on the Brown’s game & want to share with my pal,

his signature, a capital D, underlined next to a few x’s and o’s.

When she wakes, she feels she has won something, the twenty fresh in her hand, but the content of the letter drifts away and the emptiness is great. She finds herself seeking signs of him, in a cardinal flying by, in the face of a customer, anything to bring back the dream, to bring back his note.

Is he doing this on purpose, sending letters rather than visiting her in dreams? Is he disappointed in the way she lives, in a studio apartment that smells of pesticide and rattles next to the el? Is he upset that she is bartending and beginning to go round in the middle from beer and shots that carry her through the double shifts?

When she gets to bed, bar sounds ringing her ears, the dream skulks back to her as if waiting for her all day. Little clues - a flash of the note and his hand, dark from age and bluish from poor circulation. There is something he wrote – a request? A complaint? She remembers a detail, a hand drawn map with a star and an arrow.

She slips to sleep and dreams again of the map on the lined yellow paper, and again she won’t remember that he is writing to request that she bury him. It has been too long, he writes, and my pen is starting to fade.

where'd it go?

where did all of the Kennedy half-dollars go 
Arthur pulled from behind my ear
and i stashed in my jewelry box
that had a ballerina and music?

where is my 10th birthday
Panasonic Toot-a-Loop
radio, playing '4 dead in oh-hi-oh'
while i cut paperdolls in my bedroom?

where is Ed, Annemarie Singer's
step-dad, who ran over a tricycle
and a Big Wheel 
in our double-driveway?

where is all the stuff
that defined me:
-my Jane Fonda shag
-my unicycle
-my rhyming poems

calligraphy

black ink
announces the marriage
of my lover to my friend

{i love you, i choose her}

perfect curves
stain the linen,
thin as a veil now

smelling of wet bark
from it's cigar-box home,
companion to shirt buttons
and a bobby-pin

size matters

does it matter the size?

the small regret of dying my hair blonde at 15,
it turning orange instead

the smaller regret of ducking my head & averting my eyes
passing Bill W. in high school hallways

the smallest regret of failing to sleep with Mike Mc.

what size are the regrets pointing fat baby fists
at my hallowed & hollowed self?

in a pressure cooker

there is something freeing about writing or attempting to write poetry, that is different than writing prose or memoir-y stuff.  i don't use the lines &  messy is good. when i am not worrying about lines it is good, when i allow myself to jump around it is good.
i had a many angry pages because of the boston shit. boston shit and snow on my birthday. and angry isn't freeing, it is stiff and linear. i could have filled pages with fuck. 
atrocities committed by a child the age of my child. 

you blew up toes & tibiae & tendons -
ahh, alliteration in your obliteration,
rhymes in your crimes -
and they say there is no poetry in violence

every grave = a broken heart

every grave = a broken heart

every small flag = thanks, but no thanks

the craggy faced lady = i miss you more than the day you died

the jogger on the bench = i promised your mother i'd visit

the kids playing tag = i'll never know my brother was never older

the bouquet of daisys = i've moved on

every blade of brown dead grass = fuck you for leaving me

the 12ft monument = we remember you better than you were

the boy with black eyeliner = i'm thinking of joining you

every potted geranium = you are fading in my memory

opening thought by minnie, who wants credit and a really big font

i wish

I wish Minnie was the "Girl in the Plastic Bubble"
{like John Travolta but less hairy}
living in an umbrella,
sweet rain rhythm
breathing fresh oxygen,
an impenetrable cocoon
so she couldn't google 
"grafik piks of bom"

now

Her new widow’s name is a stranger

typed on the envelope:

Mrs. Walter Gorman”

Where the “Dr. &

once were,

now immense relief

blowing thru the open window 

no fear he’ll catch a chill and die.

She sips coffee with cream,

slits the estate lawyer’s envelope -

her married monogram letter opener
revealing a bill?

{ATTEND DR. WALTER GORMAN’S FUNERAL. 2 HOURS. NO CHARGE.}

Well, that’s a lawyer for you, he’d have said.

She’s glad to have cream in the house again.

3 georges

i wrote tonight and it was angry, scratchy writing, which feels like the antithesis of poetry. it was a poem (a plea?) (an ode?) to my uncle who stole a moment (and a ring) from my dad (and my son) that will never be.
and that is what stops me, the finality of it. that even if we get the ring back, my dad will never have the moment-to hand george the wedding ring that belonged to his father. 
"the 3 georges" as we called them. the ring, from one george to the next, to the next. full circle. 
yes, a cliche but the truth.  
as i wrote, i became angry and sad and thirsty (and thirsty was the only thing i could do anything about.)
i realize that leaving a space between lines of thought does not a poem make . . . so maybe the poem is in the faces of the 3 georges. the ring may be gone, but the connection is not.

being six

maybe i was six when carrie learner and i tried to set a "guinness book of world records" record
for the longest time on a teeter totter.
we had sibling spectators and kool aid
but carrie caught her ankle and we stopped moving.
when the attention shifted to her injury
i tasted jealousy -
it wasn't bitter,
but something i wanted to suck on for a long time
like a jolly ranchers green apple candy.

i am the daughter who is not there

i am the daughter of the widow
who is moving out of her home.

she is climbing through the stuff of 38 years
and calls to tell me she has a book i took out of
the bertram woods library in november, 1981.
"it's overdue," she says.
"but it's Gilbert and Sullivan. i'll
save it for you."

i am 100s of miles away
collecting the clutter of my own family
our own overdue books.

and dad, in the mahogany box on the barrister's shelf in the green room
is of no help either.

who first decided a weed isn't a flower

gracie was three, sitting in the garden in the back of our apartment in noe valley, san francisco.
"i love your beautiful flowers," my baby told the landlady.
"they're weeds," said the landlady, who liked to get high while gardening on mondays.
"i love your beautiful weeds," said gracie.
"weeds aren't beautiful. that's why we pull them."

who first decided a weed isn't a flower
and told my three year old
so that she began to question her own idea of beauty?

a poem a day, day two

gracie found this heart shaped sand dollar for me while we walked on the beach, which is poetry to me. i remember handing my dad shells. he liked very smooth shells that he called 'rubbies.' he wanted a shell that he could keep in his pocket all year to remind him of the beach at nag's head.  my sisters and i fought to be the one to find him the perfect rubby. he kept a few on his dresser. i find myself picking up  shells and thinking of dad. and now i am the recipient of shell gifts, and that feels wonderful and sad at the same time.

day one of poetry month

i found one thing out about trying to write poems before going to bed: i couldn't fall asleep. lines, not plot lines, but lines of words kept going through my head. my heart was racing and if i didn't know better, i would have thought i was caffinated.  so i have four pages of poem-ish writing.  if felt great to be writing in a notebook instead of on the computer where i have been doing my other writing lately. so i have a poem called "father forgive me for i have sinned" and i have one called "annemarie singer doesn't have a dad"
i am going to use a photo prompt today, a photo that haunts me for a few reasons. this photo is part of the wallpaper at froggies, a restaurant i have been to twice.  this photo is in the bathroom and it looks remarkabley like my niece charlotte. there is something in this little girls eyes that have made me notice her, so i will write about her. 

napowrimo

I am going to go for it - try to write a poem a day for the month of april. already on day 90 of 750words.com - but the novel is, well, not very novel-ly. but i am writing and i am trying to be patient with myself. Will post my first poem later, just had to get back on here and put it in writing!