I posted one of the poems I had published at The Bakery before it closed shop and here are the other two that used to live there.
A friend of mine who was making zines wanted me to write a dream narrative for him to illustrate, so I wrote the following prose poem. Even though the use of dreams and the return at the end are moves I normally don’t like, I wanted to play with some of those cliche elements of a dream narrative and hopefully do them well.
Buzzing and Ice
The pebble in my ear wakes me. I sit up, digging with my pinkie, and the pebble comes out. I put it in my mouth and it tastes like the bottom of a pretzel bag. When I stand up, I think I can smell leather, chickens, or boiled peanuts. I always take the back door, but this time I go out the front. This neighborhood is not familiar. I faintly hear klezmer music and see a house that looks like Grace Kelly. My mouth tastes like onions or maybe caramel. Dogs whimper. These dogs always wait for their owners. I can’t even people my own dreams. I peek in one house. One door in the hallway is open. I climb through the window and walk towards a room. My brother that I have never had sits and tries to tune a guitar. I leave out the front and walk back to my house. I sit on my bed and pull off my boots. I spit out a grey pebble. I put it in my ear and go back to sleep.
The last one from this group is a found poem.
This Is Heaven
(found poem from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, pg. 13)
A parable where the heart
prototype changed.
You work the luckier horses.
The cows go west.
A boy arrived,
smelled citrus in the air,
“This is heaven—
all lemons.”
Stephen McClurg 