Untitled Poem by Guest Poet #4: W.F. Roby

Guest Poet #4 is W.F. Roby, and he selected the words provided by Christine Swint.

Untitled

No more etcetera, only ephemera of catalogs
locked to brims. We wear our weighty sweater-vests to hide
the donut-shape. Out front, vendors
print placards thick to keep others from knowing
the name of your shrink. Here: take the luff, fill it with wind. Here:
take blue and roll it into snakes and O-shapes
until the rims of your fingernails wear, (mine
are bitten raw to rims and tire). Every raspberry wears a wig,
thin hairs that line up by name to impale
beggars. They ask the alphabet for words.
At rise, a gust from an open window winnows
digits from the alarm clock. Meanwhile,
the neighbor pulls a board of ash
as gently from its cord as you would scrape
a new egg from a nest – those three white wriggling worms
sitting bright in the dust of a dream, they are
new as crime. Just below a molding silt stone
(stuck moss-wise to its fast gray flesh) I find
the gristly nest of some subterranean spider.


Christine's Words:
luff, raspberry, impale, winnow, scrape

"Everything Loosens in the Kitchen" by Guest Poet #2: Dana Guthrie Martin

Guest Poet #2 is Dana Guthrie Martin, and she has selected the words provided by Anne Haines.

Everything Loosens in the Kitchen

Broccoli florettes are jaundiced by their separation from the earth. The refrigerator kicks out a new batch of ice, a percussive interjection. We stopped talking long ago. "How long we are going to be here," I ask. You don't reply.

*

Winged ants emerge from gaps, move in unison along the grain of the floorboards before spreading, circling and backtracking. They smear like ink. They are the shadow of something we'll never see. No way to manage our infested lives. What finds its way in never makes it back out.

*

We set up a pool in the middle of the room. We wade, you in flippers, me in goulashes. We barter: no for yes, yes for maybe. I tell you I threw out my wedding dress three years ago. You tell me you didn't really lose your ring. We trade footwear. We hug. The water grows colder and colder.

*

The dining room table flaunts its legs suggestively, lustrous as the skin of an eggplant. The backs of my hands were once smooth. Your face never relaxes anymore. We ladle hopeful words into the air: respectable, insoluble, inexchangeable. "I thought we had a deal," you say.

*

The walls are pigmented with old arguments. Fixtures wash our faces in light, diminish our imperfections. Tomorrow, we agree to rise like bread. To nourish. We high five, though the game was lost long ago. We move off to the far corners of the house.

Anne's Words:
broccoli, respectable, diminish, infested, wade

"Drinking Song" by Guest Poet #1: Andrew Demcak

Guest Poet #1 is Andrew Demcak, and he has selected words provided by Justin Evans.


Drinking Song

the bits of wet paper
salamander within a Chinese screen
minding their labeled sides in a blown sky
I shouldn’t exist, stopped,
I fight humor my shot glass
my strength divorcing emptiness
my bitter pail
the surprise of my half-corpse
I scratched and didn’t sleep
I was careful, I bragged ahead
my waiting mouth covered with hope
the way I was complaint-filled
supported by alcoholic forgetting
entirely resentful
shaped by a chilled rasp
the superior body
poured in two pale versions
absolutely white
not to upset time regretfully
distilling
I might make a living
inescapable but not whimpering


Justin's Words:
salamander, fight, rasp, pale, pail

"As A Child I Wanted To Be Reba McEntire" ~ Dustin

OK. I created Quarrel and its rules, and I am typically a rule following kind of guy; however, I am going against my norm. I've had a nasty case of writer's block that caused me to go almost two months without writing a poem, which is a crazy-long time for me. Two weeks is the longest period of time I've had to deal with writer's block. So, yes, I'm using writer's block as my excuse as to why I'm posting a poem that doesn't use five words supplied by readers. I feel like a cheat, so no bad-mouthing a rule breaker. My writer's block broke after I watched a Youtube video a week or two ago. This is the first draft of what came from the break of the block:


As A Child I Wanted To Be Reba McEntire

for my Grandmother

Because my grandmother loved to hear Reba sing,
to watch her in music videos, Fancy her favorite.

Because we watched the videos together
and thought her a fiery redhead who could do anything.

Because I wanted to be able to do anything
and everything and my grandmother told me I could.

Because Reba sang Fancy like it was her own story,
and it gave me hope that happy endings do exist.

Because after a song ended, my grandmother would tell me
stories about my mother's childhood, leaving in the dirt.

Because I sang Fancy to my grandmother so she would smile
when she was too sick to get out of bed.

Because when I think of Reba, I think of my grandmother,
and remember I can do can anything.

"The Instruction Aubade" ~ Charles Jensen

Charles selected words provided by Joy. Thanks Joy!

The Instruction Aubade

Wake slowly. The light through your bedroom windows
Has a vertigo slant—your body alone in the bed
Has not a limb to cling to.

Bathe, prepare breakfast. Pull a shirt and trousers
Like loose teeth from the dark yawn of the closet.
Put them on.

Descend the stairway like a cloud—

Attend your job. Make things, move things.
Cradle and uncradle the phone if it speaks.
Place paper in envelopes, discuss television with colleagues.

Reduce your walking speed to a stroll:
You have no where urgent to be
And there's no one to anger with tardiness.

At sunset, draw the blinds. Your body, streaked with night,
Will be weary. Examine the television to prepare tomorrow's small talk.
Straighten the stack of magazines in their nest atop the coffee table.

If you plan to eat dinner,
Be sensible. Order salad. Skip dessert. There's no harm in looking good

Even if no one's looking.

Joy's Words:
salad, sunset, streaked, stroll, stairway

"John McCain's Dementia" ~ Kate ~ First Draft

Kate selected words provided by Dana. Thanks Dana!


John McCain’s Dementia

He experiences crimson catatonic
blips, tiny fiery confusions, sonic

gongs. The women at each elbow
know. Many, many others know.

Everyone’s holding their infamous breath,
dry in the mind, moist in the flesh.

No pharmacological brew can stop
the cameras, ominous, from capturing

my fellow prisoners substituted
for Americans. As if we haven’t prostituted

ourselves enough. As if any old blubber
can shove its belly into our heads and blabber.

As if any beauty contestant is to fawn
upon. Change one letter and womb is bomb.



Dana's Words:
blubber, catatonic, moist, pharmacology, womb

"Autopsy" ~ Christopher ~ First Draft

Christopher selected words provided by Julie Carter. Thanks Julie!

AUTOPSY

I am holding my own orange guts,
forced to scoop out with bare hands
the wet strings of muscly flesh
twisting, wavy hair
alive in my fingers.

And I am crying.

My hands are thick in slime,
and the oh-so- slight catch of flesh
pulling apart from the slippery walls
is enough to make me gag.

And then I do -- my throat
clogged with the stink.

Something in the gut
I still have inside me
quivers. It is a worm?

This hollow place I am up to
my elbow in looks like
home to worms and their
seeds slip in and out
of my fingers, an infestation
of their eggs, boiled white
as the white of the worm.

I am making a burlesque
of my own autopsy!
But they won't let me stop.

Someone is calling me
a little baby, someone is shaking
their head and someone
is shaking me:

Stop crying
It's only a pumpkin.



Julie's Words:
pumpkin, wavy, burlesque, clog, boiled