This month I self-published my first chapbook titled Ribcage. The book features 16 original poems from my four years as an undergraduate. I collaborated with Jill Pelto for the cover art.
Copies are available upon request for donation only. Email dwalczak25@gmail.com for details.
In April I wrote a series of Indeterminacy poems inspired by John Cage and my studies of Black Mountain College.
The following are the ten poems I wrote:
1.
Facts
are not important to John Rice but
Rather how you hold them.
Caress them in the quiet house until
leaving
is no longer an option.
Stop
aim in the direction in front of you an
arrow. To create as an act of worship
there are gods before you.
shooter bow target
[centering]
without the other none can fully exist.
The deer stay alive.
Two months
or less to decide
how my Education has
experienced me.
Dewy said Conclusions are not endings
but pauses.
Still must “ready” come before
forward?
Aim forward, change.
Aim forward
change. Relax.
Consider it all
an experiment.
2.
In the hospital
systems fail
in phases.
95.
He keeps time
still
wearing a wristwatch.
3.
The country of Nepal now requires hikers
to bring 18 pounds of trash
off Mount Everest
The frozen artifacts include:
but are not limited to
air canisters
food scraps
hats
gloves
Human bodies
the conquering of
The Tallest mountain
in the world
is complete.
There is a garbage
dump at the top of the world.
4.
They say, “Don’t meet your heroes.”
Bob Creely’s biographer
was disappointed wrote
a scathing review.
Perhaps he could not see it
because he was not
looking close enough.
5.
Where does boredom reside?
The internet creates a
closeness
to those who
match our needs but
intimate distance.
How many kisses are sipped
through laptop screens
ignored by the next
scroll?
Which is more important
the content or form?
Every morning it is someone’s job
to
turn the world
on.
6.
If something is boring
do not look
longer
look closer
multiplicities you can not
imagine
reveal themselves.
7.
One afternoon two music students
were rehearsing John Cage’s “Living Room Music”
“Let’s add a horn,” one student
said. “It sounds better that way.”
The second student, a purist of sorts, was
concerned, “It sounds better because it’s pitched.”
“Listen,” the second student said.
“There is music always around us.”
From the hallway the bickering
murmured melodies.
8.
The other day
a young girl went to the
hospital with an awful
rash.
Her skin was flush red.
The doctors couldn’t figure out
what was wrong.
They later discovered an allergy to
Red Dye 40 cannot be treated with
pink Benadryl.
You cannot fix the
problem with what makes you
sick.
9.
There are thirty people in the
Black Mountain College course
at UMaine
Poets
Dancers
Philosophers
Teachers
and those who’ve yet to
shed their cocoons,
if at all.
The people they talk about in class
are now foundations.
“Careful,” the professor says,
“If one of you becomes famous
we will be footnotes in your
history.”
10.
In the early days of Black Mountain College they
used found materials because in the Great
Depression creative expression was
sparse and expensive.
At one point some artists made machines intended
to break.
There is beauty in malfunction.
Today, they make cell phones
Among other things
to break.
That way nothing is permanent.
You can always buy a new
tomorrow.
The largest stadium in the world is
empty today.
It’s snowing and
a girl carries her iced coffee to class in both a
plastic and Styrofoam cup.
Sliced in half an onion looks like a topographic map
snow banks are mountain ranges.
When the snow melts it reveals our trash in the median.
We mediate a river in order to direct telephone poles
that were once trees, down it.
Before a bridge a river is chaos.
In spring never underestimate the river’s ability
to rise.
In 2014 the United States congress voted down
twenty-five acts of “proposed wilderness.”
Gaining the ever so telling, not of nature,
but of us, title
“Postponed wilderness.”
Postponed wilderness.
A river is chaos before a bridge.
In Arizona the largest stadium in the world is empty today.
An artic tern flies 7,700 miles a year to have two homes.
The whale uses the coast as a guardrail.
The monarch sacrifices its life to fly away.
Teachers are begging their students to stop being so apathetic.
In autumn we set the blueberry fields on fire
later a family feud will be settled in Maine
it’s hunting season.
In October we drain rivers to make snow.
In March we wish it away
Make the snow
Clean the roads
Salt the earth
Repeat
Repeat
It’s hunting season and rain
selects rocks to weather
we select caffeine or booze
to smooth the edge of inbox entropy.
Every outdoor speech, protests and march, invades the doorstep of the homeless.
They are putting spikes under bridges to lock them out.
Chair lifts are shifting backwards on mountains.
Gravity tests those who push her limits.
I want to wear a crown
but I’ve yet to be convinced I’m made of sand.
We are all made of the same material
different forms.
The seas are rising!
The mountains are rising!
Submit
Submit.
Submit.
The weeds are rising.
My flannel sheet never felt
thicker
than when you said you didn’t
want it between us.
[But let’s rewind].
Your first word was moon and
that was all I ever needed to know about you.
Starting an off-kilter metronome of sorts
rhythm is not in you but around
you find it in the quietest places
bringing it inside.
It’s February now and
Orion buckles us together
packed under blankets of snow.
Delicata dreams we’ll eat hash in the
morning.
Butter my toast
take a walk with me.
Now, the sun is out but setting
smoke stacks — heat illuminated by
clear cold
light, from buildings, from our mouths
from I.V.s, I am warmer with
you inside me.
“Let’s listen to that track again,”
maple syrup slow [snow]
you tell me appliances
play in B flat.
I am warmer with you inside me.
I am not leaving tomorrow but soon.
In a shadowy kitchen, near a constellation poster
I am burning, not allergic
sipping tea with both hands next to you.
I am not leaving tomorrow but soon.
Constellations move, more so do we.
So buckle us a notch closer
we can stick warm stones in our pockets,
carve DNA into the mountains
So they,
We can’t forget how to sing.
Danielle Walczak
for a good friend
Laying down in the middle of the road at
3 a.m. is not always dangerous
but with you, it sometimes feels like it might be.
This won’t be everything about you, it can’t be.
You see it’s easy to write poems about nothing
but it’s hard to write poems about you.
You said, sometimes you feel like a caricature of yourself
but in a poem I try to discover your texture, architecture
structure of a soul shaped like a sculpture.
Carefully complex
words tattooed in a skin that’s not yours
inkjetted across a universe we’re not a part of
marked with the freckle behind your right ear,
when we match it’s always on Mondays.
You’re a binding stitched by needles
I have yet to bleed by.
This isn’t a competition but I hope you
realize it’s hard to the one who claps first.
If it’s a newspaper than why
does it feel like a book?
Dani Walczak 