Last Workshop Submission of the Semester: Chance

This project was intensely challenging for me. Brian (professor) assigned us each a word and gave us seven post-cards. Every two weeks, I sent my classmate Libby a poem about my word. No record could be kept of what was written previously. At the end of the term, all postcards were returned for with which to create one serial poem.

CHANCE

Everywhere my foot falls
there's that great
Trojan horse of your eyes -
waiting
explosive
shhhh....

Delicious minefield! Let's pay
no mind to Maybe or her sisters.

*****

When you realize
it's a riptide, don't
swim for shore.

My ragged breath
and a persistent purpled
suction. Intoxicating
tug into your hush.

*****

implicit risk of a cap-gun

implicit risk of an uncapped pen

all those hints at bad
the new definition of our days

*****

I am told that
you have come
to think of yourself
as an old scrim,

the passage of light
through your fibers at once
a celebration of "perhaps."

I weight the rope and wait.

*****


The understood spark
between a Fate’s snapped
fingers: ignition
of prodigal blood
in my recognized face.

*****

That I will remember
that day today is unlikely:

Embarrassment can be so
impersonal, an old coin
with the same face on either side.

*****

Warmed season of plush
parameters -

Their destruction
less
important than the thought

they might have lived.