Road Block

I had a hard time with the second exercise, "Paragraphs as Containers." The prompt given is to write about a person who decides to stop spending so much time with a gang of friends. You are supposed to write five paragraphs with spaces in between each, and these paragraphs detail isolated problems related to the bigger issue. I don't know if it was the prompt provided (though Kitely makes no demands that you stick strictly to his prompts) or just the exercise itself, but I could not sit at my computer and think of anything to write on that particular idea or any other. Granted, I just started these exercises the weekend before the 4th of July, the weekend where I work in Beer and Wine before the 4th of July, the weekend where I work in Beer and Wine for 8 or 9+ hours a day the weekend before the 4th of July. Maybe I've been tired. Who knows. Anyway, writing exercises are meant to be revisited and not meant to be done in the strict order which the book lays out. So, I will revisit this exercise again later, dog ear it in the book, for a time when I can really sit down and hash this bad boy out.

Exercise 1-Parataxis

Kitely's first section is about style-- the way in which a writer conveys their work. Exercise number one concerns parataxis. Kitely quotes the OED's definition of parataxis as "the placing of clauses one after another without showing how they connect (by coordination or subordination)..." (Kitely 29). He cites the way Hemingway and Gertrude Stein used parataxis as a more realistic way of describing life, because life itself "was far more complicated and less connected" (30). So here's my take on the parataxis exercise, using one of Kitely's suggested writing prompts.
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Tracy and her mother, Dolores Hague, sat side by side on a couch in Ms. Hague’s formal living room. A lamp was on. It buzzed against the cream colored walls, the low hum sinking into the musty couch.

“Don’t do it,” Tracy said.

“The marriage is happening, accept my decision.” Dolores lit a cigarette.

Tracy shook her head. “It’s not fair, you can’t do this.”

“Why not? I’m a grown woman, Tracy.”

“The drinking and the way he missed the last 15 anniversaries and the lying about going to Portland for rehab when really he was panhandling and doing God knows what else.”

Her mother sighed, the cigarette quivering between her fingers.

“He’s changed, there’s the church now, he’s got that heart condition. I can’t turn my back on those thirty years.”

Tracy rose from the couch, sat back down, clutched her knees.

“Heart condition? You mean the one where he doesn’t have one? Mom.”

Her mother furrowed her brow. She was a slight woman, Ms. Hague. Slight but precise. Defined chin, unwavering silver bob. Compulsory cigarette always at hand.

“It’s not like that anymore, Trace. It’s not how you remember it.”

“You know what I remember? Thirteen years ago. The Fourth of July. Him and Dan fucking Redman getting high in the car while the rest of us watched fireworks. I told you I was going to the bathroom. I went back to the car to make him come sit with us, come be a family with us. Dad was wrapping his belt around his arm.”

Ms. Hague clenched her fists by her temples. Tracy was scared she might catch her hair on fire with her lit cigarette.

“I get it, okay? He was a shit dad and you resent that, and I never did anything about it for all those years and you felt isolated. People change.”

“People don’t change. People learn to wear different clothes and perfect selling a different life. Him especially,” Tracy shot back.

The two women sat in silence, Tracy picking at her nails, Ms. Hague sucking on the last of her cigarette. Neither one ventured into the palisade between them.

Tracy’s mind raced across so many birthdays spent in tears and so many nights spent smothering out the sound of her parents’ arguing into her pillow, and of the countless postcards she’d been promised but never received, and the phone calls, and the Christmas visits, and the times she’d kissed her mother’s shoulders, her trembling shoulders wracked with sobs brought on by the man she was now going to remarry. Tracy couldn’t fathom this decision of her mother’s, much less be happy about it. Here was this man who caused so much suffering, who one day found God and a clogged artery in his heart, trying to fool his mother into believing he had bettered himself. And she did, she believed him.

The phone rang. Ms. Hague stood up slowly. Tracy remarked to herself how tired her mother looked. She picked up the receiver, cupped her hand around it, and glanced at Tracy.

She believes in him, Tracy thought.

New New New

It's hard to be creatively productive when your GPA isn't depending on it. Thought I'd dust off that ol' left side of the brain and see if I can't get the gears going. (Wine helps...)

I've started doing the writing exercises from Brian Kitely's 4am Breakthrough. A terrific book of writing exercises sure to stimulate anyone's thinking juice (sexual undertones not intended). As a person who constantly suffers from creative block, I'm always looking for a resource that can help me spur ideas.

I figure an exercise a day will do me good. Not to mention, the exercises in Kitely's book are meant to be mixed up, reversed, and rewritten as the user pleases. The 4am Breakthrough is actually a sequel to The 3am Epiphany,a book I will certainly be adding to my collection soon.

As for now, thank you Brian Kitely for getting me back into the swing of things. And for you, blogworld, my published writing exercises.

Mourning the Mollusks

It was early afternoon,
or later--
the clouds hung low and
dark, looking bruised from bustling
into each other.

At a drab cafe
facing Pontchartrain,
I sat--
smoking cigarettes
and watching a fat woman
devour oysters.

She'd cup each one into her
pink, pudgy palm
and slurp the brackish slime
into her mouth--
lemon and butter
dribbled down her myriad
of corpulent chins.

Her eyes darted back
and forth like a
treacherous walrus as she
carpentered a terrific
mountain of shells--
opalescent homes
that shone dully under the
gray specter of sun.

I felt a twinge of sadness
for those piteous little bivalves
as the woman tossed her crumpled napkin
upon them like a death shroud.
I hoped their limp, succulent souls
had more auspicious futures--
to jettison from
their calcified tears like
small Aphrodites.

It's raining in Denton again

these stony blocks
raise muted hues
willingly to the
dingy wool jacket
of sky, but the trees
collide:
all verdant and crashing--

bright flash-
es of green-
ness against

the oyster lid,
wet and murky.

it's almost brazen
the way they
bare
those shivering ornaments.
veins swollen with water
pulse with electric
escarole souls.

and the cars are beeping,
screeching
tires shriek
homage to the
slick streets,
onyx sheets
of asphalt,
as they dodge
umbrella-huddled
hunchbacks that
hopscotch
a cr os s
puddled intersections.

pregnant sky,
mother sky,
meets infant earth
with wailing city mouth
that drinks and drinks
her nectar.

Hallelujah
hallelujah
hallelu
jah.

Austin, TX Revision

One might have seen us there, stepping in and out of the sunlight that sifted through the trees and the gaps of the Congress St. Bridge, sashaying down the cracked sidewalk like we were one of them and we might have been. We might have been
one of the leathery men playing Woody Guthrie for just enough money to buy a beer,

“I just blowed in, and I’ll blow back out again”
plucking rusty strings with fingernails that had collected so much dirt, so much dust, so much dirt. We could have had the ruddy cheeks of giggling girls, our legs like satin ribbons dipped into cowboy boots and licit lips that hold back cherry secrets. It's quite possible one might have spotted us in between the hipsters and their hand rolled cigarettes. We could have been reflecting the clouds off our sunglasses or making new ones with the tufts of white acridness, little wonderland caterpillars dressed in stovepipe jeans asking
A-
E-
I-
O-
Who-Are-You?

We were all of them when we ate our rice bowls by the river while bats peppered the sky. We were all of them when we sucked down SoCo on the roofs of squatty buildings nestled between skyscrapers and loft apartments. We were all of them when we made love in that shapeless hotel.

And then one night, the rain began. It spilled out over the oily streets, washing all that sin and soul into hopeless rain gutters. And somewhere to the west, the hills lifted and pitched while the rain kicked up dust over the rocks. Our bodies rocked gently with the pop and hiss of beer cans and high heels down on 6th Street, and I curled my coral toes into the disquietude of that city.

paper airplane

i hate paris
and your reverence for it,
though i've never been,
because you never forget a thing like
cafes in antiquarian dusk light
or the taste of a kiss beneath the arc de triomphe,
sweet like ripe melons and warm like heady
humid Spring,
and i despise having to fit inside
these echoes of yours,
shaped for smaller hips and
thicker accents.