Simply Shorts

2011-06-17T09:15:00.001-07:00

“Empty white paper,

a world of pure potential,

a world before creation,

this is the perfect moment for a poet.”
Poetry (2010)
Kim Yong-Tak

Sunday's Poem -- Late

2011-04-11T21:36:00.001-07:00

The black and white cat
Drinks from a white porcelain cup
Her pink tongue
The only sliver of color
In the clear water
She then goes to sit among the
Red and yellow tulips
The only black and white
Among the color

Posted with BloghuB for Windows Phone 7

More poetry

2011-04-11T21:20:00.001-07:00

The Party
By Sandra -Thomas

Nice enough party
Nice enough champagne
So nice
Terrific
Wonderful
To see you again
We should
Have lunch
Have dinner
Get together again soon
(Your new home looks great)
Thank you
Lovely

Sorry

So sorry
Have to walk the dog
Get some air
Go for a smoke (does one do that anymore?)
Get more champagne
Be right back
Back in a minute
Won't be long
Make yourselves
At home
Posted with BloghuB for Windows Phone 7

2011-04-09T20:11:00.000-07:00

No poetry today.
by Sandra Linville-Thomas

Dry as a bone.

Words swimming in my head
but none are able to come to shore.
None can gain purchase.

None of these words can arrange
themselves to make a poem.

There seems to be no way to help
them gather themselves, to help the words
come together
in any new way
to find a way toward something new to say.

What hasn't been done before.

Or said before.
Perhaps tomorrow.

2011-04-08T20:09:00.001-07:00

Winter Turns Its Back
by Sandra Linville-Thomas

Understated so
against the sky, elegance
erupts in fuschia

2011-04-07T20:18:00.001-07:00

In the Kitchen with Niki and Dick in 1958
(another found poem, stretched a little)
by Sandra Linville-Thomas

Niki
I want to show you this kitchen.

This kitchen ain’t nothin’ but a thang Dick
We have such things.
In Russia.
Only better.
Everyone who wants a house has one, Dick,
in Russia.

Oh Niki I’ve been insulted by experts.
(You are no expert.)
Never mind.
This is a good kitchen.

Well Dick we will soon surpass you and
as we pass you by, we’ll wave to you
and then if you want
we’ll stop and say, "please come along
behind us."
Snap.

Dick, If you want to live under capitalism
go ahead, that’s your question
an internal matter,
it doesn’t concern us.
We can feel sorry for you, but really,
you wouldn’t understand.
We’ve already seen how you understand things.

You’re a lawyer of Capitalism,
I’m a lawyer for Communism.
Let’s kiss, Dick.

Well I don’t know about that, Niki.
I’ll have to get back with you on that.
So…this is a great little kitchen, isn’t it?
Niki

2011-04-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

Found Poem While Watching Wednesday-Night Television

by Sandra Linville-Thomas

I kicked the hornet's nest last night.

It was all tangled up like a beaver dam.

And then I took to the road with an abandon;
like it was a calling.

I took off my musty coat halfway down the lane,

took a few wrong turns until

it became clear to me.
And then I started running;
like it was a calling.

The super moon hung in the sky
gorgeous
explosive

And then I started dancing;
like it was a calling.

2011-04-05T14:06:00.000-07:00

I'm publishing 2 poems since I missed yesterday

Communion Wine
by Sandra Linville-Thomas

It’s written on the water
and whispered among the tall grass.
A fleeting
sign
of things to come
or that were once
and never will be again.
Confusion infused with
a communion wine is
taken at dawn,
then sprinkled over the parched earth
as a grasshopper chews and
spits tobacco juice.

Expandable Memory

by Sandra Linville-Thomas

Wait.

I remember that but

not the other.

Why?

2011-04-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

Year-end Vigil
by Sandra Linville-Thomas

Snuff out candle flames.
Baby smoke signals erupt to exhume regrets.
Change of plans.
No cozy meditative greeting for the new year,
sitting by the fireplace.
Boots on, I seek the bitter cold and trudge
a half mile.

In the stillness, I look back
at small craters in the snow.
Then I move on.

Until
I reach a flat field and my lone vigil begins.
Lighting the leftover Independence Day sparklers,
I shower the parade of seconds.
Stars sing doo-wop behind the festival moon;
a celestial backup to the sparklers’ syncopated sizzle.

Back at home, the old year, wearing a ski mask,
pockets full of loot,
slips out the back door.

Here, the new year, hope in hand,
moonwalks around the field’s perimeter,
brooding in Ray-bans and a hoodie,
and waits for me to leave.
I get nothing.
not even a knowing wink or thumbs up

Next year, perhaps a bonfire.

2011-04-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Mélange
(with backup by Russell Crowe,
Raymond Chandler
and Joan Didion)
By Sandra Linville-Thomas

“I’d move to Los Angeles
if New Zealand and Australia were swallowed
up by a tidal wave,
if there was
bubonic plague in England and
if the continent of Africa disappeared
from some Martian attack.”
attributed to Russell Crowe, the actor

Maybe he said it.
A lot of people think that way.
A lot of people don’t.

After all, thousands and thousands move there every year.
And people they leave behind wonder why.

People move out there and buy 3 surfboards.

L.A. is at the edge of the U.S. and it has
a really big ocean that people can ride.
Probably all that needs to be said

about Los Angeles, the city of angels, la-la land,
the valley of smoke (as the Chumash used to say)

But you could say more
about a girl
who first saw the L.A. lights
while driving on the 405, after emerging from a dense fog
that started in San Diego.

First, relief that there was indeed a there there
and that she was
not
going to be the person that everyone yells at
and tells to go home
and throws popcorn at
in the movie theater.

The girl driving alone on a freeway,
not knowing where she was really going.
With fog conveniently placed for someone with a chainsaw to jump out
in front of a slow car.

(She thought of her L.A. entrance later
when she was
on a movie set with machines
filling the air with just that same fog, and
surrounded by people with werewolf teeth and hair, being lit on fire.)

But the lights were just the beginning
because she wasn’t really stopping
in Los Angeles, but driving to the San Fernando Valley,
actually Tarzana

A place where a man named Charlie Tuna was honorary mayor.
The same Charlie Tuna who started his L.A. radio career
at 6 a.m. just as the San Fernando Valley earthquake hit.

L.A. names earthquakes. To keep them straight.
The Northridge earthquake
The Whittier Narrows earthquake (it was that one that she started taking
another look at this thing called living in L.A., while watching TV with her
10-month-old daughter in her lap) and
the Big One, which hasn’t made an appearance yet
(genuflect, sign of the cross,
knock on wood, cross your fingers)

and the fires
the Cedar Fire, Laguna Fire, Old Fire, Esperanza Fire, Santiago Canyon Fire of 1889, Witch Fire (and the other fires in Escondido, Malibu, Rainbow, San Marcos, Carlsbad, Rancho Bernardo, Poway). You get the idea.

I mean you have to love a city in the middle
of the Pacific Ring of Fire
that builds its houses over a labyrinth of active seismic faults,
offers a dry desert landscape and imports its water from 200 miles away
(the Pacific is good for surfing but not so good for drinking because it is an ocean after all)—with chaparral-ignited brush fires that bring mud slides after the monsoons

What it didn’t have was snow. And that’s all she asked for.
Well there was snow but it was in the mountains and
you had to drive to it (which people did in their flip-flops and shorts,
only to be bushwhacked by the cold.)

No snow and cold was enough.

And the people.

And lots of other smaller pleasures, but that can be told later because after all, the excitement and drama is in the conflict, that’s where the story always is.
Not in the hikes in Will Rogers park
(although you do have to watch out for mountain lions and swarming bees)
or in the smell of bougainvillea while driving down Sunset Blvd (warning: if you get pricked by it, get treatment before it spreads the infection through your body.)

She learned to embrace the Santa Ana winds because they signaled the
changing of the seasons like the falling leaves further east.

Even though her skin felt like it had been dropped off at a bad dry cleaners
and came back too small for her body. It also felt electric like something was always about to happen; like there was always a story in L.A.

And now Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion sing backup:
“anything can happen
meek
little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and
study their husband’s necks.”

“the wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

2011-04-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

Memory: a “rope let down from heaven to draw one up
from the abyss of unbeing.”—Marcel Proust

My Grandfather Will Fight You
by Sandra Linville-Thomas

He sometimes shoots at the moon
with a slingshot,
angry,
that when he looks in the mirror his face
sometimes
surprises him.

He sculpts shadows
from fragile moments in time;
even as each neuron
digs in,
sits in stasis,
isolated,
never touching the other,
too sapped to shake hands.

My grandfather is a fighter
and slogs through this muddy vapor
looking for glittering shards,
and tries to tap into some secret connection
hidden away from the pitted and pocked tundra,
in protective custody, watched over by a primal
untouchable will.

Images
Smells
Sounds sent out like
Morse code.
a passing train
whistling wind
warm beer and napalm
the taste of tear gas
laughing babies caught at the end of a slide
picket lines and picket fences
fields of sunflowers, embraces and leave-takings; first,
second and third kisses

“Not even sure if they’re mine, these memories,” he says to me.
“But I will hang on to them with all I’ve got.”

Are they part of a collective memory from hundreds and even
thousands of years, sloughed off by the mitochondria fragmentation?
Small sparks of rememberings
flinging about his faltering brain as
the fireflies
fling themselves about the garden
while we walk quietly together?

He stops, looks down at his hand in surprise
to find a tomato, the red of it, counterpoint to his
white papery skin.
Feeling its heft, he strokes the contours and smiles.

My grandmother joins us.
“Let’s sit down and have some tea,” she says.

2011-04-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

My local library is offering a poem a day during Poetry Month. They are featuring local writers
so you make discover a new voice. Take a look. Happy Poetry Month!

2011-03-30T20:54:00.001-07:00

Keep April interesting, and write a poem each day of April. If you’re posting them on your blog or website, add it to NaPoWriMo.

What is NaPoWriMo?

It is an annual project in which participating poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month
of April.

According to the NaPoWriMo website, it was founded in 2003, when poet Maureen Thorson decided to take up the challenge (modeled after NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month), and challenged other poets to join her. Since then, the number of participants has gotten larger every year, and many writers’ organizations, local, national and even international, organize NaPoWriMo activities.

Need more information? See the Wikipedia entry for NaPoWriMo!

Go ahead and keep it cool. Feel free to post here.

Getting Ready for National Poetry Month

2011-03-30T20:38:00.001-07:00

My plan is to publish an original poem each day of April. They will all be first drafts most likely so there is absolutely no guarantee of any quality. I’m not sure I can even do it, but it’s worth a try.

For more information about April’s National Poetry Month, take a look at the Academy of Poets page.

If you live in Los Angeles, here are some ideas to celebrate.

More ways to celebrate at Angell House Press.

If you’d like to read a limerick each day, visit Mad Kane’s Humor Blog during April.

Juicy Journaling with Sark

2011-03-28T15:38:00.001-07:00

To get a jumpstart on your journal writing, check out all that is available from Sark. Juicy Journaling it is.

2011-03-28T15:20:00.001-07:00

Forsythia
flocked
in snow?
It’s almost April
after all.
But there’s still mint
growing in a pot
in the kitchen window.
I clip a bit and release
that pungent
smell while
watching the red cardinal
eat the last of the bird seed.
Tomorrow I will refill the feeder.
But now, I need to muddle mint
and add crushed ice
and everything else
to a glass.
It’s time for a mojito.
What else is there to do?

2009-07-04T19:15:00.000-07:00

Careful, it's very addictive, but it's one of my favorite places for tweets. It's easy to follow on Twitter but you can subscribe to it in other ways.

Twitter Lit serves up literary teasers twice daily. At 9:00 AM and 9:00PM Eastern Time the first line of a book is posted. It doesn't have the author's name or book title, but offers a link to Amazon so you can see what book the line is from. From TwitterLit "Why? Because it's fun! The posts are also available for subscription via RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, and email. Literary teasers in your inbox or RSS reader, on your Google home page, on the web, in your Twitter reader, or by mobile phone."

I recommend it for simply short treat each day.

2009-07-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
Jorge Luis Borges

2009-07-02T10:23:00.000-07:00

'I'm going to propose that I tell you a joke, Boo, on the condition that afterward you shush and let me sleep.'
'Is it a good one?'
'Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.'
'I give.'
You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himslf mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.'
'That's a good one!'
'Shush.'
'. . .'
'. . .'
'Hey Hal? What's an insomniac?'
'Somebody who rooms with you, kid, that's for sure.'
'Hey Hal?'
'. . .'

from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

2008-07-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

I'm a peripheral visionary--I can see the future, but way off to the side.
Steven Wright

2008-06-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing.

I like this word. Gartner Research thinks it's one of the most important buzzwords of 2008.

I just like the sound of it. But I also like the idea of it. I always like things that make life easier. Hmm. Using software without installing it.

Read more about it here at Lockergnome.

2008-06-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin."

Ivan Turgenev

2008-06-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

I'd buy these just for the bottles. But then I like words; but, really, what great packaging.

Designed for a beautiful way of life. I'll definitely look for these to see if what's in the bottles works too.

2008-05-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

Why can't someone just clone me so one of me could live in a library and read and the other me...well maybe there could be 3 of me so at least 2 could read and then maybe those 2 could get through a 1/10th of what I want to read and write.

A magazine of literature, politics, and culture, n+1 brings you the best essays by unknown writers – the unpublished and unpublishable fiction of major figures – and politics from the fringe to the mainstream, with an eye for the new idea, the impossible vision, the remarkable work of art.

Don't miss "Money" by Keith Gessen.

2008-05-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

Translated Body
by Sandra Linville-Thomas

Ivory
Jade
Carnelian
or
Transparent rhino tusk

The Chinese woman
unwrapped the small,
impenetrable figure
and pointed to
the head
neck
arms
breasts
stomach

Shielded in her raiment
she cradled the doll
that translated her body,
and defended from probing hands.

She showed the doctor the location
of her affliction.

At times, a servant conveyed
the figure to the doctor
and tapped the place of the pain
for her.

When the mother died, she passed the figure
to her daughter
who presented her own pain
expecting the doctor’s answers to her ache.

A mystery, he said.

Away from the doctor,
the daughter caressed the surrogate mother
and pointed out her pain to herself,
honoring the legacy
in the transparent rhino tusk.

2008-05-27T10:10:00.001-07:00

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.
Chinese Proverb

2008-05-24T10:49:00.000-07:00

From Ragan Report's Speechwriter's Newsletter, September 2007

Speaking of senior executives, some of them are avid poetry fans, explained a "New York Times" article that comes to us via Speechwriter’s Slant blog. The article showed that leading CEOs are avid readers with eclectic tastes, including a fondness for poetry.

An excerpt from Harriet Rubin's New York Times article:
Poetry speaks to many C.E.O.’s. “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports. Mr. Harman maintains a library in each of his three homes, in Washington, Los Angeles and Aspen, Colo. “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

He never could find a poet who was willing to be a manager. So Mr. Harman became his own de facto poet, quoting from his volumes of Shakespeare, Tennyson, and the poetry he found in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and Camus’s “Stranger” to help him define the dignity of working life — a poetry he made real in his worker-friendly factories.

2008-05-23T22:57:00.000-07:00

Fibonacci Poems

2008-05-23T22:29:00.000-07:00

Not Quite What I Was Planning

Six Word Memoirs from Writers Famous and Obscure collects almost 1,000 six-word memoirs--considered "American haiku," SMITH's book of six-word memoirs is considered "American haiku."

2008-05-23T21:48:00.000-07:00

Point-of-View Exercise
She Thought, He Thought
by Sandra Linville-Thomas

Inez

Inez Turner wore her dead husband’s hand-carved mother-of-pearl bolo tie to her nephew’s wedding dance. She had his American flag cufflinks in her purse, his best tie twisted and knotted around her waist, and wore his favorite red dancing dress.

As she opened the door to the American Legion the accordion player launched his German polka band into a feverish song accompanying the Flying Dutchman dance. Men linked arms with their partners and whirled them around like a carnival ride. She saw Jason, her nephew, just as he switched his partner and swung her at a dizzying pace. Inez was knocked a little off balance by the darkness, the smoke, the thumping beat of the drums, the whirling dervishes, the laughter, the fullness of the celebration.

She stood for a moment just taking it in when she saw Jason’s bride, Tanya, sitting with her arm around the shoulders of a very narrow-featured man with a grey pony tail, his long legs elegantly crossed at the knee. He wore small, round dark glasses and peered over them at the dancers. Tanya whispered in his ear and he smiled as he directed his attention toward Inez.

Inez weaved through the tables around the dance floor, stopping often to greet most of the seated people, some of whom she had known since she was a toddler. Many were customers at her florist’s shop and some had joined her husband Pete at the farmers’ table at El Ranchito every day at noon for years.

Inez hoped Tanya’s father would not want to dance tonight.

Alexandre

Alexandre Petrovich searched the faces of the dancers for remnants of Dodge City’s Wild West. These people did not seem to be descendants of gunslingers. His daughter, Tanya, was dancing with what looked like a Bavarian bürgermeister. The accordion player’s thick fingers punched out yet another German polka and Tanya collapsed in the chair beside him, draping her arm about his shoulders like a worn shawl.

“It isn’t Malibu,” she said.

“No, but it is good,” he said.

“Jason wanted our wedding here,” she said. “But, I miss my friends.”

“You and I are such a small family now, it is good to be surrounded with a history and Russia is far away now,” he said. “You have only known your friends in California for a few years.”

“Ten, papa,” she said.

He shrugged and smiled.

“There’s your blind date,” Tanya whispered in his ear.

A woman with a short cap of white hair stood in the doorway with her hand resting on the doorknob. He wasn’t sure if she was arriving or leaving. She wore a simple red dress with long sleeves and a high neckline, cinched at the waist with a striped sash. She would have made a formidable Cossack.

Alexandre hoped she would take him to Boot Hill and the wax museum tomorrow.

2008-05-22T20:47:00.000-07:00

I'm trying out Twitter and am not sure about it. I like reading what other people are doing, but will have to get used to the fact that anyone would like to know what's going on with me at all times. However, they're short.

Read this to find out why others love Twitter.

What do you think? Do you Twitter?

Flash fiction is another use for it.

For more on flash fiction, check out Flash Fiction Online.

2002-10-21T10:09:00.000-07:00

"We need to give children a lot of sunshine when they are young. They are going to need it later."
Felix Adler, great educator

2002-10-13T16:59:00.000-07:00

"The true entrepreneur doesn't see risk - he sees solutions. And has unending self-confidence."
Sam Zell, entrepreneur who funded Northwestern University's center to study risk taking and entrepeneurship.

2002-10-08T16:49:00.000-07:00

Don't have too much today. Been too busy reading Dan Pink's JustOneThing.blogspot. Careful, it's addictive and so easy to remember. Just One Thing.

2002-10-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

From Alan Furst's Blood of Victory

"Well, it took Serebin's mind off what he had to do. And the stories were good, Gulian a sort of writer manque, delighted by excess and eccentricity. 'When the Turkish vizier Kara Mustapha was defeated at Vienna,' he said, over a forkful of risotto, 'he could not bear to leave behind his most beloved treasures, especially the two most beautiful beings in his world. So, with tears of sorrow and regret, he had them beheaded, to make sure that the infidels would never possess them: the loveliest of all his wives, and an ostrich.'

After the dessert was taken away, Gulian called for brandy. 'To success, gentlemen. And, when all is said and done, death to tyrants.'"

2002-09-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

A single kind word keeps one warm for three winters

{Chinese proverb)

2002-09-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

"For words finely used are in truth the very light of thought." - Longinus

2002-09-14T15:41:00.000-07:00

I read this in John Steinbeck's Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath, edited by Robert DeMott. The quote was attributed to Steinbeck, on reading the manuscript of Louis Paul's novel, The Wrong World (1938) and was courtesy of University of Virginia Library.

But the sureness of touch, the characters that move about, the speech that sounds like speaking, the fact that it happens, that one is never conscious of how a thing is said but only of what is said. I know the why and how of that. It's the millions of words written, all the short stories, even the ones that weren't any good. Without the millions of words written it is impossible to write a book like this. And by the same token - those millions of words are a guarantee that the last half will not falter for a moment.

2002-09-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

Something I just finished reading. In fact I've recently read all his books. Compelling, lyrical - during World War II when the world was crazed. His writing transports you to the time. A full sense of the history moved along by excellent pure story.

From The Polish Officer by Alan Furst:

Was the third of June, 1940.

A springtime day in Paris and, last days being tricky this way, especially breezy and soft. ...

...Such girls. It would take the words of a Blok, a Bely, a Lezhev, to do them justice. "In Lights of a Lost Evening, the tenth volume from Boris Lezhev, this fierce apostle of Yesenin reveals a more tender, more lyric voice than usual. In the title work, for instance, Lezhev..."

Now there you had girls. Lithe, momentary, a flash in the corner of your eye, then gone. Nothing good lasted in the world, Lezhev thought, that's why you needed poets to grab it as it went flying by.

Well, now and then there was something good. For example Genya Beilis. Genya. Yes, he thought, Genya. ...He would miss her, up on his cloud or wherever he was going. Miss her terribly. ...

She was, just for a moment, very angry. Boris was gone, she would never hear his voice again. For all his drinking and brawling, he'd been a tender soul, accidentally caught up in flags and blood and honor and history, now dead of it. And here by her side was a man whose work lay in such things. I am sick of countries, she wanted to say to him.

2002-09-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

What I've been reading.

William Langewiesche's "American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center", a three-part series in the Atlantic Monthly. I've just completed the 2nd in the September issue and am ready to move on to the last installment in the October issue. Exquisite writing. Charles C. Mann's article, "Homeland Insecurity," in the September issue shouldn't be missed either. Chilling. Now why can't they put someone like Bruce Schneier in charge of Homeland Security? If you are a crypto fan, don't miss his free monthly e-mail newsletter, Crypto-Gram. If you don't subscribe to Atlantic Monthly, you can read some of the articles at its website and the site also features more interviews, sidebars, etc., etc. Check out Atlantic Unbound.

2002-09-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

My first post to my first blog. Must keep it short. Right?

"A tiny little word can be a clap of thunder." (French Proverb)