"In this box, I collect the broken things. The twisted oak, the dusty lynx. Budgies and buntings and speckled hawks tumbled from their nests. We are going on a picnic and can take only the most unfortunate. The deer missing it's antler, the one eyed frog. Like Noah, we build and build, but the space gets smaller. Nothing can breath. least of all me, my lungs stopped up with feathers and the small animals I've smuggled inside the body for safekeeping . In the box, we rustle the feathers and bend the bones, but nothing fits, even side by side, stacked vertically in rows. Nothing sits upright or thrives. We name them, tag their tiny feet, and still, nothing moves inside the box. All night we soothe them with sounds their mothers make, but still they sleep and dream of trees."-extinction event
I have been working over the last few weeks on my Field Museum poem series and it's going remarkably well. The reading will be happening October 9th, and I'll have more details soon on the where's the whens and the particulars. I've been doing a fair amount of research on diorama artists and taxidermy methods and such and I'll be headed back to the museum itself a couple more times over the next few weeks to do some more writing.. It's funny but sometimes I feel poems pulling in certain directions--old directions--and have to reign them in. This is not that poem. This is not that place. But then again, perhaps there is value in the wandering from your task.
I'm hoping to get back to my habit of writing over breakfast, which has been harder when I've been landing into the chaos of work and not the quiet of the studio daily for the past three months. My daily writing has turned more into random spats over the weekend or in stolen hours during the week. It's still coming, just not as vigorously,which is okay sometimes. Fall always means more seriousness, more purpose, and I'm looking forward to it in spades.
