Thankful Thursday: Said & Saved

On this Thankful Thursday, I am thankful for years and years of things I've heard. Like a catalog, I can call on the wisdoms, cries, flip remarks, these turning points.

We can never know what words will stick, what words will sing or pierce and sting. Is it this unknowing that helps us hold our tongues, or, for better or worse, rush our words?

Things Heard

I don't believe in the institution of marriage.

Go play in traffic.

You don't need to be good.

This is temporary.

Standing in the apartment,
a wall of windows and a flush of light,
Here, I gushed, I could be a real writer.

If you're a writer, he said, you'll write.
Stung, I didn't move in.

Across town,
from a darker
cheaper
basement
I began to write.

Sugar, salt, sugar — the recipe for resolution.

Your call is important to us.

Let's play library. We start by being very quiet.

I miss you.

I do.

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate the people, places and things that bring joy. What are you thankful for today?

Swings between two poles

Instructions, exactly

Take this medicine
on an empty stomach
preferably half to one hour
before breakfast. Take this

medicine with a full glass
of water. Take this medication
at least four hours before
taking antacids, iron

or vitamins
or minerals
or supplements.
Take or use this medicine

exactly as directed. Do not
skip doses or discontinue
unless directed by your
doctor. Take this

medicine exactly
as directed.
Do not skip
doses.

- Drew Myron

This is a found poem. A whole text, lifted from my medicine bottle and reformed — with line breaks providing places to pause — into art.

Some days material is at every turn: in newspapers, dictionaries, speeches, textbooks, manuals. Find poetry in the everyday, I often say.

With this avalanche of words, I usually lift and rearrange (a collage poem is born!), or sometimes I simply erase, but on rare days a poem is whole-cloth and sitting on my bathroom sink.

The found poem, according to the Academy of American Poets, shares traits with Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol's soup cans. Poetry, like art, is the invention of reinvention. In Mornings Like This, a collection of found poems, Annie Dillard says that turning a text into a poem doubles that poem's context. The original meaning remains intact, she writes, but now it swings between two poles.

Swings between two poles.

Yes, poetry holds that sort of magic — the mysterious ability to say one thing while reaching for another. 

Thankful Thursday

Oh Leah, thank you for these notes — quirky, tender, soft and sharp — reminding me of the little things that make life big. Thank you.

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate people, places and things that bring joy. What are you thankful for today?

What I Found

At the intersection of poetry, art & heart, I found treasure.

Healing Stanzas is a collaborative project between Kent State University's Wick Poetry Center and Glyphix design studio. This series combines the creative talents of KSU Visual Communication Design students with student writers (grades 3–12), health care providers, medical students, patients, and veterans to encourage dialogue about the connection between art and medicine, writing and healing.

Things That Have No Name was written by the Psychiatric Intensive Outpatient Therapy Group at Summa Health System in Akron, Ohio. View more of these animated poems, along with posters and notecards, at Traveling Stanzas.

Thankful Thursday: In a pause

A friend emails me a poem each week, along with a one-page background on the poet, which she researches and writes. She's not a poet (she says) but she appreciates poetry.

She sends a mixed bag of poets I know and don't. This week a Latino poet. Last month a New Zealander. I'm always learning.

I know there are organizations that provide this same service, but I like thinking of this one person — whom I've met only once and briefly — each week thoughtfully choosing a poem and sharing its story with me and others. I like that one poem, lovingly shared by one person, can tie us all together in a poetic pause. 

Thank you Vicki.

This Week's Poem  (No. 382):

In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes

in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers,
unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeño.

If I ask for a goldfish, he spits a glob of phlegm
into a jar of water. The silver letters

on his black belt spell Sangrón. Once, borracho,
at dinner, he said: Jesus wasn’t a snowman.

Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed
into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States.

Frijolero. Greaser. In Tucson he branded
cattle. He slept in a stable. The horse blankets

oddly fragrant: wood smoke, lilac. He’s an illegal.
I’m an Illegal-American. Once, in a grove

of saguaro, at dusk, I slept next to him. I woke
with his thumb in my mouth. ¿No qué no

tronabas, pistolita? He learned English
by listening to the radio. The first four words

he memorized: In God We Trust. The fifth:
Percolate. Again and again I borrow his clothes.

He calls me Scarecrow. In Oregon he picked apples.
Braeburn. Jonagold. Cameo. Nightly,

to entertain his cuates, around a campfire,
he strummed a guitarra, sang corridos. Arriba

Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into
a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States.

Greaser. Beaner. Once, borracho, at breakfast,
he said: The heart can only be broken

once, like a window. ¡No mames! His favorite
belt buckle: an águila perched on a nopal.

If he laughs out loud, his hands tremble.
Bugs Bunny wants to deport him. César Chávez

wants to deport him. When I walk through
the desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon

stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin.
The snake hisses. The snake is torn.

- Eduardo C. Corral

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate people, places, things (and poems). Joy contracts and expands in proportion to our gratitude. What makes your world expand?