sidenote: a bit of poetry

i'm interrupting the story-telling stream to talk about something else that i've been working on.

i can’t seem to get away from poetry. in my first round of college, i took creative writing with the hopes of polishing my fiction writing, and i ended up with a poet as a teacher. he taught us forms and how to write the concrete before ever touching the abstract. he was cranky and dry and he had lived the best love story i have ever heard in my life. i idolized him.

in this second round, i’ve signed up for creative writing again, hoping for another chance tackle fiction. my teacher is a poet again— this time with iron-gray hair and a butterfly mind.

our first assignment was a tanka— think haiku-plus, the darling of thousand-year-old japanese poets and ezra pound. five syllables, seven, five, seven, seven. something more or less concrete, with a question mark turn at the last two lines, all painted over with assonance, consonance, and alliteration.


she lies in soft folds,
kept warm by her self-made heat,
her face smooth with sleep—
her palm cools against the skin
of his undented pillow.