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Practicumthirddrafteditme
Bungalow Row
This poem is based on a true episode in the life of Elyn Saks, a university professor and author of the memoir
The
Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
.
There is a concrete street in Miami lined with bungalows and you are walking right in
the center of this street. Spreads of large-lobed leaves droop over the sidewalk and the
slate-slant roofs and the rotted-wood mailboxes. The suns in your eyes and in the
eyes of the homes and they squint against the light at you as you pass by. Youre
wearing white Keds and your bookbag is slapping your beanpole ten-year-old leg that
Mommy and Daddy told you with flattened lips was too skinny. You better eat more of
those scrambled eggs before they notice youre sliding them under the lip of your
single-ply paper plate. It doesnt have to be a lot, just enough so they think youre
eating. They look at you slant-eyed, just to make sure. The bungalows look at you
slant-eyed, just to make sure. Elyn, they say to you with a regretful sigh as you pass
by. Youre an awful, awful person. Why do you even want to keep living? You try to
plug your ears as if you were sailing past the Sirens, but the homes arent outside of
you. They are inside of you.
They are the truth:
Why bother? Its easier to be dead.
You are fat and ugly. If you were dead no one would have to look at you anymore.
You walk faster, you try to run past, but like I said before, the bungalows are inside of
you, and they know the truth.
Cut the last few lines (thus, the speaker is no longer the houses)
Cut the line about stumpy porches
Added epigraph
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Added a title that centered the characters in time and space and let the readers
know that both characters are insane, not just one of them
Changed the womans dialogue to italics so it reads more clearly
Removed one of the adjectives describing the leaves
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REM Dreams
Liver-colored membrane stretched over the rim of a glass full of salt and tequila:
your
drink, filtered through, tastes like baby formula. You know what baby formula tastes
like
because you licked one drop off of the ring finger, off of his ring finger, off of the
babys nose, off of your collarbone, but not with your tongue, with his, and
with the
babys.
Later, youve taken enough Benadryl to make a grown man cry, but youre still
awake, sitting with the pillow between your knees and counting the blazing blades of
the ceiling fan as they fury the night into weepy solitude.
You apply nail polish, plate
by plate, armor by armor, nail by nail, onto every stripe and stipple and every former
drone-frozen area of sleep, onto every realm of REM that you enter and exit, in your
full force, wearing a gown of silver silk made by moths
whose
corkscrew tongues charge about the inside of your mouth,
testing your cheeks for nutrients.
Separated this and the next poem so they are now two separate poems
Added almost three full lines in the middle of the poem and changed awkward
working in the second line
Added the last two lines to the poem because it needed a good ending at its
point of separation from the poem it used to be attached to
Added a ballin title
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Word Salad
Word salad is a psychiatric term that refers to the jumble of disconnected language indicative of psychoses such
as advanced schizophrenia.
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Hospital Swan
Limp twists of cotton candy
drape over
the indoor banisters of funeral homes.
Collections
of fresh, stenchful hours and the need to urinate reek
like the reverb
of a
Chinese gong throughout that catastrophic place, taking with them the light, the love,
the furtherance of air. Too often youve come here alone, with no one to huddle your
shoulders against the small of their back and say quiet, unnerving words of Swiss-Miss
comfort to you, to rub undersized marshmallows into your scalp and then rinse them
out again under a long-necked faucet, the hospital swan. This time, though, there is
someone here with you--someone who takes too long to put on pants, who occupies
too much time running double-jointed hitchhikers thumbs over the rubber sides of
shoes that have acted like splash guards for you in the past when youve walked, run,
whocked through puddles and mud-dabbed curbs. In the past when you had puddle
access was the past when you were outside, not inside, sliding your greasy tongue
along the bed-bar beside your head, huffing out hot breath onto the metal so you can
draw shapes in it with your lips like you would a window. They flip you three times a
day so you wont get any bedsores but the sore isnt on your ass its right behind your
ear, behind both of your ears, under your chin, under your nose, in your chest, right
through the pericardial cavity, right through to that aorta you need most.
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I Admit You
You were fourteen
when I found you in the kitchen, dual-wielding sticks of butter
without the papers on them, flipping
your body
like a fucking pancake across the tile
and getting jabbed in the side by the handle of the saut pan that was sticking out of
the left side of the sink where it had been left to dry. Maybe its time to go, I said, but
you shook your head and whirled the sticks of butter through the air like throwing
knives and they stuck with perfect precision with their square hand-melted ends to the
wallpaper over the table.
My hands shook because I knew this would happen:
I folded
up a pair of red-paper-covered twist ties, over and over on themselves until they
looked like weak paperclips, and placed the matchstick bundle in the toaster oven to
heat until they retained their own fire. Place your head here, on my lap, I said to you,
because today is the day and I need to tell you how much you are loved.
Whats my
dad like, you said to me and grease from your hair settled into my jeans.
Tell me about
him.
Instead of your father, I described God:
Hes like a refiners fire, I said, warmly,
patiently, lifting your hand to my mouth to suck all the butter off of the webbing
between your fingers. Hes like a mouthful of salt. Hes like an ocean in a tin can. Hes
like a singed spiderweb, smoldering quietly to itself at dusk. Hes like an open orphan
on a fire escape in a brownstone-city, an orphan that has no home to go to and
nothing but a coffee mug full of ash. Hes like a hurricranial shitstorm, a grain of sand
stuck in the corner of your eye, a slap of seaweed you werent expecting, a turtle shell
hollowed out and beaten by the sun. Hes empty. Hes life-ful. Hes fallen. Hes loved
you all this time.
Clarified the age of the subject and thus implied relationship to speaker (first
line)
Added title that explains what went down in the poem (son was finally admitted
to hospital; also, mother finally admits that he is crazy enough to have to go)
Clarified who the mother speaks about in the second half of the poem
In sum: gave the characters identity in relation to each other and clarified that
for the reader
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is shaking.
I think White is scared of me.
Changed structure from a block of prose to prose with some line breaks
Changed
lots
of wording
Removed
many,
many lines
Added an epigraph that connects the poem to Elyn Saks and clarifies why I use
Lady of the Charts in the title
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I dont want to be here. Why am I here. Where are my clothes. Why is this thing poking
out of my arm. Its itchy. Will they give me Jell-O like last time. Can you put on Cartoon
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Didnt touch this one, but kept it in the collection because it represents how
much Helen and her seven alters influenced my research and inspired my early
drafts. It also provides context for the Oliver poem that comes after. I plan to
completely rewrite this poem.
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