—Prose Poetry by David Booth, San Francisco, CA
—Public Domain Photos Courtesy of Joseph Nolan, Stockton, CA
TOO BRIGHT TO SEE
A boy walks in waist-high water parting and swirling back together behind him. Water gives off lapping noises when he dips his hands and raises them again like tilted ladles. Water makes going slow across an endless ocean.
Too bright to see, the distant horizon is a smattering of yellowy copper, and orange I see, with a kind of blue splashing upward. The variegated sky is as endless as the ocean. A few clouds pass over.
With an ocean coming and going at his waist, a boy walks into a sun both blinding and warm. His skin and hair are brined. He shades his eyes with hands pruning. His face catches light and his torso, catching light, flickers like a candle floating ceremoniously at daybreak.
Neither his legs nor his intellect drive him to where he’s going. The water is too deep for his feet to touch bottom. Too deep for thought. Once asleep and now awakened by the sensation of being carried, he rides a submerged animal like adventurous boys with hair swept back and their own oceans’ horses. In a rare moment of joy [as if the mucus collecting in his lungs could drain away once and for all and all by itself] he crosses into the rising sun straddling a hippopotamus.
A boy walks in waist-high water parting and swirling back together behind him. Water gives off lapping noises when he dips his hands and raises them again like tilted ladles. Water makes going slow across an endless ocean.
Too bright to see, the distant horizon is a smattering of yellowy copper, and orange I see, with a kind of blue splashing upward. The variegated sky is as endless as the ocean. A few clouds pass over.
With an ocean coming and going at his waist, a boy walks into a sun both blinding and warm. His skin and hair are brined. He shades his eyes with hands pruning. His face catches light and his torso, catching light, flickers like a candle floating ceremoniously at daybreak.
Neither his legs nor his intellect drive him to where he’s going. The water is too deep for his feet to touch bottom. Too deep for thought. Once asleep and now awakened by the sensation of being carried, he rides a submerged animal like adventurous boys with hair swept back and their own oceans’ horses. In a rare moment of joy [as if the mucus collecting in his lungs could drain away once and for all and all by itself] he crosses into the rising sun straddling a hippopotamus.
FEEDING
When out of the blue the child asked what the difference was between homicide and suicide, she cried, “You're spilling!”—and would he please hold his cup upright. When he asked if suicide was more common than homicide, or if homicide was more common between the two, she said, “You're getting all wet!—please hold your cup upright, or if the next time you're thirsty how about I don't feed you?”
VARIATIONS ON KNOWING
I’m in a writing group called The Drunken Goats. But I don’t drink, and I haven’t seen any of my peers get too drunk. No, that’s not true. I did watch one of us get pretty fucked up at our holiday party a few years ago. He grew very affectionate with everyone, and he passed out early, with his head in someone’s lap. Before he went, though, he’d become obsessed with this sentence, the source of which no one has ever discovered:
The general known for sending his troops into the fray knowing full well that he would lose more of his own but with fewer overall casualties was a controversial warlord.
He must have said it a hundred times, varying the diction and syntax with each articulation, his final utterances incomprehensible because he was slurring.
Understand, you, that she will lose women of her own but not those women she doesn’t know to send into a fray anyway, before someone brands her Controversial Warlord.
And now that I’m thinking about it, it wasn’t a he-goat (Paulo, who is a loudmouthed drunk), but a she (Maggie, who is not). And she, for her love of fine art and prosodies marked by repetition and theme and variation, and for her performance that night, called to my mind Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Put another way: The goat who drank the most was like a High Modernist.
VIRULENT SEMIOTIC
The kids aren’t kids anymore. They picket their graphic design department in protest of the Pitfire font, a typeface whose designer the MeToo movement has identified as predatory. His warm letters appear on signage, pamphlets, press kits, menus, mastheads, business cards, stationery, syllabi, course readers, fact sheets, FAQs, donor solicitations, wayfinding maps, and gold seal certificates throughout university life.
__________________
Today’s LittleNip:
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
—Marsha Norman
__________________
David Booth is a high school humanities teacher and poet. He lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife, Ingrid Hawkinson. Washington Square Review, Simi Press Magazine, The Chicago Quarterly, The M.I.T. Press, Farrallon Review, Absomaly, Fourteen Hills, Switchback, Opium, Quick Fiction, and The Missouri Review have published his creative and scholarly writing. Too Bright to See is his debut collection of poems, which is available at his blog, www.sacredpedestrians.com. Welcome to the Kitchen, David; thanks for these, and don’t be a stranger!
Tonight at 8pm, Poetry in Davis will present a short (30 min.) poetry reading on Zoom at ucdavisdss.zoom.us/my/andyojones featuring Oswaldo Vargas, Dr. Charles Halsted, and Richard Loranger. Facebook info: www.facebook.com/events/399953277928075/?acontext={"source"%3A"29"%2C"ref_notif_type"%3A"plan_user_invited"%2C"action_history"%3A"null"}¬if_id=1609950386271650¬if_t=plan_user_invited&ref=notif
__________________
—Medusa
The kids aren’t kids anymore. They picket their graphic design department in protest of the Pitfire font, a typeface whose designer the MeToo movement has identified as predatory. His warm letters appear on signage, pamphlets, press kits, menus, mastheads, business cards, stationery, syllabi, course readers, fact sheets, FAQs, donor solicitations, wayfinding maps, and gold seal certificates throughout university life.
__________________
Today’s LittleNip:
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
—Marsha Norman
__________________
David Booth is a high school humanities teacher and poet. He lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife, Ingrid Hawkinson. Washington Square Review, Simi Press Magazine, The Chicago Quarterly, The M.I.T. Press, Farrallon Review, Absomaly, Fourteen Hills, Switchback, Opium, Quick Fiction, and The Missouri Review have published his creative and scholarly writing. Too Bright to See is his debut collection of poems, which is available at his blog, www.sacredpedestrians.com. Welcome to the Kitchen, David; thanks for these, and don’t be a stranger!
Tonight at 8pm, Poetry in Davis will present a short (30 min.) poetry reading on Zoom at ucdavisdss.zoom.us/my/andyojones featuring Oswaldo Vargas, Dr. Charles Halsted, and Richard Loranger. Facebook info: www.facebook.com/events/399953277928075/?acontext={"source"%3A"29"%2C"ref_notif_type"%3A"plan_user_invited"%2C"action_history"%3A"null"}¬if_id=1609950386271650¬if_t=plan_user_invited&ref=notif
__________________
—Medusa
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