Danika Dinsmore

Storyteller

poetry

Monday Poetry on Tuesday

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Cycle of Dizziness

I want to touch the matter in front of me
and say I am recording you
to reassure my science

when I go inside to have a conversation
to appear days later in a foreign place
with David Byrne singing in my ear

ginger is the new black

I’m getting old and all the things
the peace-resters told me are True

little bang little
bang            bang

my medication is grief
I make a tea with
get burnt and sober

sipping my choices

grind myself helpless and thin
or open up wider     to
fall limitless in

Monday Potes: from 3:15

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From this year’s experiment. This is the first 3:15 poem I’ve ever written from a hospital room. I had to take my husband in one night. (He’s fine, btw. He had a nasty virus.)

Aug 4, 2010

Vancouver General Hospital
Vancouver, BC

the moon is red
like a sci-fi planet
surreal in the night
out the emergency taxi window
three cats to the wind
then all windows vanish and replace
themselves w/white hum
disembodied voices test for cures
charts mark the anaesthetic blocks
to your hands and feet
you’re the patient under the sheet
you have a fever of 101˚
you ask if you are dead
not yet
on the TV a man kills
8 in Connecticut but you
are safe for one more red moon
rise             more red blood sun
the plasma rays reach out
touch earth skin
heat it like your neck
fevered and quiet
except for the occasional
moan                   what’s the occasion?
lying in a hospital bed
the familiar feeling of
a body breaking down
its limits
cosmic and uncertain

Monday Potes ~ A Room of One’s Own

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Moving my belongings into the old shed / new office space was overwhelming. I’ve uncovered things that have been boxed for over 5 years. Items I had thought lost or had forgotten about entirely, stirring both melancholy and joy.

Inspired by my own creation, I stepped back to write about the space, remembering the lines of Virgina Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own that I read 20 years ago as an English major: A woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write fiction.

I haven’t had a room of my very own in over 7 years. I know there are women (and men) out there who may never have this privilege, so I feel quite blessed. If you haven’t carved out a room (or a space if en entire room is impossible), I highly recommend it. And when you do, or if you have, just sit in silence with it for a while, then write whatever comes.

A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf knew
how we would sacrifice our selves
daily to keep the world running
behind the scenes

The space I have staked has her ghost
prints all over it

Sometimes I shut myself inside
and cry for every injustice my world
has conceived

Sometimes I just breathe and watch
the imperfections of my cocoon
assume my humanity

I speak with inanimate objects because
I choose to believe gods are everywhere
one moment after another we choose and live
until we don’t

I have unopened every box
and scattered the remains of
lovers     punishments   and sin

I have ordered my papers and colours
by categories of want
instead of should and could

I have retread and retraced
every floorboard every pebble-path
of strangled enlightenment

In the quiet cold
every object stretches and
opens its eyes in a brilliant
cacophony of years

Spider Relocation Project and Avoiding the Woolly Worms

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It’s Day 28 of the Spider Relocation Project (aka Shed-to-Office-Renovation) and we’ve lost two more little dudes. One was into the vacuum and the other one was painted over with a roller. Sorry guys!

Total Saved: 56*
Total Lost: 3

*It’s possible I could have saved the same spider more than once.

I can’t show you the current status of the renovation because it’s too close to being done! The big reveal will be within the next week, I’m betting. Squee!

For the Monday Poetry Thang, and in the spirit of being concerned about little critters, I bring you (from my book Every Day Angels):

avoiding the woolly worms

I drive 10 miles an hour slower
to avoid them crossing the road
it is the season for so many things
don’t know what they will become
if left to become
some moth or butterfly fluttering to light
but for now they simply creep across every path
subtle as skin
twice as vulnerable
and I know I must be insane crying over
black and orange fuzz-piles on blacktop
as commuters back up I
swerve into the opposing lane my life
an unconcern as worms are enlightened
be free                 be free

in the next lifetime
perhaps they will live
in a great ocean

*            *            *

if you listen to sea turtles laying eggs
it sounds like a moan of human pleasure
exhale so familiar it makes one shiver
afterwards they abandon their young
to predators and elements
return to ocean         straight necks
sun and salt     stinging tears     mistaken
for regret

at recess village school children
shield emerging baby sea turtles
from vultures
They would tear their heads off
if we let them…
they say in Spanish

so few
so few after egg gathering season
ever make it to the water

*            *            *

upstairs I stand at the window
wondering if you are asleep
in the hammock
one leg thrown over the side
it is as if I am looking down
on the memory of something
or a distant happy dream

it is green and dry through the trees
I’m at the window upstairs
as the hammock swings back and forth
and back             and forth
filling the space between us

You wave slowly and I
wave back
far too calm and quiet

Spider Relocation Project – Casualties to Date: 1

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There was bound to be a casualty sooner or later. Spider relocation is risky business.

I didn’t mean to do it, but I wasn’t exactly looking out for the little guys as I caulked the room. I was just caulking along and ZOOP, accidentally caulked a spider into a crack. Egad!

Condolences to the wee beast’s family and a tribute – an oldie but a goodie from my chapbook Her Red Book.

Days After the Spider was Dead

She knew that time of year
when trees invent new colors and the sunset
from a pacific Northwest train is an
angelic hole in an otherwise clouded sky

She’d been waiting for some appropriate
memorial for the dead spider
Big-as-Your-Hand leg span tennis-shoed
into a basement carpet as 40-year-old
schoolboys revisit songs they’d written
long before the world had bitten them in two
sent them separate ways with a melancholy glance

She sat mesmerized by her lover’s fingers
and his “forgive me I’m out of practice” smile
until the spider incident
knocked against her head
the spider later to be
reincarnated as a
deaf child whose parents grow frustrated
after years of misunderstanding
a deaf child who will only hear music
in her nightmares
as long fingers reach through webs like
musical notes and catch her
by the hair

The reunion is over now the basement graveyard
lights out cold fall streets
smear pages of leaves wet with timely rain
her lover’s hand takes hers during
Ave Maria in church on a Sunday and she thinks
I didn’t even know that spider’s name…

Weekend Writing Workout – Defining Moments

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Author Anne Fleming has a brilliant short story called The Defining Moments of My Life, which I use in the classroom to inspire students for one of my favourite writing exercises.

Fleming’s short story is told as a series of moments that defined the character/narrator during her youth. The brilliance of her piece is that it is in two parts, the first part being “The Defining Moments of My Life as Envisioned by My Mother when Pregnant with Me.” This shorter section includes things like:

4. I am an easy baby, gurgling happily in my crib. Each stage described in the baby books I enter into promptly and exactly. At X days, my eyes focus past ten inches and I display an interest in the mobile above my crib . . .

7. I get my period. Of course my mother has lovingly explained my entrance into womanhood before the sacred event. I embrace my womanhood with bashful pleasure, feeling closer than ever to the woman who brought me into the world . . .

8. . . . I continue to be attractive, as my brother also turns out to be. We are popular and have lots of friends. Mothr makes us a nutritious lunch each day . . .

and

10. I have my first abortion.

Sorry. 10. I am valedictorian and give a moving speech, thanking my parents for their support.

The second section of the story is called “The Defining Moments of my Life as Seen by Me” and goes more like:

5. My adopted brother arrives. He has black hair and brown skin and hollers all the time. I can’t believe I ever hollered that much or that loudly, though I am told repeatedly it is true.

6. . . . Timmy Mills calls me and my brother ugly. This follows on my mother telling me gleefully and regularly – every time we se an infant, in fact, cute or ugly – that I was an ugly baby . . .

7. I get my period when I am ten. Not expecting this for a couple of years at least, Mom has not yet given me her Soon You Will Be a Woman speech, but I know what’s going on. I don’t think I’m bleeding to death with some mysterious disease. I know what menstruation is. I have read my friend Elaine’s copy of Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

and

9. At seventeen, I win a part in West Side Story. I am the tomboy, always trying to get into the gang and always getting ridiculed and kicked around instead. My character’s name, interestingly, is “Anybody’s.” My mother is appalled. she knows I could not possibly be Maria, but she thought maybe a chorus girl, maybe even Bernard’s girlfriend, or Riff’s. Anybody but Anybody’s . . .

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Later in the story her brother gets arrested, her father goes to rehab, and it becomes increasingly apparent that she is a lesbian – who then falls for her best friend.

It’s a sad/beautiful demonstration of our dreams and expectations vs. reality and deliverance. (Life is often about surfing that line with grace, isn’t it?)

The EXERCISE I give to my students is to write a chapter poem or short story entitled “The 10 Defining Moments of My Life.”

What is really interesting is that I give this exercise to elementary kids as much as I give it to adults. It’s great fun to see what a 10 year old considers a “defining moment.” 🙂

A poetic version of the above might go something like:

1)
Four year old dance steps tap a frenzy of look-at-me
I’ve got girl graces
I can fly free and free and free
the world watches and applauds
the snake charm sense spinning
the manipulation of the birth
of me

2)
Discover stealing small things
fingering coins, cigarettes, stones
the hidden thrill-guilt in taken tokens
like charm seeds
planting the momentum for
stealing that which I can’t return
the heart of a man
and other beating things

Now it’s your turn! Write in prose or poetry “The 10 Defining Moments of My Life.”

Monday Potes* – Sad/Beautiful

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*Potes is my personal slang term for poetry. As in, “Yeah, I got my potes on me.”

What has always fascinated me about the sad facets of life (i.e. death of a loved one), is how beauty is the other side of the same coin. I find I am constantly looking into that beautiful sadness.

sad/beautiful

there is a hole and
as the tale goes
an infinite being with arms
like the aftermath
of a bomb

so fearless it ceases
the heart      so certain it
cauterizes the wound of
containment our
little selves
children
of a wiser source enchanting
explosions on the sun

when the moon turned red we
knew we knew
the sudden vast center
expanded    dropping messages
our own tales told
back to us through the machines
we ride

motion is the only way to defeat
the sad beautiful

motion is the only way to ignore
the endless reverberation
of nothing to hold
on to

Weekend Writing Workout – Fragments

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portrait collage by Ofer Wolberger

During my office Inner Sanctum of Awesomeness renovation, I’ve been unearthing some old material.

Yesterday I ran across several sets of “fragment poems” I had written almost 20 years ago.

One set was based on pictures I cut out of a magazine. One was cut ups from a dream journal. One was (I kid you not) based on things I read about cows.

*YOUR WEEKEND WORKOUT: come up with a fragment series!

You can make fragment cut ups from books, magazines, and journals. You can write fragments as a ritual (i.e. write one every time you open the refrigerator or every time you look in the mirror all weekend.). You can take titles of pictures or books or films or songs and write fragments using only the words from those titles.

The only rule is that they must be “fragments.” Fragments are disembodied ideas and phrases. They are not attached to any beginning or end. I write them primarily on gut instinct, something about the words/phrases sticks out. There is no narrative – but the mind tends to fill in the gaps with meaning (even if there was no intended meaning, just interesting sounds).

My favourite way to write fragments is to pull lines from multiple sources and intuitively arrange/collage them into a series.

The fragment series below is a “collated narrative” – which is when you spontaneously collage several sources at once, usually using different senses. In this case I was listening to a radio interview while I pulled out lines from a journal and a newspaper article. When putting it together, a sense of rightness and meaning emerged.

Reading Lessons

“I really believe you’d find _______ in growing corn” (racism)

I

We embraced
so immediately like a
one-trick pony
implicates racism

II

You have been lying, forging it
all for me

III

I want you to help me
I want to go backwards

IV

sure on this side of the fence you are
in charge
sure I murder the majority

V

Through the code a path
against belligerence
perhaps there is another side

VI

You are trained
I am wide

VII

Denied contempt
uttering excited utterings
isolated
they beat you

VIII

If you knocked
would you move me?

IX

In filling this place
I come across novelty
a movement in the sphere

X

Compare this:
“That’s not the point”
and
“That has nothing to do with it”

XI

I could make
some gesture
with this hand

XII

Attributed to the killing (verb):
noiselessly extended can’t
stand to sit still
you’re an escapist

XIII

I mean let me ask you something –
is murder where you draw the line?

~   ~   ~   ~   ~

*I used to post Weekend Writing Workouts regularly on my original Accidental Novelist blog but have gotten out of the habit. I’m going to get back into the habit, but haven’t decided if they will be poetry or prose based. Or a combination.

Pause for Repression

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Working on transitioning my old home office space into a new one made me realize how oppressive my space was. No wonder I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and underinspired.

But digging through all my papers and files has unearthed some fantastic material. In this particular case, a writing exercise I’ve only used once, so I thought I’d try it again.

The exercise is to title something, and then working through the poem, conclude with the opposite idea/feeling. The concept of “repression” came to me because of my thoughts around my work space. Then I realized how important forms of repression are. We have to repress certain things, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function as human beings on this planet.

Repression

We must repress ourselves
daily     in order to go on in order
to move a pen, a cup, a stone
we are so small
in our collected selves
we must reduce the disagreeable
to a mumbled prayer and hope to emerge
in a wider existence
an expanded being

There is memory beneath the
fiery doings of the fearful
digging into dreams, loosening the world
we have to trust it is below our feet
and beyond the stars
shedding everything we’ve learned
to cling to

Repression is how we eat our meals and
put the toys away
how we step one foot into the street
turn on faucets and lights and machines

If united we really knew
how infinite our way
we wouldn’t even bother dressing our bodies
we would head straight into the sun
wild and bursting

If you decide to try this exercise, let me know and share the results.

Fragments at 3:15

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17 more days until the 2010 begins!


Every year you think it may be the last, but you can’t help yourself. You must write. It’s like playing the same numbers on a lottery ticket each week. That poetic gold may come. You succumb. You buy a magic journal and pen. You set your alarm. You are a 3:15 warrior.

This year I know is gonna be awesome. I can just feel it in me bones.

I JUST finished typing up all my entries from last year and I pulled out a few fragments to share. The logic and wisdom of 3:15 half-dreamness. It never gets old.

from 3:15

it’s too hot to jump through hoops and
dog biscuits make more sense than
love

~ ~ ~

dream saboteurs keep me locked in an
office of noncommitment

~~~

the Doctor says make happy
before you fall asleep    make a
subconscious stew of feelings
of peace and love                I thought
this is me in my happy place
and still guns pointed at me
as if my blood would stop

a war

~~~

I bet          no one but insanity

knows what it’s like to run amok

~~~

If all our moments came back
to haunt us,     where would
they sleep?
Moments moping under the
accelerator, biding time in the kitchen

~~~

All edible agents
are drawn and quartered, distributed
w/out much fanfare.

Placing the lower quarter of an
idea in his mouth, he declared
all originality sin.

~~~

drawings that are purposeful
that show the ring to royalty
and unobstructed lustre offsets
become angles of the revolution

~~~

don’t go into the light I’ve decided,

no, no, stay right here   eat
sausage w/lentil soup.   be at
the poker game, mind games, keep
your mind bending     it’s exercise
stupid, this thinking.   buy
gas masks.  visit Hawaii.  Look for
a private island to return to, or live
in peace.     Go north.    Kick a
snowman.  brush your teeth.

~~~

what to do with a husband
what to do with fondue

~~~

everyone dressed to the nines
except me
about six-and-a-half.

~~~

my details like dust    mingle    in space
every time I look out now     I see space
I see us in it     hurtling     around the
sun     centripetal force     and here I am
a universe of universes     talking
to you     my random formations
hurtling     in their proper places
around the sun     all of us     me too.

~~~

I am a triangle maiden
mother crone (w/out the
mother) a childless triangle
an escape artist
put your love in a box
in a window     on the curb

Chalk on sidewalk
hopscotch     come home

I almost flew away
I could have if
I had enough speed

you can’t roll a triangle
you can’t plant
a triangle seed.

~~~

The 3:15 Experiment has a FACEBOOK PAGE. Check out the participants, cheer each other on, get the best advice from old hats, chew some 3:15 fat.