Poem: Of the Village, for The Writers Block Poetry Contest

The theme is discord.

I live in a small community, so the title and reference to a village is about that, how you can't even go to the grocery store here without running into everyone you know. The poem is about struggles in relationships, discord with the self. I am currently trying to grow and change my life in new ways and sometimes when you do that, it feels like your past chases you around.. especially in a small town in the form of the people and places you are hoping to grow beyond.

I am fascinated by the wisdom that can be found in ordinary things, and how that ordinary peace is all amid the discord if only we would notice.

Here is the audio for my poem. *edited to add that the recording itself is discordant as well

Of the village

Because tomorrow I fell in love with
sandpaper tunnel with the rain outside; you’re
a lilac bobbing in the wind or smirking under
a wooly shirt and I’m the wind or the bobbing, even
slipping; even knowing what the sand does, I look
like a dishpan, sound like sweet supreme la señorita of the village
crunching between our teeth; we work, we turn wrenches
we wreck certain subfields in the grocery, and I occasionally dredge up
seaweed on my ankles or toilet paper on my shoe

from the old house. Where he and he and he and he and he and he.
for example. Where he was sullen and small-shouldered next to the table.
Or where he was mirthless like that time before my job was discovering what the joke was. Or where he was secretive even though I saw the shoeprints on his body that made him criticize the mess. Or especially where he didn’t know what my stitches were made of or what I was making with them. Bullocks to stitches. I drag them like toilet paper on the bottom of my shoe and show you hoping you wont see. What kind of shit is that? This is the grocery store. We’re just here shopping.

Because I didn’t have to get you to open; leaves opened trees opened against our eyelids distant tinkling of chimes opened the stiff movements of the sticks in the river and spraypainted walls opened away with the great reckoning, and Safeway is open practically all night; there, a small cinemagraphic-dog-on-a-scooter encounter has a man barking from his car window till midnight. Because there is there is there is there and, Grandmother Puddle shimmers in the darkness. She lays on the concrete, distilling the hours.