Chicken Spaghetti

Found Poem: Fix This One Thing

Fix This One Thing

You took AP stats?
Uno, dos, tres
The energy I got back
was nasty
She’s just making 
all these mistakes
Cuidado, cuidado,
Maybe it’s around the—
My best teacher
was Kiran Desai
I didn’t get lost

This is a found poem. All the lines and the title are things I overheard in New York.

—Susan Thomsen, 2023

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Jan at Bookseed Studio is the Poetry Friday host for January 27th. Go visit for more poems and inspiration on Friday.

Photo by ST of one of Timothy Snell's "Broadway Diary" mosaics (2002) at the 8th Street/NYU subway stop, Manhattan. It depicts the arch at Washington Square Park.

Cinquain: Gone Fishin'

Gone Fishin'

River-

bank veteran,

grizzled heron gazes, 

lifts one foot, takes a giant step,

impales.

*****

After reading Molly Hogan's post about the cinquain last week, I decided to try out it out. On Twitter I started following Alex Price, who has a daily cinquain prompt. Tinkering with the form—five lines with a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable scheme—and thinking about the exact words to use was challenging and fun. Somehow Alex's prompt for "phase" turned into "gaze," and, voilà!

The Poetry Friday roundup for January 20, 2023, takes place at Marcie Flinchum Atkins' blog.

Photo by Susan Thomsen, Connecticut, 2019. Blue heron art by Kevin Costa.

Poetry Friday the 13th: The Roundup

Welcome to Poetry Friday! I feel lucky to host the roundup, which you'll find below. Please join us and submit a link. (If you're having difficulty, send an email to    c_spaghettiATyahoo.com    Replace the AT with a you-know-what.)

I'll start off with my poem "Vintage," inspired by a photograph by Trina K. Bartel which I first saw on Margaret Simon's blog, Reflections on the Teche. (Thank you to Margaret and to the photographer, who granted me permission to use her work.)

Vintage

The Craigslist ad
came out so nice
I decided to keep
Mom’s bike and
ride it myself

The flowers I put
in the basket made
all the difference
and sold me on the idea
of maintaining

—Susan Thomsen

A round of applause goes to all the poets and poem-talking participants. Drop a link here.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

School Rules, Lupe Mendez

Lupe Mendez, the current Texas Poet Laureate, is also an educator and activist in Houston. His poem "Rules at the Juan Marcos Huelga School (Even the Unspoken Ones)," online at the Poetry Foundation, is my pick for today. An excerpt:

[Shout on paper, write boldly,
in a book, in the middle of an open
field, in the street, in the classroom,
make sure your voice shrills.]

I'm grateful to the VS podcast for introducing me to Mendez and many other poets. Just like prior hosts Franny Choi and Danez Smith, the new duo, Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers, are super fun to listen to, and their episodes always send me straight to library and bookstore websites looking for the work that was mentioned.

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The Poetry Friday roundup is at Reading to the Core. Next week it's right here, at Chicken Spaghetti.

Photo: Roll-gate mural in the Mission District, San Francisco. Susan Thomsen, 2021.