Poetry Exercise #16: Memory Poem

Summertime Killer

Dancing from the wasps,
On the roof she sets down every bowl with precise measure—
A mixture of soap and raw meat,
The bane of summer wasps.

And we dance on the grass away
From each other,
Glaring from a too-bright sun
With our midday summer water clothes,
Attacking with squirt guns—

“Bang. You’re dead.”

Poetry Exercise #15: On Art

On Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe

You are what we call a nude,
Because a goddess lacks clothing.
What were you thinking?
This is not the sixteenth century—
This is 1863, and the pastoral is dead.
Women don’t dance
Nude, with sheep,
While a horny shepherd plays a flute.
We don’t eat nude, anymore.
You’re setting us back a couple hundred years here,
You know.
Now we have something called ‘morals’
And ‘ethics’
And we eat clothed.

Poetry Exercise #14: Ironic or Concessional Structure

Global Warming

We will have curly-limbed,
Speckle-faced, flower-lipped
(bloody with berry juice)
Children whose skin will tan
Like frying potatoes,
Crinkling in hot oil.

In forty years they will be
Dead from skin cancer.

Poetry Exercise #11: Exquisite Corpse REWRITE

On the day of the explosion
your fire coated me like paint.
It left the skin recoiling in pain
and the skin’s body winced
like a lobster from the cool recess of a tank
suddenly cooking on the stove.

Your damage is done—
now my harlequined skin
is thirsty and only the river
Phlegethon can quench it.

You had resigned yourself to the wicked ways and
I think you liked the darkness.
But lights turn on and space gets filled.

Poetry Exercise #13: Unsympathetic Poem

You know the rat, but this is not a rat.
He is covered in fur like the butterscotch pudding you scarf,
But don’t try to taste him.
If you do, his cut will burn you,
Like the lamp did that one night.
Do you remember the pink ribbon trailing the rat?
This rat has one too,
But it is covered in things that poke and sting like
When you stepped on Barbie’s dream car.
Unlike the rat that you know,
This rat climbs trees
Like you stack your unwanted legos—
The ones you never use.
The ugly ones you never use.

Poetry Exercise #12: Diction Poem

“7 Ways of Looking at a Kiss”

Touching mouths of lust
make us fall into
the shadowy path.

A precursor to copulation,
two humans join themselves
at the mouth.

Like when mom pours my
cereal
and the milk touches the
cheerios
and they get soggy and
gross.

Kinda a cross between
a star, exploding
or a drunk knocking out
my headlights with a
baseball bat.

Sudden, unnoticed movement—
my heart beats a warning and his lips cut into mine.

The two teenagers reach together,
overcoming feelings of shame, lust
and anxiety.
They succumb to peer pressure.

I tasted the salt on his lips.
His tongue merged with mine.
Our bodies quivered as one.

15 Words

List fifteen words that you may want to incorporate into a poem.

Marble
Twig
Gravel
Jellyfish
Blade
Stem
Finger
Key
Box
Pine
Salt
Stone
Hat
Champagne
Paint