Happy New Year from Next Line, Please! I'll admit, this post is a little late, but what better way to begin 2019 than with a blast from the past: the last NPL publication from last year!
To refresh your memories, contributors were asked to make lists of anagrams inspired by their names, and to use those new words in a poem.
Pamela Joyce S turned the prompt into a “Sonnet on Brewing Love,” which exhibits an “ample meal,” the “leam of a lamp,” “a map,” a “male plea,” “Ma and Pa,” “a pal,” “a man,” and a “leap,” among other words derived from her first name:
After an ample meal of hearts of palm,
sweet pea puree, and pale vanilla ale,
his lap danced. Her lap sang souchong,
steaming beneath the leam of a lamp.
Aiming to amp up the fire, he read her tea
leaves like a map, foreseeing them steeped
in desire under the elm, or maybe deep in
maple sap. Heeding his male plea and hearing
the peal of distant bells across the lea, she thought
oh, dear me, la de da, what would Ma and Pa think?
He was not wise as the Dalai Lama,
more lame like an ape on the lam,
but he could be a pal and he was a man,
so she took the leap and said I am yours to keep.
Michael C. Rush contributed “Liar,” a poem rich with music and wordplay:
came churlish from the church,
cashier of mulch and macethe lush accrues his scarce slim smile
as each rich slum mule
clears his scale of scum,
cues music of relics and rice,
charms of chile and icehurl him, such a sham, over the arch
into the chasm,
a sum of muscle and lice,
of lucre and cashhis crimes and cries
smirch the user, the usher, and the heirhis scam chars, cures claims
Eric Fretz’s “I Wear the Ferric Fez” adds alliteration and fun to the mix:
The words my names combined make free
when recombined, hear me recite
them, I am a crier.
Weave a circle round me thrice,
for they produce this way a fire,
and from another angle, ice.
So make that circle thirteen feet,
I wear the ferric fez,
I’m fit to tie my rite, and then retire,
to the height of a tree,
the depth of a reef.If it is true, erect it on a fiercer frieze.
And then Eduardo Ramos Ruiz’s “Ode to Eduardo” which blends English and Spanish to produce impressive effects:
Dear Ed,
A redo of brand is due:
Dread not the red eye of critics
Who ur el nombre de pluma.
The Eddo era is at an end.Los tiempos son duros—
Do bid ado to Edward and Edwardo.
In due time the road will bloom,
For Dude from dud shall reign.
Dare to read and write anew.The adored era de Lalo—
Hear without an ear or resonant eye.
Leave the rod of playthings,
Heave the oar, and seek the inborn ore.
The subconscious rode shall lead.
And finally, a list of lines that we just couldn't help but include, if not in full, then in a perfectly quotable fashion:
—From Shari Ayers’s “Liminal Deities”: “Trickster—that shapeshifting Mata Hari / drifting in his ill-fitting sari to the Western Front.”
—From Keith Barrett’s “Heir to the Hatter”: “A rite of passage or just a wrong massage, / Message received, loud unclear.”
—From Millicent Caliban’s “Condemned to Life”: “Many lives have I lived: some ill and some nice, / some licit, some not, sometimes lice without limit.”
—From Emily Winakur: “your mother’s mink, / the mean shelter / of her wink and nod.”
—From Patricia Wallace: “Art’s a waste. If you ask Lit Crit, / irony laces art’s longevity. Who believes in it? / Not even Patricia. Life’s so short it could be art.”
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