Because of Our Zeal

cause human
bodies are bad at re
producing our desires
lurk between the sheets
caused missed carriages only
happen to other heroines

We’re starting to get into it now. This is the first of a few pregnancy and birth poems that cluster around the emotional pivot of the book. This is the darkest of those and the first sheet since I started this project where I really wish I could share the entire poem with you. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea from this excerpt. This is not the whole story. Well, okay, none of these small samples are but this one specifically is more than what you see.

You can see even in these few lines that there’s something going on with the breaks, with the rhythm, with mixed metaphors and muddied meanings. Picking up on the emotional/typographical direction set in the previous piece, this poem is a mess. An absolute mess that couldn’t be anything other than a mess.

Good news everyone! This is the final metropolitan. Though now that I’ve said that out loud I feel bad. Even worse, this is my last bottle of Iroshizuku. Unlike the nurebairo I used for the first worksheet, this black is not dry. It is perfect. Black black black like my soul but with a little blood red when the sun hits it right.

Okay, so now this entire post is getting depressing. Let’s put this out of its misery with a last exhortation to buy a metropolitan before they disappear and to fill it with this ink.

About Learn Cursive with Lunatic Engine. Each week, until my first book of poetry launches in April 2020, I am going to complete a cursive worksheet featuring lines from the poems in the book with notes on which tool I used. I will post the blank sheets as pdf’s below and here on the full explanation page for you to download, print and complete.

A new lesson with new lines will be added to the complete document so that by the time the book comes out, you’ll have not only had a chance to read a couple of lines from each poem, but you’ll have written them yourself.