Overheard at Table 2: The Doctor’s Advice

Two women sitting at a table.

One woman is talking, “… and so after they’ve got me all prepped for the operation, right before they put the sedative in the IV to knock me out and roll me in there, the doctor is going over the post-op instructions again, and then she just pops out, ‘and no intercourse for two weeks’

“and I look over at my husband and I swear to God that man has a look in his eyes that is saying, ‘The doctor is saying my WIFE can’t have intercourse for two weeks!’

“I so wanted to punch him in the sack.  But there was the doctor and these prep nurses all around me.”

The woman’s friend tells her, “You should have said something.  One of them would’ve probably punched him in the sack for you.”

Overread at Booth 3: Poem of the Day "Arboretum of Plastic Leaves"

Arboretum of Plastic Leaves

It is not enough

to imagine a garden, or an

arboretum. Some place with

plants with leaves so thick and

solid that they appear almost to be made

of plastic, and glistening with a luster as

to almost appear as though they had been

painted, and covered with a protective coat.

Leaves such as these, should surely

Shade us, as we walk through the garden,

Hand in hand, pretending ourselves to be

Ken and Barbie,

Or at least,

Adam and Eve.

MR

2016-0105

Overread at Table 3: Poem of the Day "About Poets and Poetry"

About Poets and Poetry

Everyone writes odes to the dawn,

Passionate sonnets to Love,

Haiku that speak of silence,

But no one, it seems, through all these drippings,

Has written a poem about toenail clippings.

MR

2016-0104

Overread at Table 1: Poem of the Day "Midnight Chirping"

You awake near midnight from a dream in which you are writing a poem
about the crumbling cement walls and dirt roads of Assad's Syria,
and you realize that the smoke detector is chirping.

Maybe it was just the one time.

Nope.  There it goes again.

Your wife is breathing silently beside you.
The dogs shift their weight in their cages.
Mercifully, the cats are still sleeping.

There goes the beep again.
You know you will not be able to sleep until you find it.

Unfortunately, the night is dark, and the
house is spacious, an open layout, from the
second floor you can see the entire living room, and the
foyer.

This makes for an open, breezy feel, makes the house
seem larger than it actually is.

But!

When the batteries start to die in the smoke detectors,
the echo makes the offender impossible to find.

Especially in the dark.
Especially when you have been awoken from a
half-dream.

Still, you find your way to the office closet,
pull out the stepladder, and begin to walk around
the second floor, to each detector, pressing your ear
as close as you can, awaiting the next chirp.

They do not come in regular intervals.
Sometimes it takes so long you think that you might have
dreamed it.

Then, there it is again.
Not from the one next to your ear.

Finally, you find it, the one outside the bathroom
in between the kids' rooms.
You slide open the hatch, pop out the 9-volt,
push the new one in.  Then, you

wait.

Silence.

Thank God.

You go back down the stairs, put the
stepladder back into the closet of the office,
and go back to bed.

You try to sleep.
You think of different poems.

You think of this poem.

Then, another chirp.  This time, it is 3am.

Another smoke detector is testing your gratitude to God.





MR
2015-0103

Overread at the Counter: Poem of the Day (again, Yesterday)

I was having a dream at about 11:30pm or so last night, I know only because I kept coming in and out of sleep and seeing the clock and remembering 11:34 or 11:43 or something around that time, and the images in my head were of boots slowly walking over crumbled stones of cement houses that had been bombed to rubble and the title of the poem was "Assad" or "Assad's Syria" and the lines were


Feet stumble across the rubble of broken stones.
Lungs filled with acrid cement dust.


... and I was thinking of a man, or a woman, or children, and I was remembering how, when the towers fell on 9-11, that all the people who were in the vicinity at the moment that they crashed to the ground were all covered in cement dust, and then I was thinking about how, ten years later, everyone was dying of lung poisoning, because all their lungs were filled with the particulates, and so I'm wondering if, in five to ten years from now, will the Syrian refugees also start dying of the cement dust that rips apart their lungs from the inside, and I was thinking what is all this for?   What, after all, is the point?






MR
2015-0102

Overread at the Counter: Poem of the Day (yesterday) Prompt #57

Prompt #57 was simply titled "Reminiscent Dawn" but the challenge was to write a micropoem without the term "reminiscent dawn"  - Frankly I had to look up "reminiscent" to get a true sense of the definition of the word, because it seemed to me to be more of a "tone" rather than a true phrase.  But, armed with the renewed knowledge that reminiscent is that "thing" that makes you remember something, and in this case the thing is the dawn, well, that was when the micropoem came to my head.  The streak of purple is, of course, the dawn.




The purple stroke Above the treeline in the backyard, And the cooling coffee, Whispered of her Breakfasts in bed.








And I was left with this - are the breakfasts in bed what the narrator took to her, or are they what she brought to the narrator?  To be honest, I do not know.  It could perhaps work either way.


MR
2016-0101

Overheard at Table 3: Playing Hard-to-Get in the Modern Dating Age

"I've been dating this girl for a couple of months now and she's really cool and I like that she's kinda wild, but the other day I just had to tell her, 'Listen, I am NOT going to send you a picture of my penis, because if you like it, you better put a ring on it ...

"'on my finger that is, not . . . well,'

"God, dating is tough these days."