The Usual Qs A’d in Poetry

Q What about inspiration?

A--At first it's got no manners, eats
with its fingers, slurps the soup,
 kisses with too much tongue.
 It thumbs through my foolscap
with false starts, balls it up,
sighs and lies down with a cool cloth
on its forehead. All night imposters ring
the doorbell darting away like Halloween.
I do not notice when inspiration leaves
but when it returns, Sunday hat in hand,
I ask for some ID--
I am your ambulance, it says.
You are my car wreck

 Q What about writer’s block?

     A-- From the pink muscle, I’m about to pinch

           dangling syllables; but my fingers close

           around damp sandpaper. A garbled sound

           drops behind my teeth and I hear hard

           swallows, like a liar caught in his lie.

          Word, turn around and retrace this neck’s stretch

          with your true identity. The lights in

           my head will guide you…no —it’s no use:

           alphabets elude me while substitutes

           make mockery. The word is turning out

           of sight right now, a red bicycle down

           a bombed-out alley. I run toward it —

           only to find severed letters bobbing

           in confetti-strewn waters, and one owl

           cruising overhead, pinching something

           indecipherable in its beak.

Q-What made you want to write?

A--After a tornado hits, a girl may notice
what’s missing: the arm of a Tiny Tears,
her plastic Barbie’s plastic Ken. And if
she has no dolls, she may content herself
with teacups. If not cups, then saucers broken
on the tracks of a train rumbling through.
If not a train, a set of wheels trying to reach
full potential. Something crucial is yet to be
driven off in the darkened next-door:
her father’s heartbeat, a sister’s equilibrium.
Rails made porous and fluid as tap water—
a glimpse of the ghost in the hall.
If there is no ghost, a premonition
that someone will throw its words back
in its face. If not words, then gestures
behind the newspaper from which
conclusions jump. These are bad weather years.
Each one finds its own terror touching down.

Q--Any favorite books?

She clatters through the back door,
scowls at the librarian’s puckered shush,
scrapes chair to table, grabs a book
that falls open to text ticked and bracketed
by anonymous hands. She clucks softly,
angles the spine away from policing eyes,
searches each margin as if she had struck
the marks first, worried that some point
might be missed if not underscored yellow.  

 The girl sees impressions of her fingers
on the pages, hard evidence that books
are changed by readers they change.
She slaps covers closed, slides the volume
into the shelves and walks away empty-
handed, reverent, her mind roaring open.