Untitled-Sanctuary

[An assignment in the class I'm currently in had us write a poem about a sanctuary we have. I had a hard time with this because I don't know that I really have one. The first go through I wrote about the place between dreaming and asleep. My prof thought it was too abstract. So I went with the following. This is a first draft, but I liked it enough to share]

Untitled-Sanctuary

He puts his hand along the side of our faces,
as if he’s blocking out a bright light.
“When you do that,” I say,
“I pretend that time stops,
like we’re invisible.”

He puts his hand against the small of my back
and runs his finger down
as if he’s tunneling in the canal
along my spine.

He puts his arms around me,
I fit like a cub, as my hands sit on his chest
“If I could fly,” he says,
“I’d take you across the ocean and sit you
down on a canal in Venice.”

Writing Exercise

In my class (Creative Writing for Teachers) we did a fun writing Lose Weight Exercise today. We were given different news articles and a few poems. We went through and circled phrases or words randomly without spending time picking and choosing. After we were done, we were to put them together, not necessarily into a poem, but just thrown together to see what would come of it. This is very similar to creating a Found Poem. The purpose of this Lose Weight Exercise is to see the beauty in playing with words and also to understand how poetry works. It sparks imagination and can even cause your words to grow into something more. The following stanzas/lines are what I put together during the Lose Weight Exercise. Some of the lines were complete in their form and some sentences are made up of words I took from different places individually.

His grown daughters
love leaking out unguarded the way
poisons on their mind.

When I was a kid in the late 1960s
bad guy terrorists were shoving a guy
in a wheelchair over a side of the ship.

At night when everyone should be asleep
they battled a tank that was robbing banks and
sabotaging oil wells.

Cornfields, a mountain and winter snow
skiing is recommended.
to spend their golden years
to retire with a list of kudos.

Leaders from China share global circus events.

The milkman tries to stop by at dawn,
he is also a strange bird.

The car is awesome.
A replica.
Hijacking metered parking, goods,
services and intellectual property.

I Will Carry You Home

I’m having an insanely hard time of pulling myself away from the weekend.
Saturday was the day Joshua and I met at an Augustana concert one year prior. It’s hard to understand that it really has been one year since I poked him every time I walked back into the crowd, called him a model or pretended he was my boyfriend to avoid some creeps there.  Joshua wrote me a beautiful letter and gave it to me on Saturday. In it he mentioned different moments from that night. I too, can’t believe but am ever thankful that our weird but sweet meeting would find us together one year later. In about a month we’ll celebrate our one year of officially being together.

It’s really hard to put into words what he and this relationship mean to me. We’ve remained together even when hard times have happened. We’ve chosen to love even when it was hard, even when we didn’t want to. We’ve learned about each other, our different beliefs, our pasts and our hopes for a future together. I’m completely blessed to have such a good, true and loving man decided to love me and to love me so completely.

My family loves Joshua (my brother actually texted me Sunday and asked if Josh got any ideas from the wedding ) and his family has much of the same feelings. I’ve never felt more complete or more loved.

I’m very excited about every day together, for the rest of the summer, the rest of the year and for as long as God keeps us together.
I love you Joshua.  None of these words are enough, but you know and understand better than any words I have.