Fibonacci for the Life List
The Amazon eco-tour sights
species of oddball
bird, odd poet
motmot-
like—
rare.
Going through a Period of Periods
I owe much to the period
of declarative sentences. It rained,
so I put on my socks. Periods that abet
description. Mr. Period punches gag
lines: Stella missed her period.
Old Polish joke. Grade-school days.
The period is adept at fragments
as well as minimalist basics, subject
plus verb equals: Euphemism sucks.
No wonder the period waxes imperious,
full of itself with imperatives.
Mind your manners. Beware of wolves.
Open the window. Make another rhyme.
Meanwhile, the period of abbrs.,
e.g., op.cit., ibid., plays hooky;
brb, btw, lol, etc.
Periods are plentiful.
I’ll spare them not. Ever.
Instead, I time travel to Key West.
I seize ghostly periods
of Ernest Hemingway. The wind blows.
I write. Period. The end.
A seven-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had some 400 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has ten books to her credit, the newest of which are Lithic Scatter and Other Poems (Mercury Heartlink) and Attaining Canopy: Amazon Poems (FootHills Publishing). Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry is Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills) received the 2009 Eiseman Award for Poetry and she recently received the Dr. Sherwin Howard Award for the best poetry published in Weber – The Contemporary West in 2012. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com), a member of the board of directors of TallGrass Writers Guild and Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.
Steel Toe Review 