Professors of Other MFA Students Rock.

This poem was shared with me by my fellow EWU MFA-er Laura Ender. You can read it by clicking here. Enjoy!

I Tell Form to Kiss My Butt Tonight

Dropped Soup

Pulling the eggshell around the face
Thinking this is what Dali would do
Tear into something that breaks
And making it do what you want it too

Pressing parts that are broken back in place
When you don’t even care where they go,
Closing in when all is needed is the way out

Egg beater, egg whites
Meringue, yolk
Custard, melt the cream down
Find tough strings forming, toughen
Tight
Together.

Drop the pan.
Loud.

-J. McIntyre

Crazy Hummus Poem

Discussion in workshop on Tuesday on how to write about the physicallities of love lead to me giving myself a challenge. This is the result. (Insert Law and Order sound here)

Opening/Sealed

I fear I will turn into this hummus and his

hands will sink into my garbanzo bean skin

and stay too long.

Then, I won’t request them anymore.

His fingers will find the errors

the misplaced crumbs

an unmixed ingredient that adheres to his hand

and doesn’t wash away with the first

rinse.

I do not make a good paste for hands to

go within, even if only made

of five simple components–

the lemon juice will always sting.

-J. McIntyre

No Parking Meter

Metered Degree

Don’t fall away waves
the ones that make sense
by declaring the right thing to do.
No one wants to hear voices of
what will never work.
That this is a dream.
A failure.
A bad calling.

Waking up to tires flailing is
never what the tire dealer’s daughter
wants to hear.

There is no lull in a collar here.
No predicted, consistent temperament.
Only wavering certainty and misunderstood
consonants.

Free Form vs. The Sonnet

The poem started as free form poetry:

Fine Arts Building

We spent a semester inside your walls

Watching them crumble as you heard us talk

Of Emerson, Ginsberg, Neruda and Earley

When you were used to Picasso, Rembrandt and fumes

Of paints and clay, worn and dried, fresh and cut

With nothing but humbled pride.

We made eggs in your eye stirring them till

Complete and filling to our mouths that wrapped around the

Words we learned to spout to each other.

To spend our last morning with you.

This is our forever, this is our hello

And it was our goodbye.

-J. McIntyre

Then, I transformed it into Italian sonnet form:

Fine Arts Building

We spent a semester inside your walls

When you were used to Picasso and Hume

and cut with nothing but humbled fumes.

Watching them crumble as you heard our calls

Of Emerson, Ginsberg, Neruda and Walls

Of paints and clay, worn and dried perfume. We

made eggs in your eye stirring them, gooey.

They bloomed, complete and filling to our mouths

which called around the words we learned to spout

wildly. This is our forever, this is

our hello and it was our goodbye.

To spend our last morning with other doubt,

while learning to live here without dismiss.

We will go forward, breathe and standby.

-J. McIntyre

Watching and making this evolution was not easy, nor exactly fun at certain times. But, poetry, I love ya. This is a good dance we have going. I let you lead this time.

Sandra Cisneros: Poem 0

Full Moon & You're Not Here

Useless moon,
Too beautiful to waste.
But you, my Cinderella,
have the midnight curfew,
a son waiting to be picked up from his den meeting,
and the fractured marriage weighing on your head
like a crown of thorns.

Oh my beauty,
it’s not polite
to keep me waiting.
To send me reeling in a spiral
and then to say good night.

I smoke a cigar,
play a tango,
gulp my gin and tonic.

Goddamn you.

Full moon and you’re not here.
I take off the silk slip,
the silver bangels.

You’re in love with my mind.

But, sometimes, sweetheart,
a woman needs a man
who loves her ass

Sandra Cisneros: Poem 1

"My Friend Turns Beautiful Before My Eyes"

Sir Walter Raleigh,
dimity and damask,
rococo and arabesque,
batiste and challis,
handkerchief and crumpled glove.

Love, I don't know
how you suddenly grew lovely,
why I never noticed last
summer, nor the summers before
when the hard sun died
anything before it bloomed.

My seasonal lovers have come and gone.
And you were there, friend,
cold as porcelain,
mute as the milk moon.
I was afraid of you then.

Did you notice
I never hovered
in the cab of your pickup
when we good-byed,
when the pecan trees
rustled and shushed.

A pink lantern burning
patient on my porch.
Nipped kiss. Screen door
slammed. I danced
barefoot with the cat

when I was alone.
Glass of wine,
candle, my brush
across my hair a hundred
times. And now,

here you are.
Little asterisk, little
How-I-wonder-what-you-are
upon my linen.

Incest! Error!
My head split in two--
half of me preening its feathers,
the other watching from
a stool and sneering--
Fool!

Sandra Cisneros: Poem 2

I Don't Like Being in Love

Not like this. Not tonight,
a white stone. When you're 36
and seething like sixteen
next to the telephone,
and you don't know where.
And worse -- with whom?

I don't care for this fruit. This
Mexican love hidden in the boot.
This knotted braid. Birthcord buried
beneath the knuckle of the heart.

Cat at the window scratching at
the windswept moon
scurrying along, scurrying along.
Trees rattling. Screen
doors banging raspy.

Brain a whorl of swirling
fish. Oh, not like this.
Not this.


-- Sandra Cisneros

Sandras Cisneros: Poem 3

Night Madness Poem


There's a poem in my head
like too many cups of coffee.
A pea under twenty eiderdowns.
A sadness in my heart like stone.
A telephone. And always my
Night madness that outs like bats
across this Texas sky.


I'm the crazy lady they warned you about.
The she of rumor talked about -
and worse, who talks.


It's no secret.
I'm here. Under a circle of light.
The light always on, resisting a glass,
an easy cigar. The kind


who reels the twilight sky.
Swoop circling.
I'm witch woman high
on tobacco and holy water.


I'm a woman delighted with her disasters.
They give me something to do.
A profession of sorts.
Keeps me industrious
And of some servicable use.


In dreams the origami of the brain
Opens like a fist, a pomegranate,
an expensive geometry.


Not true.
I haven't a clue
Why I'm rumpled tonight.


Choose your weapon.
Mine--the telephone, my tongue.
Both black as a gun.


I have the magic of words,
the power to charm and kill at will.
To kill myself or to aim haphazardly.
And kill you.

Forgetting Why

Smell her eyelashes
and forget where the minute went
tossing legs that close tightly
over and over
pushing away the wandering pain
of numbness.

Confusion wrapped in
overreaction or
slow revelation
that hurts so sharp
that wandering toward it
feels like seppuku.

Kill her
quickly so that she
gets what she deserves–
awkward facial expressions
without time to
say goodbye, show remorse
or relinquish her last day of mediocre sins.