folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem
statement: the p rose
The p rose. On the up and up. The letter P. Rose. Or pee. I’m a nation, urination. Nationalism is peepee. Rising up is for prose. And cons. A p rose is a rose made from a host of interlacing Ps. A fractal of peepeepee. Urea. Eureka. The pros offer density and destiny. In the garden, “prose” is short for primrose. And “primrose” is short for preliminary neurosecretion. The p defies gravity. The p rose is past tense; the imperative is the prise. Usurp rise. Razed. Prized. The rising p greets the day with thoughts of relief. P-shaped petals and leaves. Belief. The B is a double P. “Pelief” is just “Belief” with one-twelfth less meaning; “Pclicf” means even less. The p also sinks. It’s sinking about life and death. In sync with peepee. The p defies levity. Down the drain. D rain. A d is a p that’s fallen on its head, and so is a b. And q is a p that is looking into the past. So that prose and brose and qrose and drose are all enantiomers of the same idea. The peer owes is another way of it. Indubitable and indebted. Owes the pee-er. Hose the pier. The p rows away into the sunset. Or back to the garden. Oh snap, the pea rows grow along lattice. Let us go up and up. The p rises. And in the fall, the p rose.
dragonfruit Sermon
mock orange blossom joy sleep-in joy 1980 Suzuki 400cc joy giving the perfect gift joy freshly cut yellow cedar smell joy feeling a fetus kick joy Rick Moranis joy sprouting mulberry seeds joy remembering that nothing really matters joy first scoop of honey from the bucket joy sarcasm joy watching a movie after midnight joy froth in the milking bucket joy playing the drums joy watching someone else playing the drums joy alder cones joy first-ever leap off the diving board into the deep-end joy finishing a poem (either writing or reading) joy community joy in vain joy dragonfruit joy first snow joy last snow joy making up words for things that should have words like “gutch” for the region between gut and crotch or “rejubilification” for the particular glee of seeing an old friend joy
Cucumber Sermon
I wake up in the morning for coffee and already a chicken is missing, my students try to convince me that, biologically, cucumbers are fruit, but that culinarily, they’re vegetables, and our fridge fills with lemon and kirby cukes from someone else’s garden, and my kid is asking me to facilitate a carry for him through voidgloom tier 4, the difference between what feels good and what feels right is sometimes a dry August hiking trail turning back on itself, diuretics and death threats, and I question whether a Rubrik’s cube is, in and of itself, moral or immoral, and what of the geometry of bananas, and when Frigga tells her son “Everyone fails at who they're supposed to be, Thor…” the article says it’s ethical to kick over certain cairns but also to leave trails as you find them, and the temptation to flourish here is omnipresent, 50 things you can make with cucumbers: garlic dill pickles, tropical smoothie with kale, mojito mocktail, greek yogurt tzatziki, hydrating smoothie with mango, homemade cucumber and summer berry popsicles, irresistible finger sandwiches with crushed mint, roasted with parmesan and scallions… “the measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are,” The Recombobulator 3000, I don’t know, another clutch of chicks has hatched, probably half are roosters, naturally doomed, and what feels good isn’t always easy, but neither is what feels right, or maybe the problem is feeling, and goodness and rightness has nothing to do with it
apricot Sermon
dip my finger into the morning bowl of dog water to lift out a soggy sod webworm, its wings spread across the wet surface like a George Harrison song, and our ten-year-old will use only Cottonelle® Ultra Clean Toilet Paper with Active CleaningRipples™ (he’d be mortified to know I mentioned it, so please don’t say anything), while the four apricots that Laurel brought home soften on the counter until our mouths are ripe enough to accept them, growing up my mom always said my name means “gentle,” but when I Google it now the only meaning that comes up is “handsome,” which feels kinda gross, and I get texts that say “there’s already plenty of peepee in the pool” and “wish you were here”, an ember that is neither dying nor kindling, all these small, brief, gentlenesses, mini infinities, and sometimes my anger is indistinguishable from sadness, how the dog’s cheeks and muzzle lift into a slight, false snarl with each lap of water, and turns out the light switch we thought was broken for months was just a burnt out bulb—we are proud to be FSC certified and use fibers that are 100% plant-based and no harsh chemicals or dyes—and I confess to having looked up a specific moth species so that this poem would sound smarter than me, but I have no idea if it was a sod webworm or a beech moth or a brown house moth or whether it survived or not
kevin mcpherson eckhoff's most recent book is a translation of poems by Andrés Urzúa do la Sotta titled The Language of Stones available from Hardscrabble Press. He spends his time teaching, moping, milking goats, and reading other people's books to his two boy-os. Oh, and he has a very quote-comedy-unquote album called Joke Killer. Mwah.