10 Comments


  1. awkward, unsilvery,
    wake the peeled off-
    white light wrung
    meat shrunk
    thumpin’
    shank shiv,
    gushest glister,
    taut slit-
    slot, stunt-
    less stump
    slump —

    horny biotch in the crawlspace,
    muddy hindpaws on the prowl,
    brainless spittle dribble,
    unthrobbing scribble drivel


  2. Little Waking Song

    Muddy prints in the veins’
    ruby-colored tunnels,
    thumping in the crawlspace
    underneath the ribs;
    rain drumming on the balconies
    of the heart.

    ~ Luisa A. Igloria
    02 25 2011


    1. Ha! I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away. And an especially creative transformation of the prompt material, too.


      1. The woodchuck was too noisy anyway. And other than feeling like parts of me are excavation sites, I am fine though slightly fuzzy.


      2. Well, that’s good, I guess.

        Around lunch time, I looked out the back door of my mom’s kitchen and saw a woodchuck going past, probably the same one heading for another burrow, undeterred by rain and soggy snow.


        1. And I thought I would pinchhit for the super-poet with this much ado about a thumping woodchuck.
          Welcome back on the porch, Luisa.



  4. A CRAWLSPACE IN EDEN

    1.
    Thumping under a crawlspace,
    the poor furtive resident woodchuck
    has joined the ranks of human lovers,
    and got itself a cranny while in heat:

    What is revolting about the freedom
    to swing on the branches of maple
    when even jays and robins find it easy
    and O so quickly practical in flight?

    Has the figleaf myth finally befuddled
    this spritely unshackled Abelard to hide
    an urgent function to please his Heloise
    in a cramp and cobwebbed crawlspace?

    2.
    In the orchard sprawl of a forbidden
    garden, once upon a lonely time, a man
    begged for a woman and gave his rib
    that it may grow into loins and haunches

    and He said that she looked good like
    the sun and the stars and the appletree
    whose ripened fruit they cannot share
    or lose the blindness of celibate bliss.

    What does it matter that a nook is dark
    or dank or deep? Is this not a paradise
    regained? How so, when the wildness
    of wind and throbs of sea and waves are

    bartered for the silky warmth of sheets
    in antiseptic rooms and lose in turn
    the East of Eden, where love is free
    and unafraid and brighter than a crawlspace?

    —Albert B. Casuga
    Mississauga, 02-25-11


  5. In the Eden that was less
    is more, a fig leaf was like
    Thoreau’s lake– earth’s eye,
    in which the beholder measured
    the depth of his own nature:
    small tendril, wisp curling back
    toward the safety of the thigh
    even as the tree, the world,
    its littlest creatures begged
    to be numbered and named.

    – 02 25 2011


    1. A philosopher-poet’s view, indeed! “A fig leaf was earth’s eye, in which the beholder measured the depth of his own nature.”

      Nature being what biology mandates, it is the “fig leaf” that serves as a “caveat” to the coy—“noli me tangere” (touch me not) unless you mean it, for from this act the Trinity’s sublime “e pluribus unum” (from the many One) turns love to LOVE. That should be free and unafraid.

      What we have is the “tree”, pruned, but still a refuge for even the “littlest creatures that seek to be numbered”. From the depths of this nature, man can ascend toward his “summum bonum” (his highest good): God Who is Love (the last time I looked out of my crawlspace).

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