This
blog is devoted to a select group of poets. We're starting with poets
from the Ann Arbor area, but, hey, if you're from Detroit, Grand Rapids,
Saginaw or the Upper Peninsula, then that is okay, too.
Today's poem or short story prompt is the word "marker".
Our
goal is to provide you with a prompt every day from which you are to
garner inspiration and submit a poem. How to submit will be very easy.
Just put your poem or short story in the comments section and hit
post. You may not immediately see your post, but it is there under the
"Comments" section. You may need to click on "Comments" to see your
poem. It is there on another page.
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I spent too much time as a child smelling things and then wondering, with a child's sense of dread, if it was bad to be smelling these things. Magic markers. I'd open the caps and smell the markers and because it was so intoxicating of a smell, I'd put the cap back on it long before I wanted to. The same thing with gasoline. When the gas station attendant would open the gas cap to fill the tank, I would spring out of the car and start washing the windows. My parents thought I was just an overzealous child who loved to clean, but I was really just hoping to get close enough to the gas pump to inhale the fumes. Now there is a moder name for this I guess-huffing. But I never smelled long or hard enough to get that high. I just loved the way gasoline smelled.
ReplyDeleteHere are other things I could not get enough of: Vicks Vapor Rub, Coconut Cookies (not macaroons but the credit card sized cookie that was made out of flour, sugar and industrial strength imitation coconut flavoring), furniture polish, the polyester of my Catholic school uniform, table salt.
Why couldn't I have been a normal smeller? The type of child who would come running when she smelled fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. Or the little girl who dabbed on her mother's Chanel #5. Or who loved the smelled of a nice, clean baby. Maybe it had to do with nobody made those chocolate chip cookies or my mother didn't wear a signature perfume or there wasn't a clean baby at our house. I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for me. It's just the way it was.
And now that I think of it maybe wandering around looking for odd things to smell was a way to offset those tiny deprivations of childhood. Like a poor person who, if there is no real meat to eat, might go kill a muscrat or scoop up roadkill. They'd probably rather be eating high on the hog, but if that's not happening you take what you can get. Kind of like a dry coconut cookie or the fumes around the gas jockey making up for whole bunch of stuff that I wasn't go to have.
Catherine Powers
June 10, 2013
Copyright 2013
MARKERS
ReplyDeleteCGEMS
PCA3
AFLP
APO3
now that we've decided it's OK
to tamper with the basic stuff
of which we are made,
we engineer our children
true,
currently to only a small extent,
eye color, hair color, sex,
but be patient
we will hire and fire
based on genetic markers
for long life or disease
or a tendency toward violence
my marker is more simple,
more basic
my defect is identifiable
because I
say the wrong thing
at the wrong time
- Mike Fedel
June, 2013