I love prose poetry!! Just last week, our professor emphatically proclaimed that a prose poem is an inherent contradiction! But I love prose poems, just as I love putting poetry in my prose. It’s all good. This one was just a fun little exercise for me, nothing serious.
Happy Poetry Thursday!!
OLD HAG
I am getting my hair done in the salon, a hot, melting day, and I am not in the mood. Next to me sits a woman, straight-backed, sitting in her own wooden throne. I say, hey, you, do me a favor. Glance down at your old wrinkled hand. Don’t you see, it is mocha only a few shades darker than my own and yet you turn your nose up at me, like you have shit on yourself when really you are the shit underneath my shoe when I jump from the bottom step and land in the wrong patch of grass. And isn’t it sad, that you could be my granny, hip and chocolate and proud, but also bourgeois and jealous and adorned by diamonds that weigh down your frail hands.
Psst… granny, you know babies are slaughtered in diamond mines.
And I never could stand my grandmother anyway. Why is it you turn your nose up at me? Because I am selective in how I choose to slaughter my locks for the sake of beautification? Is it because I speak, clipped proper like an Ivy League dropout? Is it because I just look so not black or is it because I’ve got the body of a playboy reject, not quite bunny status, where yours is simply rejected? Is it because I am the prime you wasted decades before? Let it go you old hag! This city has molested and mutated my Midwest courtesies, and well, I never much respected my elders anyway. And I’m okay with that. Even better one day soon, I hope you choke on your own bitter teeth.
7 Comments
February 15, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I liked this a lot. There’s something about all of this happening with a granny that makes is shocking. Well done.
February 15, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Wow. Venomous and scathing – but captivatingly so. This is such a fine example of the form (as I’m now learning). And the interesting juxtaposition of the speaker’s disdain for the old woman, even as she is quietly insulting herself with her “better” traits. Fascinating all around.
February 15, 2007 at 2:32 pm
This is why I read you. There’s something intoxicating about your venom. Love it!
D
February 15, 2007 at 4:35 pm
I agree… I was shocked and entranced on my first read-through, and on the second I picked up more of the intricacies of it–very fun.
February 16, 2007 at 7:26 am
Venom and malice! It comes out vey well. You did great!
gautami
Ambrosial.
February 17, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Beneath the venom is some very sharp observation!
February 22, 2007 at 7:15 am
It’s weird, I never thought of this poem as venomous! It’s always interesting to be able to step back outside of a poem and see what others see.
Nice! Thanks, fellow poets!