New Challenge!!!

Después de una larga pausa en este blog, les presento un reto, no tan nuevo, pero definitivamente debe provocarles algún entusiasmo, sino curiosidad. Acabo de toparme con este cuento breve o microrrelato de Luisa Valenzuela. El juego consiste en tratar de imitarlo. Escribir un relato breve, no me imagino hacerlo en más de 100 palabras, y que todas las palabras comiencen con la misma letra.

PALABRAS PARCAS

Abelardo, Arsaín, astuto abogado argentino, asesino agudo, apuesto, ágil aerobista acicalado. Atento. Amable. Amigo asiduo, afectuoso, acechante. Ambicioso. Amante ardiente, arrecho. Autoritario. Abrazos asfixiantes, ansiosos, asustados. Aluvión apagado, artefacto ablandado, apocado. Agravado. Altamente agresivo, al acecho. Abelardo Arsaín. Arma al alcance, arremete artero, ataca arrabiado, asesina. Atrapado. Absuelto: autodefensa. ¡Ay!

Luisa Valenzuela

Retrato: Rita Rivera, rubia ruborizada, radica resolución risible, rabiando ronca, riéndose relamida.  Risueña retira rótulos rotos.  Recalcitrante, rocía rosas recién reabiertas, reafirma resentimientos rastreros.  Receptora regente, requiebra rediles, reflexiona rimadamente recatada.  Romántica rompehuelga, rauda, revivifica risas rebeldes.  Ruidosa resurge rutilante resquebrajando rosedales.  Rosacruz reguetonera revuelve reverenciosa restos rancios.   Reafirma rutina rústica ramoneando rápida.  Ruiseñores, ranas, remata radiante.  Realista, reajusta rodilla rojiza resquebrajada.  Realmente racista reserva ritos readmitidos. Rebate razonamientos rígidos.  Reina radioaficinada ruge receptiva recuerdos  ridículos.  Rostro rebujado, ropa roída, recae resignada.

jj

                                                     

Veamos

Verónica Vélez Vilá vanidosa vivaz virginal, vístese veloz. Viaja vigorosamente visitando vergeles, vagabundeando veredas; vezando valles. Ve violencia, vejámenes, vergüenza.

--Venga vea--vocifera Viviana, vieja vecina verrugosa.

--Vaya vertiginosamente venciendo vientos viciados.

Vencida, Verónica, vientre virgen virtuoso vigilante, vaga,  (des)varía.

--Venga vea—vocaliza vacilante. —veinte vándalos varones vampiros, vuelan veloces, vierten vehementes, viscerales violencias, vanagloriándose verbosos, venciendo vengativos verdugos vesánicos.

elf

___________________________

Here goes --

Alien Acolytes Amass

Amber always alleges an amatory awe amid admirers, adolescent and aroused avocations. An acutely acerbic ambrosia aches, and Amber, all awkward, agitates: anatomy's algebra akimbo, arched and anaerobic, almost accusingly alluring. Anxieties articulate among Amber's abstinent artifices. Arrows attempt an arrest, abduct aortas and alternate arteries, Amber's axles alarmed and animated after awesome abuse. Although an amnesiac Aphrodite, Amber avoids all allegories, accumulating amethyst ammunition and antithetical affectations. Ahh! alive and alien, aglow, aubergine avenger, an alkaline asterisk, Amber annihilates as Amber advances, announcing another awful autumn of love.

JAlberdeston

Daisy Zamora

For Mother's Day, try writing a poem about being a mother. Anyone game? Here's a good one by Daisy Zamora (Nicaragua)

Poema Preñez

Esta inesperada redondez
este perder mi cintura de ánfora
y hacerme tinaja,
es regresar al barro, al sol, al aguacero
y entender cómo germina la semilla
en la humedad caliente de mi tierra.

_________

Valentine's Day

Write a poem for Valentine's Day. Here's a poem to inspire you.

"Valentine" by Carol Ann Duffy


Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Una traducción:

No te regalo una rosa ni un corazón de satén

Te regalo una cebolla
Una luna envuelta en una bolsa de papel de estraza.
Promete luz
como el metódico desvestir del amor.

Toma.
Te cegará con sus lágrimas como un amante.
Hará de tu reflejo una foto del desequilibrio del dolor.

Trato de ser sincera.

Te doy una cebolla.
Su beso feroz quedará en tus labios
de manera posesiva y fiel
como somos nosotros
mientras lo seamos nosotros.

Tómala.
Sus argollas de platino se encojen para formar un anillo de matrimonio,
si así lo prefieres.

Letal.
Su aroma se adhiere a tus dedos,
y a tu navaja.

elf


____________________

This is post-Valentine's Day....but it always takes time to percolate.

Queen of Window Love, Mistress of Mistaken Affections
--Listening to the 80s While Staring Out, Sector Lechuga


Out the window there is no love but the flocked edges of sky writing the names of gnats, like lovers scratched into a tree. It and I leave a brief cursive of anecdotes, catching. Roberta and I search for paradise.

A noisy trace of slaughterhouse creeps the night’s distance, tramples through truck crops, into gawky frangipani, into me and other formerly nubile brush. The scent steps over fences, then into the sleep of fat steers and all their glum mothers.

The window brags, pretends to offer love in a season of hurricanes, but by now I know it’s only bad television. Seconds later, my attention is moved again to the periphery of lonesome: a salamander festoons the louver’s aluminum whispers, with its own nervous breath, wide-eyed, an angel having to catch up to God’s footstep. He and I are both so very Chuck D, fighting miserable with our hands clenched like crooked teeth.

I forget myself. I get lost and braless. I throw back a laugh and land somewhere in the east, in a boy’s rumbling muffler, in the fist of love, cresting.

An island shimmies, worrying the foot of the radio. As Costello sings a song of salvation from whiskey’s Saturday lips, dusty screens (pinholes to the mild and the mystical) whisper soft and hot, while my body minds itself in spite of the breeze.

Jane Alberdeston Coralin

____________________

Sisyphus Merriam Webster Definition

EXERCISE: WRITE A HAIKU IN WHICH A SISYPHIAN EFFORT IS PERFORMED.

____________
King Sisyphus's Last Trick (Haiku String)

Rock who had never
run away for boyish games
or adventure, now

could be measured by
his ever thinning waistline;
gone, a boy's corners.

Mother, a black sea
boulder, hated the king who
turned boy to pebble.

How quick kings forget
a mother's vengeance on fleets
of gold and soldiers,

on tricksters who turn
the effort of love to sand,
feet laughing at gods.


JEA

_____________________

Seven line story

Jane sent me a set of guidelines for a contest from an online magazine called Opium. I reproduce it here as a game: "The rules? Write a story or prose poem that is seven lines or less (8.5" x 11" paper with 1" margins)." Below I posted a great little story as an example. Also taken from Opium:

Postcard from Mykonos
by Thomas Cooper
Estimated reading time: 30 seconds

When H and J were on vacations they wrote postcards to the Mortimers, a couple they never knew or met. They imagined the Mortimers at home, captivated, when they received postcards from San Tropez, Tokyo, Madrid. “Maybe we’ll visit this thanksgiving,” he wrote. “Why didn’t you meet us in Bangkok?” she wrote. It went on for years. But this morning,alone in Mykonos for Christmas, at a desk window overlooking the Aegean sea, he writes on the back of a hotel postcard that he has news he must share in person, and that he’ll soon be on his way.


At Home with the Mortimers

In the face of Buena's utter disappointment, Raul tossed the extravagant postcards out; where Buena saw friends in a secret new world, Raul saw the reflections of escape and excess: would his wife wear Lamborghini-red lipstick like the mouth of that postcard's Amsterdam whore? Would other men see the horizon of her bikini line from a yacht skimming the postcard's Baltic? Would she shame him, traipsing the card's naked edge of 42nd Street? All led to Buena's ultimate deception, he later thought, her hair in his hands. Buena watched the man she had once thought to love

suck in all his breath and loosen a ball of phlegm into the trash can. She said nothing because above all she knew that though Raul could control her, he could not control the mail. She let him mock her. "You're the sucker born every minute". Before the fire of his doubt could consume him, Buena secreted those minute love letters that beckoned her to sit in Parisienne cafe chairs lined like eggs in cartons; to touch Lady Liberty's prickly crown; to bathe in the yellow curry of a Nepalese hillside; to follow a gaggle of Geishas walking in a grove of

cherry blossoms. She never thought to believe the postcards were images of a life spent in dreams, that her reality existed in the garbage pail. A somnambulist, Buena mined, then rescued the pieces out from under the finger of Raul's suspicion. She cut her hands with the shark lids of bean cans and inhaled the stench of 50 cent half-smoked cigars. None of that mattered because she had never known the depth of her discontent until the mysterious arrival of postcards from a couple she'd never known nor met.

JEA

Dreams

Megan walks into what seems to be a hospital, light beams shine brightly, so brightly she squints and shades her eyes with her hand. If she could only find a bed to rest her weary body. “You can use the one reserved for the homeless,” someone whispers in her ear. And there in front of her are six gurneys each covered in sheets of the most vivid hues: Tuareg blue, azalea pink, Flaming June orange. Although she yearns to lay down on the alluring field of colors, and rest her head she shivers at the thought that someone will come to reprimand her, and demand she give up her bed to one more needy. Finally, she sees a row of black chairs in a dark corner. And while she walks toward them thinking of how she’ll need to arrange her body to fit in, she hears what she thinks is an ambulance siren’s wail approaching quickly and loudly.

elf

El horóscopo/ the horoscope

Juego: Usando el lenguaje de los horóscopos, crear un poema. Puede ser tan corto como un haiku, o tan largo como un soneto. Game, anyone?

#1
El amor ronda
tu puerta entreabierta.
Atrápalo ya.

#2
In the year of the tiger
the mice scramble about quietly and oh so discreetly.
But beware,
the steady nibbling can even one so fearful and ferocious defeat
oh so completely.

Elf

_________________________________________


Found (Horoscope borrowed from DailyHoroscopes.com, Aug. 18, 2010)

Slip onto the lips of the information you receive
today, where you will find that some avenues,
previously blocked, are now opening:
however, be wary of the mouths of rapids and avatars,
jelly jars, and automatic garage doors.

Put yourself inside everything.
listen to streetlights, wake to witness storms,
a bitch's worry skulk into night, an iguana's
orange breath, mufflers and long winding kilometers.
The more information you get

to help you understand
the years of an imagined kiss, the tomato stain
on the kitchen floor, the knot at the nape
of your neck, the vengeance of an ingrown
hair, the more success you will have
with your endeavors, though acidic and mildly cellular.

You probably already have grand tenuous ideals
and visions: a box tied around what the past
would not give you. But now you must put everything
aside together. You may have to find yourself,

a minister to your pale hungers, helping each
learn patience, understanding, acceptance, only till
the lull is done, till the itch is gone, till the time
has .... An odd flavor, this psychology.

But by now, you already know
that what passes for love is not easy.
Remember: this is a time for prudence, a time to tend
to details: listen for when your body loosens,
unravels; be a titan, unabashed. Be okay
with princes in 18-wheelers, the metallic smile of youth,
the fantasia of body shop mechanics and all their boyhood
looks; most importantly, let yourself
be a tomtom for the heart.

But never drive while lonely.

Juego: Myth-making

Ekphrastic writing is a fantastic way of re-envisioning an artwork. Choose a mythological or literary figure from a piece of art (literary work, painting, sculpture, etc) and re-tell the story in your own way, using your own perceptions, prejudices, dreams, visions, whatever speaks to you in the work. I've pasted mine below "Oberon Takes Wing". If you want to see other examples of ekphrastic writing, here's a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l-nj9MeTNo&feature=related


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l-nj9MeTNo&feature=related

Oberon Takes Wing

He should have known he knew not the new wings. look how disproportionate, laced in iron. if he could make it, he thought, to the lamppost, the bench, the score of grass waiting like an unmade bed; but there was so much he didn't know. and so much of the little he knew: the light in a hostas leaf unfolding itself; romance in the red red brick seeking for him a new path; song trees waving him in. closer, they sang in lyrics made of rustle and whoosh. but it was the girl in green he could hear through all the mess. the girl who spoke to him best, spoke to him last, held him by a flimsy but tactile faith: the ephemera of her fingerprint on the border of his instep, the long shadow he made on her face. he followed her in his mind, heard the bells ringing in her flight and spanned what little he had of wing.

JEA

Artwork: VCCA Sculpture: information pending

El sueño de Ícaro

Sueño con la brisa acariciando mi rostro,
con pasajes de luz,
con alas blancas
agitadas al viento.

Sueño con el sol descansando sobre mi cabeza.
con el sabor de la libertad,
con el olor del vuelo
de colegas bípedas.

Sueño.
Y en el remanso de esa quimera
ni el sol ni el mar me son letales.

Despierto.
El desigual y caótico descenso al precipicio
Me recuerda lo fugaz de la felicidad.

elf