80 words without dialogue

She stood at the edge of a precipice, between one moment and the next, a sailboat named “Joy-Luck” passed on the river below. The sound of road construction filled the air. Smashing concrete. Trucks. Trucks backing up. Machinery. Along the river the three-lane highway turned to four, dust floated and swirled around her 8th floor terrace, and she realized that joy and luck never intertwine, even if the boat moving toward the distance could have taken her, at least, closer.

102 words and some symbols

She is taking a scissor to every word, slicing individual letters. Tatters of ink stain her fingers, her lips, she presses each letter to her tongue to make it stick, presses the characters between sheets of wax paper, irons, lets it cool. The waxed alphabet in its variety of shades and fonts, serif, sans serif, bold, capitalized, lower case, is ready for the archives. “This will make all the difference,” she says to the bird who only speaks letters. “T,” he replies. “There will be no future of words if we don’t protect the letters,” she tells him. “S,” he squeaks. “D.” “J.” “G.”

a response

misconstrue
your grade
(this poem is more like a “C” poem)
the paper on foucault, however
subjective
use more images
fragments of care like the falling branches on my infected
ash tree
can you settle for a page
on which
every word begins with “M”
merry maids misled mist monday moving maintenance maneuvers
i am just thinking out loud here
usually it works best in line
breaks
a shadow of a leaf
(his burning anticipation, the fullness of the flower’s scent,
insert additional lines here)
a dog is a dog is a dog
until the continuum of history becomes
no such thing
and baseball teams win when the city most “needs” to feel
like a winning city
like a real team
like a reasonable argument
logically
or
you cannot respond
to what has not been summarized
properly

sunday in the rain

what i’ve told you has been otherwise in circulation
history repeats
the fragmentation of
details
which red it was or the date was sometime in September
an object
leaf, stroke, yarn
connected to 100 buttons scattered
across the floor a series
of tests to determine in which system
each button
would like
to participate
a sense of order
the pattern becomes jumbled
once the buttons move too closely
together
at velocity
scattered repeats of
fragmentation
the details of which
would require
every square to be highlighted
in red