FIREFLIES by Cecilia Woloch

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn't hunger
but something like fear, a staunching of dread
and a taste for bitter gossip
of those who've wronged me -- for bitterness --
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don't even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
or those cute little toylike mice
whose soft grey bodies in sticky traps
I carry, lifeless, out to the trash
and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book
to a human being, and humming
and living inside my head
and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.

I like the stark honesty of this poem.

Mad TV had a dating service parody called Lowered Expectations that ran for a season or so, the gist of which were the absolutely undateable citizens looking for other undateables to hang with . The effect was sadder than it was funny--the sight of characters with intractable personality quirks trying a last ditch effort to find companionship through a whimpering admission of their grosser assets.

Loneliness is an ungainly crucible for anyone to bear, whether super star or twitching wretch; the confession in the Mad parodies were losers begging for love, the assumption being that those who fall short, perhaps far short , of our insane standards of style and hipness suffer from a magnified self loathing.

Which is why I like this poem by Cecilia Woloch. It's a declaration of what's- really-here, the words of someone who is unapologetic about their faults, perhaps a bit embarrassed by some of them, but not ashamed of any of them. It's not in-your-face like the monontonous products of slam poets can be--this is a monologue on a human scale, a bit of a conversation we come in the middle of, a splendid speech that fills in what we've missed without the digression of backward-motion narrative. Woloch is curt, crisp, and sharp in her lines, and manages to be take-me-or-leave-me-alone without being a full time jerk. I like this poem

Hi Ted (great poem MA), I have been lurking around your last few poetry reviews and just wanted to comment that you have been taking names and getting numbers, keep it up.

Hi, MaryAnn, I too liked this poem for its honesty, its admission of the narrator's (poet's?) peccadillos and her abililty to state things objectively without angst and with minimal self-judgment.

OK, now this next part is so tenuous that it's hardly worth the keyboard energy to type it all, but I've got to share it anyway. In my Google search using the words "crossword puzzle poetry," I came up with the crossword puzzle I posted on Friday night. I also came across a site that had a crossword made up of supposedly the most commonly submitted bad poem titles to a popular poetry magazine (or something to that effect). Unfortunately, the clues were so obscure that very few people in the whole world would have been able to solve the puzzle.

But I did take a peek at the answers to that crossword because I was curious about frequently-used titles. A few, for example, were "Aubade," "Insomnia," and conversely, "Sleep."

So, after reading Woloch's poem , I had this thought that perhaps fireflies -- like sleep and insomnia -- were common objects of poetification. You, too, can Google "firefly poems" and see that everyone from Ogden Nash to Robert Frost wrote about the firefly (as did several people who really have no business trying to write poetry -- I mean, there are some really bad firefly poems out there!).

And I am finally getting to my point, which is that I found mention of one Coral Bracho, a female Mexican poet (and how I wish I had more familiarity with Mexican and South American poets). Bracho wrote a book of poems, and the poem the book was titled after is about fireflies. The formatting absolutely wouldn't work, so here is a link. Let me know what you think of this poem:

<link>

Hi IT,

I just finshed reading an essay about women poets, so my answer may be colored by that.

What I like about the poem you offered is that the form is experimental, something that not many women poets seem to try. I also very much liked the sensuousness of the poem. Thanks for the intro to a poet I've never heard of before.

What I don't like is that she uses (for me) too much figurative language and too many "big" words. (I can't help but wonder if those words were chosen by the poet or the translator.)

I'm seven years old again. I swear I am.

Here I am in NJ staying with my 91 year old grandma while me mum travels this week. Grandma is in the kitchen cooking a vicious-smelling meal. You can't imagine the debate that will occur when I refuse to eat it. I grew up with this woman. This has happened before...

I liked the poem, Mary Ann. One quibble with the accuracy-- unless you leave the stickytrap mouse to starve, the trap does not kill the mouse. It just sticks them and they squeak, panicked or pissed, I don't know which. When that happened to a mouse we caught (back when we lived in the cool house in the woods), my husband, a good-hearted Saint Francis type, felt terrible for the mouse. He took it outside to release it from the stickytrap. He felt even worse when the mouse came free of the trap, but its feet didn't.

I wish I was making this up.

After that, no more sticky traps. Cats.

Cats. I think that's what Grandma is cooking. It smells like cat piss.

m.

waltz, can't you just eat a few mouthfuls? It will make grandma feel so good. Remember, food is love.

Hi all, this is off the topic, but I’m sure many of you have visited The Happiness Project. I believe Gretchen Rubin does a good job with that; I lurk there. Well, I was doing a little reading and ran into this: Mass Happiness for UK! Coming Soon!

That is a link to my heading for a post with a link to an article explaining a very ambitious undertaking in the United Kingdom. I hope you can visit it.

HAP, I think another rule should be to cut our time on the Internet in half as well.

Hi MA, you may be correct. I need to refine my searching skills, and I wish I could upgrade my access.

Some lines from Pope

I hate it when that happens. See the ending of the free portion of the article and sigh…

…drastic compensation for…

That is a cliff hanger.

But, for only $28 I can find out the ending.

I did register, though…that’s free.

i pretended to be sick. at her insistence i took 'stomach pills." (i pretended that, too.) then, because Grandma so had her heart set on my recovery, i pretended to get well.

i ate the food.

food is love? food is purgatory at Grandma's house.

m.

Hi M. Re: food is love? food is purgatory at Grandma's house.

Consider yourself fortunate. At my Nana’s house food was H – E – double hockey sticks. One time she was making something (I got this story second-hand) and she dropped it on the floor and one of the cats smelled it and promptly turned around and tried to bury it. She was cool though, she owned a doll hospital.

HAP,

guess what i did today. i swam in the ocean.

totally unexpected, my sister's got me outa Grandma's for a few hours and we went to the beach. I watched my kids body surf and I thought of you.

monica

Hi M, this is a really cool article about whales:

the bowhead whale

each year a new song

female or male come hither

it’s unestablished