Chicken Spaghetti

Four people in bathing suits,

including a tan man in a thong, 

American herring gulls and a Ring-billed gull,

Double-crested cormorants standing guard on the jetty,

Footprints in the sand,

My own earbud on the ground too many times,

A Northern mockingbird, 

A sign saying the snack bar is open 

(It wasn’t.),

Chestnut hunters, and a man with a stick,

A birthday ribbon in the dirt,

One lobster boat,

A flat Long Island Sound,

Doldrums for a sailor, and

Perfect for water skiing,

Should one be so inclined.

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An aspect of participating in Poetry Friday that I especially enjoy is that it puts me in a poetic frame of mind, and one thing leads to another. In this case, I was taking a walk at the nearby state park and started taking pictures of flowers with my phone. That turned into collecting other images in my head, and when I got back to the car, I scribbled everything down on an envelope. Lists, process, projects, themes, ways in: all fun things to think about when you’re looking around with the Poetry Friday lens.

An earlier version of this post, with additional photos, appeared on Instagram. You’ll find the Poetry Friday roundup at Matt Forrest Esenwine’s blog today.

The last poetry project I started was to create poems from newspaper headlines, and after a couple of months, I just couldn’t stand it any more. What’s the Kenny Rogers line? Know when to fold ’em…know when to run? I ran.

Poetry and I did not keep steady company over the spring and summer, for no good reason other than that I was burying my head in the sand, but I did read and loved Elaine Equi’s collection Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press, 2025). Ben Shields writes in Artforum that Equi, “a staple of the New York downtown scene,” uses “language, casual enough for a napkin, [and] leaves you with the impression that you’ve just been told a delicious, unshackling secret.” What a lovely description!

For a sample of Equi’s style, I recommend “Muffin of Sunsets” and other poems at the Academy of American Poets. I’m looking forward to reading more of her books, too, now that I have summoned up a modicum of personal organization.

This is the first new post on WordPress, where I moved the blog after Typepad announced its denouement. Welcome to the new home of Chicken Spaghetti! You’ll find more Poetry Friday posts at The Poem Farm today. It’s good to be back.

Photo by ST. Madrid, 2025.

Mural by Sara Erenthal, Allen Street, New York, New York. Photo by Susan Thomsen, 2020.

Today's bit of poetry goodness is the February 26th, 2025, edition of the New Yorker's Poetry Podcast in which Jericho Brown reads a work by Elizabeth Alexander ("When") and one of his own ("Colosseum.") He tells poetry editor Kevin Young, "Every poem is a love poem because somebody just had to write it down. Somebody just had to get it right, and it was out of love, of that moment of writing, out of love for that poem itself…" I highly recommend listening to the interview and readings.

Another of Brown's poems that I like is "'N'Em." You can read it at the New York Times Magazine.

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The Poetry Friday roundup is at Margaret Simon's Reflections on the Teche. Margaret and I grew up in the same hometown and even attended the same church as kids. Small world, right? She's such a thoughtful, talented writer. Go visit!

Definitions

Break is a word
That kicks at the end,
With legs of a K
Severing ties,
Though it begins
With a buxom, promising B.

Break can be rest,
Pause measured by coffee,
Perhaps in class,
Perhaps at the office,
A siesta of sorts
As darkness drops in.

Break is a verb
Employed against horses,
Stomping spirits,
Rupturing traditions,
Punting friends,
Into dangerous orbits.

Mend is a word
That fixes the break,
That sets the bone,
That patches the hole.
Mend offers a hand
And does not let go.

How is the adverb,
How is the work.

Draft, Susan Thomsen 2025

*****

A month ago the Poetry Sisters offered a challenge for February: to create a "__ Is a Word" poem, a form invented by Nikki Grimes and shared by Michelle Barnes. (Thank you to Tanita S. Davis for the background.) The above, a very rough draft, is what I came up with. Should I keep the last two lines or set them free?

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 28th is at Denise Krebs' blog.

Image: Latin dictionary photo by Dr. Marcus Gossler, used under the license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Here is a poem by Patricia Spears Jones, whose work I have admired ever since reading her piece in the 1994 anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café. This one is called "Comedy with Flutes," and it was first published in 2023. The Poetry Foundation link includes audio. Do take a listen! I'm adding "Comedy with Flutes" to my own "Resistance" collection. It begins,

Enough of this foolishness—caution gone

She opined

We need a comedy with flutes

Happy Black History Month, happy Valentine's Day, happy Poetry Friday. The roundup is at the blog TeacherDance. 

Photo by Susan Thomsen, 2019.  @ellestreetart mural, part of the @streetartmankind project. New Rochelle, New York.

No doubt someone has shared this poem on Poetry Friday before; it's such a good one. I'm still working on my own poems, made of words from headlines in the New York Times. Right now they are coming out really angry, and whether that speaks to the zeitgeist, my own frame of mind, or both, I couldn't tell you! I'm trying to get at my own form but haven't yet arrived. I did realize that unlike headline writers, I wasn't limited by space constrictions, so that let me cut out and paste in some "a"s, "the"s "and"s, and so on. 

I like the repetitions, word choices, and arrangement of white space in this Hirshfield  poem. She has found her own form, and I'm reminded how important it is to read mentor works. That "we" in "Let Them Not Say" keeps us readers on the hook.

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 7th is at Carol Varsalona's Beyond Literacy Link.

Thanks to the Academy of American Poets for its Instagram account, where I found "Let Them Not Say."

All purrs, she joins me
On the couch for a minute
Spreading her good vibes.

This is Kimchi, one of my resident muses. She's a small cat and a big character.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Nightmare

Tiny burning embers
Blazes
Fire weather
Warnings/increased
Forced evacuations
LA girds
Location, size, containment, and more

Monster winds

Fire’s massive scale
What do you pack?

Source: The Los Angeles Times, accessed 9 January 2025

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I made this found poem from words and phrases in headlines and subheadings in the LA Times. I wanted to keep it brief. I'm so worried; we're all so worried. See Time's "How to Help Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires."

The Poetry Friday roundup for January 10th is at Kathryn Apel's blog.

No image today.