Made for TV

It's a beautiful, almost-fall day. Cool fall temperatures blew in suddenly the other day as my husband attempted to finish mowing the back yard, after a lawnmower mishap + repair (spark plug popped out). He had to put on a jacket, take off a cable, duct tape it to an older mower, etc., but the newly lush lawn got mowed, and today, as I say in the poem, "Made for TV," newly up in storySouth, "Blue / sky asserts itself."

I am tickled to be in the issue, you bet, and look forward to reading everything in it. I am very impressed with this online journal, so elegant and so well organized and easy to navigate! There's even a fabulous author index for reading the archives.

"Made for TV" is a sort of free-verse pantoum, using flexible repetition and enjambment to do what Hollywood does, and, furthermore, television movies:

Hollywood moves things around
to tell its own story
its own way.  All we can do is forgive.

And so on. The poem brings together the changing leaves, my hunting/target-practice neighbors, and a friend's breast cancer diagnosis. (But it's not a made-for-tv movie.)

In the same issue is "Beason," a persona poem I've been working on for years. It was written, but then a horrible murder happened in Beason, so I set it aside, not to add trouble to that portion of the universe, even in my mind, and I've adjusted it since to become something else, but still something oddly redemptive, I hope.

Meanwhile, the harvest--even if it must be meager, after the drought--has begun.

Corn, Peach, Melon, Ceramic Jar by Jonathan Koch, and thanks to him, again, for permission to share it.