ALL OF A SUDDEN I MISS EVERYONE (EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY) |Michael Prihoda
it’s natural to be afraid,
watching
the birth and death of the day.
this is your
catastrophe
and the cure,
saying so long, lonesome,
and welcome, ghosts.
will you ever not
be haunted, asking
“what do you go home to?”
—–
Michael Prihoda was born in the Midwest. He is still there. He is the founding editor of After the Pause literary magazine and he spends a lot of time watching Modern Family when he should be writing. He tweets @michaelprihoda and blogs at michaelprihoda.wordpress.com.
Note: these poems entirely constructed from the song titles of music albums, said album becoming the poem’s title. The genre is experimental found poetry. The artist can be found here.
Jane Austen, Programming Languages, and Being “That Guy” in the Writing Class
What’s in a name?
This is not a typical blog piece, though nothing about me is typical, so it fits appropriately.
I have been hesitant to write anything about my life that is deeply personal, because that requires an incredible willingness on behalf of the writer to be vulnerable and honest. However, I am always up for a challenge.
I’m 9 or 10 years old. I’ve snuck into my parents’ bedroom and am quietly walking across their carpet, praying that I don’t make a sound. I open their closet and find the brown metal box. My heart is pounding, hands shaking. I crouch down, balancing on the balls of my feet, ready to jump up and escape at the potential first creak of the stairs. Silence. So far so good. I lift the top up slowly. It doesn’t betray me by squeaking. I’m grateful. My little fingers search through the vanilla colored tabs labeled…
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Digital Devices and Learning to Grow Up
Love’s Oven is Warm: Baking with Emily Dickinson
“Love’s oven is warm” Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Sarah Tuckerman, on a note that enclosed a gift of slightly scorched handmade sweets, possibly chocolate caramels. If the words were by any other author, one would be forgiven for reading in them a possible sexual double entendre. But Emily Dickinson is enshrined in our memory as the ultimate virgin, the “Queen Recluse” as her friend, the editor Samuel Bowles, described the poet. Dressed always in white, she rarely left her house for thirty years, spending her days tucked away in an upstairs room, writing nearly two thousand poems that few people knew existed until well after her death.
Of course, scholars and fans have long made a cottage industry of identifying Dickinson’s secret failed love affairs: the broken engagement to her brother Austin’s Amherst classmate George Gould; the impossible love for the married Samuel Bowles; the late-life affair with her father’s friend, Judge Otis Phillips…
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Sacred Trust
Forgiving the Flesh–In Which I Recount the Ways My Body Has Betrayed Me
Dear Lily June,
As human beings, we live in the flimsy structures of our fleshy bodies. Our hearts, like birds, are protected only by a cage of ribs; our minds, like yolks, sit inside the bony eggs of our skulls. It is a system designed to be fragile and frail. We are not built to last forever.
In my youth, I felt as if my body was invincible and thus, I treated it as if it were invisible. (In fact, your Grandma Raelyn might recall to you someday how I used to hide my body, as a toddler, under my ratty baby blanket, transforming myself into a makeshift ghost and earnestly believing no one could see me when I was under there.)
When my own Grandmother Mary began the comparison game as I hit my early teens, wondering why I couldn’t “try to be beautiful” like my sister–your Aunt Loren–I…
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Revealing Dress
I am so awkward.
Honestly, sometimes things seem perfectly normal at the time and then I just don’t know what I was thinking. This post is cringeworthy, so be forewarned. If you are uncomfortable with boobs, stop right now and go enjoy your weekend.
I have an author page on Facebook. I hate Facebook, but it’s out there and it reaches people and I have to use it, so I do.
I’m supposed to interact, comment, connect.
I love that readers can comment, readers are fun. They are sort of like my small group of sticker trading pals. I write it, they like it, it works.
But I’m also supposed to do my least favorite word in the English language, well maybe not my least because “whatever” really holds that honor, but definitely in my top ten of least favorite words is . . . networking.
It’s like nails on a…
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All The Aches
07.28.15
In my preparation for my senior year, I now need to be proactive in my search for different colleges, whether it be in their various programs, their applications, and their scholarships. Honestly, all of this research has my head throbbing and my heart
sinking. I wish myself well in my near future, as I tackle numerous headaches & heartaches.
nysstalgia 