

nrt centos (community made poems)
A cento is a poem composed of lines written by others:
the term comes from the latin word for "patchwork garment."
At a no river twice performance, we track the lines that have connected words or ideas from one poem to the next.
We assemble the lines into a cento at the conclusion
of a round of reading.
Kind of a meta-poem of the reading. A verbal collage.
A motley thing. The poem the audience made.
We'll even send it to you afterwards...
Here are a few recent centos...
NEW CENTOs from our May 11, 2022 reading....
Through the Windshield
and gone, rain-lapsed into dream-blur, an exile
from everything, this love that steals us, makes
us slink away into an idling cab--
gone, not the name it preferred to go by
as a child, but its given name, the name
the doctor repeated, his hand humming
down to kiss your underside. This moment,
we mourn the immensity of this love,
its loss, deep and old-fashioned, barging head-
first outside to find us, a screen door wedged
by a branch, a wayward rhododendron
flowering in blue.
5/11/22 via zoom
Rain, Silver, Tongue cento#2 from same lines
An idling steals you, slinks into rain-blur,
gone the dream-lapsed love.
Everything else an exile. Name it.
Children? Marshmallow? Not clear.
Heels side-by-side, hum a constellation
of kisses—star, moon, star—a kind of eerie
vulgarity, the underside of love.
Mourn the immensity, the deep
vastness of old-fashioned blue found
wedged inside the flowering rhododendron.
Come out the screen door, own that moment
when her deep voice cheered you on.
5/11/22 via zoom
The Worm is Implied
Who knew we would start with blueberries at the opera?
No one could have fished it out, the modest monster
searching, a clever beast fumbling in the harsh air,
listening, wheezing, crashing through the darkened
rectilinear gravity. Buoyant, the creature's arms
carrying us home like a goat, a calf watching itself
slide into straw. One door closes, and the other
stays closed, mixing the impossible weight of the Nile
with the stone at the bottom, marblequiet. We pass through
the water's edge stricken, worrying, pain softened
by the morning after. It carries our face where it will,
a whole life spent walking down some dazzled lane
no more than a wisp, no more above or below than air.
Who knew we would end in a field in Kansas?
Lit Life Conference 4/23/22
It Might, At Last
Be sufficient, a balanced love --
he, ex, me, ex, an equation
one falls prey to in half-sleep,
a dream we can't recall. Do not risk
a breath, its thread like stripping
hair, like nicked secrets, the surety
of death we cannot grasp. Pay attention --
here is beauty, sweet, green corn; here
is pain, a failed crop, bursting. Mornings
spent lifting our voices in green-lit
supplications, hosanna, hosanna, light
in darkness -- a muddy light, but imagine
if we just let our guard down, if we reached
for it, glinting in the give and take
of the tide. We may find something there --
a home we may not always see, but one
we can return to when our travels are done.
4/13/22 via zoom
Love Might (cento #2 from same lines)
Love might, at last, be a balanced equation,
sufficient, half-standing alongside
the dream of stripping death, the knick
of last breath, the waiting grasp
of beauty and the pain it remakes
like fields of green corn bursting
sweet hosanna to the green-lit morning.
Expect light when darkness falls.
Hope, though we may not see it.
Guard down, completely home,
we return when our travels are done—
briny, ruined, new, and soft as spiral
corridors of conch shells spreading silver—
the way the tide gives and takes.
4/13/22 via zoom
Not What You Thought You'd Be Reading
In eighth grade already, no longer fourth
grade girls at a lunch table, outcasts in yellow-white
dresses and daisy bouquets, the best
of every color. The elevator in my dream sprouts
like seeds scattered before a closed door, a sign
of emerging green and easy, a sign of growing
like we wish we could, marking the spots where breasts
will be, in the pits between arms and legs,
the bare animal of our bones working
in the sun, tiny scraps stripped from the spinal column,
letters in tiny script on squares of blackened paper
leaked from the pen, fingers on skin, a puzzle
of blotted scribbles, we scavenge this beauty
from the garden of our bodies, in desperate daylight,
a letter, written from a distance -- I love you.
3/9/22. via zoon
Already, This Is (variation on same lines)
Not what you thought you’d be reading: two outcasts
& a lunch table of fourth grade girls, yellow dresses,
yellow daisy bouquets, & the best parts of
your yellow-white mamma. Like the elevator
in dream, mushrooms sprouted from moist carpet
like these marigold seeds scattered and already
green— we could wish them away, beat their breasts
in the backyard, mark the spot our pit bull died
in my husband’s arms. Bury bones in the sun, strip
down any animal to squares of blackened letters,
tiny scraps of tiny script the pen leaked.
A puzzle of love letters from jail, scribbles
with a gloved finger you scavenged overnight.
Chaos and trespass. Beauty in a desperate garden.
3/9/22 via zoom
An Afternoon Flirting with Lapping Tide
I believe it is love, and let the ocean have me,
now that I'm done with the boy with dangerous curls
from white-hot America, a honeyed exit door
pulled outwards, a symphony too beautiful to leave.
Moonlight, a paper-necked boat down a long river,
carried on the smoke-soft current of the sky,
sifts the buttermesh, the silt, the silk, all three
worlds in one glance -- resuscitates me, rushes in
through my cottage door, the keys left hung
on the rack in the corner, keeping quiet there
in the summer dark, the purple of each other's bodies,
adoring the same moon -- be this. Let go. Let it in.
2/9/2022 via zoom
Silt and Shadow (variation on the same lines)
After flirting with the white-hot sun
and the boy with dangerous curls, I want
to stop moving and let the ocean have me.
America, now that I’m done with you,
all exit doors pull outwards, the world not
too beautiful to leave— the symphony,
the imperfect dancing, paper boats down a river
beneath moonlight, milksilver, smoke, ocean,
buttermilk sky—water is the finest mesh.
Silt, mud, silk, all three worlds in one glance
reveal with clarity the crime scene: keys left,
hung on the rack by the umbrella stand
quiet in the summerdark, same moon,
same earth, same purple shadow. Light tries
to reach you. Be this thrum of letting in.
2/9/2022 via zoom
Before It's Time
How tiring it is to rummage through each year's
map of the world like a shed filled with white fog,
settling like a thin coat with a lasting scent
like gardenia or lily, a shadowed veil
of goose-white death lowering its paper wings.
We practice our words like loud branches cut
above the healthy bud, pointing in the cardinal
direction of the wound. Tell me -- where does the hawk
live? In the honored burl, flapping in the cracks
in the middle of my life, forlorn and stunned,
mute as newsprint, and yet along with the other
screaming fuckers--kookaburra, loon, lark--
lets us know they aren't about to budge.
12/8/21 via zoom
____________________________________________
Random Woman
Sailor and saint, heartening compass, she speaks:
I rose, a cardinal sizzling its defiant
legless dance, seductive, like the experience
of the first prick in the dark, its nectar,
of the bodies that teach us how to lose.
Then she runs wherever the dead lay
in their funk, remembering and released, the selves
so small and awe-filled they must have been imagined.
NRT 11/9/21 The Ice House #1
A Trail of Turtles
Watch them -- like wide-bosomed women
in the river, deep as a cluster
of continents, biting little blossoms
bloody, their cold love like fallen leaves
at the bottom of the pool, like girlish
heresies, bluegrass, brandy-stained
as painted glass, shaking as they descend
to their drab beds prudently in the dark.
NRT 11/9/21 The Ice House #2
Dreaming the Whole Movie
You know, we do croon
a certain confidence,
walking on the beach
together, our eyes
keen, excitedly
watching the fish nets.
We're in our underwear
(proof we're dreaming it)
comfortably lit
by the atmosphere
of heaven, the distant
stars laying out
safe air in the universe,
the old farewell
to the flutter
of our hearts, thumping
like sweet ghosts, dancing
imperfect, voices
calling soft, though no birds,
only windchimes spreading
their cold fountain of light,
only tambourines drumming.
Sometimes I'm not
just dreaming it.
Sometimes I want
this forever.
10/15/21 Caesura Poetry Festival
Desire as a Tree on Fire
Or a fish jumping in my heart, a house
melting after midnight, a rowboat
like a cupped hand full of lost years,
a phantom mouth blowing a chill breeze earthbound,
braiding two lives, a door, big and sweet,
that will not close, lollygagging
in the scented milk of dreams, dissolving
like sugar. Upturn the green lands,
displace me. What glad work it is.
10/15/21 Caesura Poetry Festival
Grateful
Tall and buzzed for comfort,
a lanky shock of indigo
iceflesh. You're doing it again--
your sewn spine fading,
but just long enough
to lose your cool, the weathered
sound ringing eureka, eureka
in a punctured ear. Nevertheless,
I promise, my words light
and crisp, coiled tight and weightless
in the tiny yellow room
held in my mouth, inoffensive
and rather beautiful, slowly winding
through your sleeping head.
Short Reading #8 9/15/21 via zoom
A Spectrum of Place and Home
Home was the place where we bloomed, a rose
through jean skirts, a larval thing from bedrock
that had never seen the light of day, a paper crane
folded up, the hell of a schoolbus, an empty bottle
spinning on cement floor, dark hair coiffed,
a flipped chrome lighter, the red tip
of a cigarette that neoned my sister’s name
in the air in flickering tribute, between night
and a bend in the road, as if to hold up our love
to watch the light pass through it.
NRT Short Reading #6 4/14/21 via zoom
Flying Like a Lunatic Carpenter
I've never used the word shabby before,
but it's the only word for being belted
to the backseat of my father's convertible,
driving under trees, when a swallow appears,
wings marbled with streaks of cobalt,
tangled feathers, tide-kinked wings mid flight,
gigantic in its glory like a great blue
handkerchief in the sky's pocket, flying
over asphalt, the cuts and bruises that look
like dirt to us smeared along the blacktop,
good enough for momentum rolling, a performance
designed for no one but witnessed by the spruce,
elastic limbs waving to us in the sun, green
and blinking with butterflies, unimpeded---
and the landscape would not say them nay.
NRT Short Reading #5 3/11/21. via zoom
Costumes and Ceremonial Robes
are sedge in moonlight, milksilver
in the river, are smoke oceans
of dappled buttersilk, mother's
archlute of ancient hides stretched taut
over the supermoon, setting
left, quiet, right, quieter still
as expected, and why sometimes
before pushing one spoon through
with that small pleasure, one serving
of dark moon is enough, spinning
high in the whistling air. Mother
thinks the agony of creation
has run its course. You are my life,
she says. Mother is satin, silk,
stained-glass, what's hardened and hidden
in lace aprons, cracked like windows.
So she says. She's probably right.
Short reading #4 2/11/21 via zoom
O Wheels
O wheels of bright invisible stars
You taught eternity, world without end
Each fall I pull you out of the box to test your soles
volunteers in their blue vests assembled
under yesterday’s blown curtains of rain
stretched out in a canoe on the Chickahominy River
fingertips blunt, wasp squashed under thumb
laughter dissipates like smoke.
I don’t know whether I’m selfish or cruel
my voice is undertow
a flare of orange sparks like tracer rounds
I turn to watch the embers disappear.
NRT at Caesura Poetry Festival 10/1/20 (zoom)
Wait Till Sixty
You will turn, in a state, almost deaf—
spend your golden days in the wind,
a chorus of wetting the bed, pajamas
cannabis and cocktails, like a car rattling
to a stop, mowing around your rust for years.
Back in the tank, painted to fool predators
unshaven in the mirror – where do you come from?
Where do you go? Queen, paleontologist, nun,
or none of the above, appearing and disappearing
in a column of indigo smoke.
NRT at Caesura Poetry Festival 10/1/21
I Made Out With A Sweet Vermouth
I can remember the sign of the cross
like riding a bike –
cleaning house to music
and wiggles between sofa cushions.
Sometimes bikes collide,
because what’s the fun of being Barbie,
a pig rooting truffles, the relentless
plague of flies—you can’t soak hams
long enough, cornmeal and pork bones,
it could have been any day,
it had to be this one.
I swear to God, this
chromatic communion my husband
sang in Sunday School—wondering
who will call first?
Phoenixville Cento #1
8/17/18
Remembered from an Earlier Landscape
To love jigsaw puzzles, you have to love trouble,
revising one's map of the world
and that spindly, easily preyed upon feeling
of shame— a copperhead
looked straight in the eye. Empty husk
of skin, soft lash. So many scarred
with your kisses and my claim is tenuous
at best, hands and knees in the dirt, razor
to my neck. The sun's dismissive gaze
turns up the naked body — what’s longed for
beneath the surface— love. The stars will soon
shine close, cast a line in the sea-sprayed afternoon.
Bedminster Cento #2
7/31/17
Kingdom Come
Shhh, God said, when Eve
held the apple out—
poison or no, chartreuse walnuts
on buttonwood street, stiff
sheets newly folded—
you can learn a lot about people,
maybe kindred, kooks of a moment
ago, sideshow freaks jammed
into a jar—Adam proposes,
takes the old viola, rests
in a tree, what seems like
a thousand cranes pass, mourning doves
under cover, enclosed
like a houseboat, access to the pill,
some blood on a wire,
the exquisite itch
of summer.
Phoenixville Cento #2
8/17/18
Cool Parchment in a House on Fire
Your flesh— such cohesion, stretched
thinly over wooden finials, a smoke
ocean that seems to curl from you to me,
buttermilk smoke that follows our brief
explosion— our creature of pointed teeth
with a past, fish who walk on cloud feet,
birds in hot water, eight quart stock
pot steaming, hearts and backbone,
electric skin unveiled, you comb
your long, long, ever-tangled hair,
all the stars blown to one side of the sky
Princeton Public Library 11.17.19
Cherry on a Sundae
Pamplemousse, at first, and rhubarb
pie-- new sensations, the naked
body dancing, to rise like a carp,
greener, iridescent green,
and all that remains is clarity,
brisk, bright sky cracked
back, black as crows cawing
to be calm, sky and wait.
Stay still, bird, Breathe.
Farley's Bookshop #2
5/2/19
Bent to Earth
The number of stars climbing toward mercy--
we all have somewhere to be,
like fathers moving quietly in other lives,
better scripted, in bright pink deck chairs
laid against the wall. Just our luck--
a collossal sneer, like growling and snapping
monsters we can prove
by sighting the rare and suburban.
Bucks County Community College #1
4/19/19
You Can Try
Whatever measure offered
goes up, unraveling
bonfires, the road lingering
everywhere, the original
thrill, the naked body—
drink deep. Your taproot,
rabbit cages shattered,
perpetual posture,
letting go, a luscious ache.
The thing about work is
you try to feel it keenly,
in everybody’s shoes.
Chestnut Hill #1 11/16/18
The Waterbound Leaps
How much I am like you,
down to the chiseled bone,
the last thing I ever want,
pockets tucked with hours
of devotion, who listened and fixed
yellow daisy bouquets, starched
rebellion, the harshness—
smack this marriage, clearing
the day’s lesson of inauspicious
tire tracks, half-lowered goldfinch
in the purple thistle, such grating
determination, unmistakable,
fills the air, sway and swish, silk
feathers paint my stiletto heels,
hold still in the radio-fed black—
the fact of her goes on.
Chestnut Hill #2
11/16/18
Springsteen on the Turntable
Your best answer silence.
Baby, this is my church: the deep
significance of sharp-edged things,
a clawed tear in our venture.
Eyes dart, mirror to mirror—
a scarlet berry.
When others ask what color,
ask if she knew, shoot a wide
red-lipsticked “woo hoo”
to anyone passing by.
They cleanse.
Lansdale #1
11/11/18
Life is Radiant
Take beauty— flirting in the white-hot sun,
caution always loses in a contest
with bare skin— the heft of its calling.
I sat on the polished pew and swung my legs,
my husband sang, you ran into the burning,
breathed deeply the fullness of a moon
particular to each odd night, trying
to shake the painted stallion. Not my idea,
sneaking cigarettes in the bio lab,
so praise the god of cloned wheat fields,
the dog heavy on the end of the bed.
Pretend you don’t wish for languor and lust.
June 15, 2019 The Ice House Bethlehem, PA
Think About the Bomb
Think about the bomb, the stench of birth,
she said she wanted to adopt,
understanding the ache.
I want to name this bright day.
Every day a new snowflake,
a bird not moving; losing time.
We play the daydream game,
how to need me. Get lost.
You are not who you say you are.
Bootlaces hold you up.
In a moment, someone reinvents a man,
voices fall into shadow.
You’re the real.
June 15, 2019 The Ice House, Bethlehem, PA
She Resting, He Guarding
So what's the chance this clutch will end
deep in some poet's wine dark Atlantic?
The cuttlefish has three hearts, but no ink,
black as smoke from a poet's inkwell,
small, clear blown glass muddies the waters,
the trout of tumblebrook, its tangy blood,
yellow wings, streaks of onyx and cobalt--
a bad decision to stand thunderstruck, trees
parking the silver drape, its wisteria hysteria,
chandelier, white compote, purple goblet
of sparks, prisms unsmothered by cherry,
unpunctured by tooth--time for an aged provolone.
Chestnut Hill #3 3/22/19
Evidently
He doesn't care, either, for the upholstery.
The flowers go on blooming,
as from an overturned white rowboat,
but we barely advance, our shoulders
collapsing, the final chord released
in the nape of our necks. It's crowded here,
so many -- pink and silver, chubby,
cartoonish, clinking into one another,
getting ready for bed, a dearth
of dominance, though someone is in charge.
The fastest way to a man's heart?
Straight through the third and fourth rib.
July 14, 2019 Clay on Main, Oley, Pa
The Acquired Knowledge of Childhood
How to liberate chaos, how clouds
want to know the body, the red wind
picking up, how to read, how mother's voice
picks up a song she liked in high school,
how to track the house, how the horse
becomes the cold, cold night, how to soap,
how the sound of the ocean, the want
to restore, erase the collage, how it may
be a long way, but how, on a good day,
as each leaf falls, it is followed by the next,
and the next, and the next, how to tell
a story of how the stars look tonight
NRT Short Reading #2 September 9, 2020
Large Bulge Confined by Fear
Dark and glossy like a finger,
our bodies— swift and shining
in search of meaning. Forgive us
all our flaws. The same rib
made her, made us, against
an unknowing blue sky, our plural
doubled like twin snakes, sugar and salt,
slithering, black and white banded
like the cycle of blue flowers
against a mottled moon, overlapping
burnished scales, bent housewife
and beaten-down husband, penthouse
and houseboat, convince us the bay
is part of the ocean, overbearing branches
undercut, husband on the bandsaw
a hollow where she used to be—
remaindered materials, scarf and pillowcase
Insist on leaving by walking backwards
this oasis—whoever is inside
must be looking out.
Princeton Public Library 11.17.19
WALL – It Will Wear Its Silhouette
Time wears a low neckline
and likes the downward rush and tumble
of social butterflies flitting
she is my needy one, her nails scritch
on the wooded floor
wandering and exploration,
not the only actions.
The soldier drew consequence
from her emerald satin dress
a place for stars to go
I wander the streets by night seeking
Six feet of human compassion
at the foot of Mt Compassion
as a stolid stone tower
collapses, a misshapen chaos
bouncing the rubble
into radioactive motes of joy
12/9/20 Audience Open Reading
Costumes and Ceremonial Robes
are sedge in moonlight, milksilver
in the river, are smoke oceans
of dappled buttersilk, mother's
archlute of ancient hides stretched taut
over the supermoon, setting
left, quiet, right, quieter still
as expected, and why sometimes
before pushing one spoon through
with that small pleasure, one serving
of dark moon is enough, spinning
high in the whistling air. Mother
thinks the agony of creation
has run its course. You are my life,
she says. Mother is satin, silk,
stained-glass, what's hardened and hidden
in lace aprons, cracked like windows.
So she says. She's probably right
2/11/21 short reading #4 via zoom