Borrowing From The Yellow House

Robin Behn has a series of "Yellow House" poems that are thematically linked--sometimes very loosely, sometimes very intensely. She's working on a collection of these poems. In my advanced creative writing class, we were required to read a handful of these works, and I loved a few of them so much that I couldn't stop reading them out loud last night before bed.

Today, our professor read each of the poems one-at-a-time and after each was finished, we were told to write down particular words or short phrases that we remembered--things that jumped out at us. We did this with six separate poems. Then, after we had the lists made, we were instructed to go outside for twenty minutes and write something new using, or inspired by, Behn's words that we'd recorded.

I tried to use every single word on my list, and I came up with this, although it has no title. Also, because of the nature of blogger, it's not formatted the way it is in my notebook.

The perpetuity of dank stones,
chestnut smell of death, a
filmic latch-key monster
with velvet teeth and
fallen feathers.

Your fingers,
your beard as curators of my neck, no--
more like fluttering tails
of blind cavefish
climbing
the lattice of my ribcage.
And then you are,
you are
arched over like a spoon, like
the letter r on its side,
unaware of the policing squares
of light
that pass through latitudinal
tree trunks and jagged crosshair
branches.
in the still--okay, cemetery;
in the exact middle of what is not

not a dream,
but a street where I once lived
in an--
almost--yellow house.