“Looking for Inspiration, Distraction, or Most Anything That Doesn’t Start with T or Rhyme with Rump” by Muriel Nelson (poetry, ’96)

A guest post by Muriel Nelson (poetry, ’96) appears in Superstition Review:

Looking for Inspiration, Distraction, or Most Anything That Doesn’t Start with T or Rhyme with Rump

Coffee, yes.

Pink hats, yes.

Chocolate, yes.

But none of these inspires for long. Just look at the length of those “paragraphs.” The poems I wrote last winter were equally stunted.

I tried starting each day with coffee and resistance.

• Email Electors. Their purpose is to protect us from an unfit candidate, right?
• Sign petitions. We’re the majority. We’re strong if we stick together. We need to save what’s worth saving! (Can we?)
• Challenge the NYT to publish a front page without mentioning #45. Don’t play what he deals!
• Contact GOP senators without revealing my blue-state zip code.

I tried pink wool next, along with gutsy poets Eleanor Wilner and Maxine Kumin. Later I read Mark Twain for his anger and humor combined and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thoughts on hilaritas from inside a Nazi prison.

. . . continue reading here.