San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly

JACKIE CHOU

Writing Poems

I turn to the next available blank page in my notebook

And stare at it, demanding a brilliant idea or line from it.

The blank page stares back. Selfish blank page,

All take and no give.

What can I do but to dress those bastards with

Beauteous, noble words?

Lines, circles, dots, and curves hang on their

unfitting bodies like priceless jewels on pigs.

Words are so beautiful on their own, unmarred by

reality and the sordid hearts of those bastards.

Yet words can also be empty and insufficient,

Like an evening dress hung on a plastic

headless mannequin.

So I alter my words to fit those fat, crooked bastards.

Then I glower at my creation and complain.

Why them and not truth, my preferred model

who befits words?

Then I realize that the talentless writer is no

better than her subjects.

I open my textbook to see examples of good poems.

Theodore Roethke is Ralph Lauren

and Alfred Lord Tennyson is Calvin Klein.

I am nobody.

I am an amateur writer trying to write poems.