HOUSEKEEPING

By Ashley Toliver

Under enormous strictures the salt hinges, becomes a fold. Underneath the canopy I dressed in white like stitches were anathema to waking. A hush at the collar makes binding notes. You smear the water. Past the pointed periphery, out past the lake notes miming the subject. I stand up straight like a clasp on the light boards, catching favor. In the daytime, nothing lingers. Pull all the maps inside.

What's a Prose Poem to Do

I—a habitual writer of sequences, and particularly of untitled prose poem sequences—have been trying to write an Individual Poem. I’m interested in the single moment, but I distrust it. So I met myself halfway in this playlist and looked for prose poems with titles, whose main unit was the punctuated sentence. We start with Yona Harvey’s “Q.," whose sentences catch Harvey’s wonderful & particular rhythm, and with Ashley Toliver’s exquisite emotional miniature, “Housekeeping.” But, as usually happens when I write with constraints, they crack a bit by the end. In Jenny Xie’s haibun “Corfu” we see how a line break differently holds tension from the sentence, and in Trace Peterson’s funny and whip-smart HRT poem “The Valleys are so Lush and Steep” the propulsive energy of the sentence travels across each section break. Each of these poems find potential in the focused attention to the texture of their language that a prose form provides.

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