Daily Dose

From Braised Pork, by An Yu

SKETCHING

"She was sketching the fins of a fish when a loud thump came from behind her, and a man cursed."

From  Chapter 11

Daily Dose

From When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele

I DO

"I do know that in my heart, the heart dedicated to Black liberation, I love people. Period. I love complicated, imperfect, beautiful people. People, I suppose, like me."

From Chapter 9, No Ordinary Love

Daily Dose

From The Mountains Sing, by Nguyen Pan Que Mai

KNOW

"I know now that true love is rare and once we find our true love, we must hold on to it."

From The Land Reform, Nghe An, 1955

Daily Dose

From The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

THE MEMORY

"The memory hits her like a blow, and she presses her fist to her heart."

From Chapter 25

Daily Dose

From Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Tyler

SO

"So, straight ahead to floor-mopping day. 'Zee dreaded mop-pink,' he says aloud. But he makes no move to fetch the mop and bucket."

From Chapter 8

Daily Dose

From Valentine, by Elizabeth Wetmore

MY STORY

"My story? No. This is not my story."

From Glory

Clerihew on a Stormy Night

MARY SHELLEY

Mary Shelley
Reduced to jelly
Many a stout-hearted male
With her horrible tale.

Daily Dose

From Human Hours: Poems, by Catherine Barnett

O ESPERANZA!

Turns out my inner clown is full of hope.
She wants a gavel.
She wants to stencil her name on a wooden gavel:
Esperanza's Gavel.
Clowns are clichés and they aren't afraid of clichés.
Mine just sleeps when she's tired.
But she can't shake the hopes.
She's got a bad case of it, something congenital perhaps.
Maybe it was sexually transmitted,
something to do with oxytocin or contractions or nipple stimulation,
maybe that's it, a little goes a long way.
Hope is also the name of a bakery in Queens.
And there's a lake in Ohio called Hope Lake where you can get nachos.
I'm so stuffed with it the comedians in the Cellar never call on me,
even when I'm sitting right there in the front row with a dumb look of hope on my face.
Look at these books: hope.
Look at this face: hope.
When I was young I studied with Richard Rorty, that was lucky,
I stared out the window and couldn't understand a word he said,
he drew a long flat line after the C he gave me,
the class was called metaphysics and epistemology,
that's eleven syllables, that's
hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope.
Just before he died, Rorty said his sense of the holy was bound up with the hope
that some day our remote descendants will live in a global civilization
in which love is pretty much the only law.

Daily Dose

From Recollections of My Nonexistence, by Rebecca Solnit

WHAT

"What I had then was a voice that leaned hard on irony, on saying the opposite of what I meant, a voice in which I often said things to one person to impress other people, a voice in which I didn't really know much about what I thought and felt because the logic of the game determined the moves. It was a hard voice on a short leash."

From Chapter 5

Clerihew After Cocktails

JEAN STAFFORD

The rather mean laugh heard
Out of Jean Stafford,
Was as nothing compared to the quiet rage
She went home to write out on the untroubled white page.

A Caricature

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Zeina, by Nawal el Saadawi, translated by Amira Nowaira

FANCIES

"Her fancies seemed real, and reality seemed fanciful. Her white fingers holding the pen could not hold the truth, which trickled through them like water."

From page 100, this edition

A Caricature

Clerihew for the Boston Cooking School

FANNIE MERRITT FARMER

Fannie Farmer
Strapped on the armor
Of proper terms and careful measures
And produced an American treasure.

Daily Dose

From John Halifax, Gentleman, by Mrs. Craik

ROOM

"The room looked very neat, I said, with an amused doubt as to how long it was to remain so."

From Chapter XXXV.

A Caricature

Clerihew for a Hard Working Author

DINAH MARIA MULOCK CRAIK

At daybreak
Dinah Craik
Rose to pray, clean, and cook,
Then went to work on another book.

A Caricature

A Caricature