Creative Writing

Just figured I should throw out a few creative writing samples. I am doing another workshop in the fall, so more will be coming. Many of these have been published in Wake Forest University's studenty literary magazine 3 to 4 Ounces.


See

The daisies rooted
in the box
on the back porch
see the sun on days
when it is not there.

Petal faces gun
where the target hung
and will hang again.

Marking where the sun
shone, knowing
it will burn back in.
Emily Rebecca White

Hear

Nina Simone sang
and vinegar and salt
broke into dust
in my mouth.
My feet became drums
and the air in my nose
dripped into sweat.

Hearing her, my ears
said hello to the valley
dipped in my neck
and pricked the calluses
crusted to my feet.
Emily Rebecca White

Touch

Something like sneezing says,
“Electricity, watt waves
from ankles to head.
Stop and wring sharp
into cool. Become breath
that is hands, promising,
‘Love you were here.
You melted, but I puddled
you in my palms, waiting
you firm, and you are here.
Emily Rebecca White

Taste

9404 Kimborough Drive was the seat
of a tidy starter house.
The yard was green trimmed
and shutters dressed windows
like little girls jeweled
in their mother’s diamonds and pearls.

Four brothers lived next door.
Every summer basketballs grew
from their fingers, dribbling
the ball to remind their hearts
to say “blood, pump. Muscles move.”

Today I woke with the bounce
of leather smacking concrete
and I tasted jump ropes
cutting through heat
and sucked on the salt
of boys sweating next door.
Emily Rebecca White

Be

Go ahead butterball.
Bleach your onyx skin
and trim your thick hips.

Be otherwise. Lean
long and black against
the crisp of papered sky.

You say you don’t dance,
while stepping to the rhythm
of a bumping boom band.

But baby flatter, just batter me,
and remember that sometimes
you don’t hate to catch
the bounce of a heating beat.
Emily Rebecca White

You should know

you were beautiful
last night
when you explained
your theory about kindness
as a platinum lie-

and promised me
the last time
you were honestly good
was August 23, 1988,
six years, to the day,
after you were born.

I wanted to kiss your eyelids,
but you had turned,
clearing away dishes.
Emily Rebecca White

favorite favorite

He didn’t exegesis his son’s face
or tell some story of triumphing grace.
He chronicled a passing noon
in the aftermath of southern July.
He said they were watching baseball,
a year or so after he quit being a boy.
A few big plays.
Seeds bought in the bottom of the second
swelled to the top of the eighth.
He told me they didn’t talk much.
A double steal to third.
Maybe it was the heat.
A grandslam past second.
Maybe they had nothing to say.

When the game folded and the crowd rose,
they lit cigarettes and sucked on them
until the field lay silent.
It wasn’t what I had expected.
No bells. No whistles.
Just some ordinary this and that
and end.
Emily Rebecca White

Repeat

“You will eat your words and crawl
into the sink of yesterday’s mess.”
But that’s not what I wanted to do at all.

I felt like summer without walls,
easy as the last time I slept.
I laughed when you told me to crawl.

I straightened my skirt, stood, and walked
the stretch down 57th, headed west,
not wondering how you were feeling. Not at all.

Remembering the cold, I lifted my collar
and wondered if I would turn home yet,
but that’s not what I wanted to do at all.
I don’t think I remember how to crawl.
Emily Rebecca White

Babel

My nose pressed your neck
and the prairie between
your skull and back
smelled like leather cooked
taut into boiled squash.

That day I named you
Squanto and began
to carve the light
of your heel-toe
stride in heavenbound
totem poles.

One day you ugly
up and died,
but my knife drew
the story of your step
into the sky
as a blaze of pilgrimage
and Thanksgiving,
with feathers stretched
proud across your head.
Emily Rebecca White

I was jumping,

toothed by the take of midday.
Beaded stomach and mind frayed.
Chit about need and connection.
Chat blah blah about reflection.

Home was twisted two streets away
when I tucked my face and explained
the niceness of your ears, your chin
your mind, your stink, your kind, your skin.

Then boxcars boxcars boxcars crashed
into belltowers and hard smashed
clocktowers and crumbled like rice
that warms into a milked baby nice.
Emily Rebecca White

Owner of the black market

Just give me a little feel,
you mormon, you mobster.
If I had a gun I would shoot you
while handicap people
make handicap faces.
Then have sex with your body
for the apportionment
of voting rights.
(cause you're my favorite lobster).
Emily Rebecca White

Amazons

Just after lunch:

Shrimp boats line, and face
us, sprawled brown
and topless. Oiled lemons
dripped across the beach.
Anne points. We wave,
sitting up and straight,
posed like the boats are
our paparazzi.

Around three in the afternoon:

We mermaid the tide,
tits blackened like
Ethiopian
salt then peel sardines.
We tuck longnecks at our
waists in hope of trade
for nets heavyed
with jerking fish.

Dinnertime:

We are expensive
because the folding day
calls like a Joni
Mitchell song. We buy
sapphire gin to twin
with avocados,
flats of raspberries,
flaky salmon.
Emily Rebecca White

Good Morning

Please close the shade.
I am too tired
to roll over
or close my eyes
or sleep with any light.

The morning is sharp
like popping balloons,
and all I want
is to lay under itching
wool blankets.
Emily Rebecca White

Good Morning

I understand that
mothers crack
the lisp and stutter of no,
and smiling,
echo now.
And that God peeps
under the skirts of hell,
with the devil’s sporty cape
borrowed across his back.
It is counting
the number of carnations,
and then the number of roses,
to decide if a church
is laid for a funeral
or a wedding procession
Emily Rebecca White

Woman at Breakfast

Warming milk
into her cereal,
she saw dishes
stacked faithful
from dinner
the night before

and listened to your
feet moving upstairs,
the echo of your
feet moving upstairs,
from yesterday
and days before.

Changing has
come constant
like wanting,
or maybe
fevered more
like needing.
Emily Rebecca White


Carnival

We were on the highway headed home. I
was catching cheetah fireflies, staring straight
into headlights. (You blink and they’re alive,
quick pulsing behind your blackened eyes).

We were coming from the circus or fair,
I remember my stomach was full of
cotton candy, and I made-believe the tires
raking concrete were stiff cranks of roller-
coasters. The echoing dull n.p.r
folded me heavy handed into sleep.

I was awake when you cradled me out
of the seat, but my eyelids leaded shut,
knowing sleep was a free ride to my bed.
You stretched covers to my chin and named me
Possum, moustache pushing into my cheek.
Emily Rebecca White