Poetry Postcard Project: Day One

This August, Little Miss Talkalot and I are participating in the Poetry Postcard Project as a sort of mother/daughter bonding activity. The idea is to write one small poem a day and mail it to someone on a postcard . . . and other people on the official list write poems and mail them to you, and it's a month of fun and love and poetry, probably most of it really bad because it's written so quickly and sent into the world without much editing. I'm hoping, though, to receive at least one or two poems that I find really interesting and introduce me to new writers. Also, I'm (obviously) using this as a way to jump back into writing . . . even if I am nursing an infant while doing it. (I hope whoever receives my own sorry contributions is super forgiving.)

I'm going to post both my attempts and Miss Talkalot's poems on here because, well, 1) I'm a masochist (also, obviously -- it's painful to post one's first drafts publicly but I'm trying to be less precious about this sort of thing) and 2) Little Miss Talkalot is pretty proud of her attempts (as am I).

So . . . posts in the form of pictures for August. Unless I have time and energy to write about other things . . . which may or may not happen. I have to attend the Leadership Fiasco next week (dun dun DUN) and that's promising to fuck things up rather splendidly. For instance, on the first day they expect us to stay at the conference from 8:30 in the morning until 7 at night. The last two hours are supposed to be some kind of cocktail hour/social event.

HA! RIGHT.

I'll be hightailing it home at 5 to nurse what will probably be a very angry infant.

Anyway, back to poems and postcards.

Here's the little girl's first poem for August. We had to blur the addressee out because, well, I didn't think about privacy before I took the photo. Stupid me.

Oh my god, I'm the mother of a tween. Already.

And the front of the card!

I bought a bunch of blank postcards (blank on the front) back in July and the kids have been busy coloring on a lot of them.
 
And then I've kept several blank ones for the days when I'm particularly verbose, like this first attempt, so that the front of my postcard holds the actual poem. Also, for now, and as a way of giving myself a kind of prompt (so that dreaded writer's block doesn't settle in), I've decided that each day's poem will be a kind of lesson intended for the Vampire Baby (when she's old enough to read and subsequently ignore the lessons I have to teach her). Ahem:

My poems are promising to be far more angsty than my tweeny daughter's, methinks.

Later, gators.