Exquisite Corpse by Exquisite Tutors

Two sonnets written by the tutors and staff at the MICA Writing Studio and Learning Resource Center last week.

For those not in the know, Exquisite Corpse is a parlor game for writers, wherein someone writes a line and folds the paper down before passing it to the next person to add a line and so on. Our group wrote two, the first in this fashion, each person folding down their line before passing it to the next person, and in the second one we could see only what the person before us had written. Like literary mad libs, and just as strange and then suddenly profound.

Sonnet 1

Forêt de Monet

if it storms, the broccoli can come in.

To the extent of nose-laughing

someone’s in a pig sty murmuring of painted salamanders

that nurse, she shot me

oh, the twinkle in the eyes of an Irishman!

The sun is like tourmaline

break

a churchy girl told me the bee that hit my eye was Satan

it’s all a bunch of baloney!

I cleared the corner of all the spider babies, so scary.

Crashes like schizoid sheep against the holding gate.

Now I’m feathering about in a sandbox in Cape Cod next to broken red Tonkas

because really sometimes that’s just where you are.

Sonnet 2

I’ve developed cross-species feelings

without knowledge, consent, or any thought why

she picked rotten oranges from the ground and placed them on the dining room table

as an art installation watching the various stages of mold and decomposition set in.

I gotta get outta this room. I’m done being a patient.

I’m done arranging roses into the speakeasy anatomy of epics, dead or alive

my fingers crack like plaster, skin falls like suede petals

with seams stitched with dry grass.

Sow then

dragged the traffic cone down North Ave

I did think of the exploration trip to the blue hills

our communal coke cans have started to rust

oh, the rusty limbs of coke cans!

are delicious to lick…