scrambled egg & tomato sandwich haiku.

what's wonderfully awkward, comes from gardens and hen houses, and also involves breadatarian aspects ?

a ridiculously large and perhaps slightly overfilled scrambled egg and tomato sandwich between two slices of toast is the answer, in this particular scenario.

last week, one of my traveling poetry class students gave me a freshly picked burpee's beefsteak tomato from his garden, even in this month of october. i decided to put it to good use by making a toasted scrambled egg and tomato sandwich as a reminder the kind which my mom often made when i was younger, before the days when i actually ate tomatoes myself.

my version is rather monstrous, though, and a bit difficult to eat, but it's very worth each clumsily-working bite. i also add pink salt to it instead of the typical white kind.

here is a haiku-ish ode to this sandwich.

*

a last savory

taste of summer sits between

toast. tomato. egg.

candy shop haiku.

haiku are even more fun when candy is involved. at least that's a recent theory of mine.

the peppermint stick candy store joined boyertown in berks county in early 2015 and recently relocated to a larger storefront on the main street slightly across from the boyertown community library. the shop is also a great asset as a part of building a better boyertown in our area. it is curiously situated right smack next to a dentist's office. the new space is brighter, even more friendly with nostalgia-stirring persuasions, and it being bigger means more candy, thankfully. with a blend of modern and historic candy across the inventory, as well as ice cream and old-fashioned soda, if you have not checked it out yet, setting a date to get there is absolutely a must.

and now for a candy shop haiku.

*

penny candy, chalked 

prices paid in coins, the sweet,

the sour—zeal for tongues

literal walking poetry in mont clare, montgomery county.

since the weather left us questioning how we could enjoyably spend our morning on friday, my traveling poetry class first met at steel city coffee house in phoenixville, chester county, and later shifted into river-hunting in mont clare, montgomery near lock 60.

more truly than even in the past, for being a traveling poetry class, we were walking poetry and explored expanses which two of us hadn't seen before. and notable scenes below are sam traten holding a shore-found bobber in honor of his neologism of bobber-fling, along with him sniffing a nearby electric pole to determine if it was made of red cedar wood or not.

from before we were so footfall-oriented, i shared a poem which i wrote about barbara tucker, in the class, after reading her latest river poem. below is a poem.

*

barbara tucker takes to water

when she writes whims of poetry

you write like water, like the river,

barbara. it is something beautiful

to notice, to take in, whatever waves

are when they're less broad, moving

their route southeast but free of salt

like what sloshes around in the sea.

your language pours outward with

this natural flow so fitting that it is

a little hard to fathom—graceful

and deep like the caverns and all

complexity in your heart. it doesn’t

surprise me that you live less than

six miles from a river, the schuylkill,

and that its name means hidden river

in dutch from the explorers who

aimed ships here around 400 years

ago (its previous name from the native

americans was turtle river, or tool-pay

hanna and also turtle place or tool-pay

hok ung). none of this surprises me, but

the better water in your inching words

always tugs behind my ribcage ever

so slightly in a way which teaches me

that i love land, wet sections around

                                             it, and students who embrace this all.

family fun night at nockamixon state park in late september-- crafting animal poems.

on the last day of september, i made my way to quakertown in bucks county to teach my animal poems workshop as a part of a family fun night at nockamixon state park. 

after reading through some of my sample poems, a boy named austin told us about how he saw a momma and baby deer on the drive into the park. from what he could see, the momma wanted them to get back on their way, into the forest, but the fawn seemed interested in anything but stamping a path of footfalls into the woods. austin used these little moments as a way to put his first animal poem together, which he read to us at the end of the evening.

some other stories which were shared involved a dog named holly spooking a chicken to fly over its own coop and a dream of red, purple, blue, brown, and black bears circling a house, doing their best to get inside the home-- a bit scary, yes. but we had a great time even on a rainy friday night.

photography here is kindly courtesy of rebekah sheele