Monday 15 August 2016

Makeover Poems

Am following a course in poetry online with http://creativewriting.ie/ and this is one of the exercises. 
Apart from the "how to" aspect...  the challenge is to rejig a poem you have already written 
so you may have read an earlier incarnation of this one in a previous post.


How to gut a fish or edit a poem

First you have to lay the subject flat
and cut off head and tail.
No mercy for extraneous indigestible
matter. Make puncture wound at anus, cutting

through paired pelvic fins, slicing
the thin abdominal wall, incising
the ventral surface along the horizontal
until you reach jaw.

Let spill the guts and blood and slime -
A delicate flick of knife at dorsal fin
turn the spine of your knife against
the grain of the scales, and flay

until you shed silver.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

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