Write word-centos of poetry by María del Castillo
Sucerquia, Dustin Pickering and Anita Nahal. A
word-cento is one of my invented forms of poetry.
It is a rearrangement of the words of a poem by a
single author. I try to exhaust every single word of
the poem (though lately I’ve only been doing some).
I lose the structure of the original poem, do not
position any two unique words next to each other,
and the resulting poem is a response to or a
continuation of the original poem.

 

BLOOD SILENCE BLOOM

(a word-cento of María del Castillo Sucerquia’s
“Final Bloom” *)

Blood silence bloom
cotton orchestra
play soft desire
to the eternal horizon.

Blood silence bloom,
remember thorns,
my heart a garden of words.

Blood silence bloom,
look at me one more time,
see rain spread
a deluge of music—

I dance
to the melody of fingers,
a desire to remember
branches of silence.

I clean the sky
of blood silence.

* Original poem by María del Castillo Sucerquia
published in Atunis Poetry (Belgium) and Miombo
Publishing (Zimbabwe).

NOTE: I used the word “remember” instead of
“remembers.”

 

CLINGING

(a word-cento of Dustin Pickering’s
“The Southern Wall *)

Clinging to courage, climb questions!
Climb! Beam timeless, tasting
poetry
by the sun of broad-shouldered
sounds,
emblems ancient
who dare not conspire
in the air of smiles, sweetness
dreamt to my lips! —

Clinging to crimson man,
a shadow I compose
sun and sage,
illuminating twilight
I dare not stay
and dig.

* Original poem by Dustin Pickering
published in Ethos Literary Journal,
September 3, 2019.

NOTE: I used “beam” instead of “beams”
and “conspire” instead of “conspires.”

 

BEHIND THE WORDS

(a word-cento of Anita Nahal’s
“Stories” *)

Peeling slowly
into night,
camouflage
delving into
reflections,
stories sweet and now
on the surface
we may not understand.

* Original poem by Anita Nahal published
in Confluence, May 2017. Also, in her book
Hey, Spilt Milk is Spilt, Nothing Else (2018).

 

Joshua Corwin, a Los Angeles native, is a neurodiverse, 2-time Pushcart Prize-nominated, Best of the Net-nominated poet and Winner of the 2021 Spillwords Press Award for Poetic Publication of Year. His poetry memoir Becoming Vulnerable (2020) details his experience with autism, addiction, sobriety and spirituality. His work has appeared in Winning Writers, The Somerville Times, Palisadian-Post, National Beat Poetry Foundation, Stanford University’s Life in Quarantine and more. He has lectured at UCLA, published alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti and read with 2013 U.S. Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco. He hosts the poetry podcast “Assiduous Dust,” writes the weekly “Incentovise” column for Oddball Magazine and teaches poetry to neurodiverse individuals and autistic addicts in recovery at The Miracle Project, an autism nonprofit. Corwin is the editor and producer of Assiduous Dust: Home of the OTSCP, Vol. 1, featuring a collaboration with 36 award-winning poets demonstrating one of his invented forms of poetry. He is currently working on an existential novel about an alcoholic lawyer plagued with suicidal ideation.