Poem by David P. Miller

Four Fab Golden Shovels

After Paul McCartney

Well,
remember my
pimple-flecked heart?
How those braces went
together with puppy love boom?

Eighth grade heart pounder, when
the Only She I
babbled for crossed,
smirking, that
room.

After George Harrison

Let’s play around a giblet factory, clutching
lips and small intestines with our forks.
They might be open-handed with the waste, and
let us scrape the plasma from their knives.

Oh honey pie, confess and face your dream! To
wade neck downward in a vat of eat-
ery-discarded table scraps. Oh god, their
mingled waftings fry the heart like bacon.

After Ringo Starr

Unstrung over you,
everyone’s raw eulogies were
notched in
a
roasting abandoned car.
He shouted, “Awful riproar crash!
Deceased now, and
untimely overcome! You
tickled sickly orphans. Lost
religion under oath. Your
remainder is all hair!”

After John Lennon

She’s the whirl-noise cloud I
crack my sternum for, so I want
a cranium hornet-heavy. She’s you,

she’s the shred-bass twister so
ninth-grade miniskirt, so I chortle bad,
heavy on the boy stammers. It’s

that she’s the snapped-off tone arm driving
the inner groove gasped silent. So it’s me,
broke out in heavies, flung off the lip, love-beads-mad.

Note: in a golden shovel, the poet takes an existing poem as the source (song lyrics in this case). You use each word of the source text as the end word of a line, keeping the original words in order. The writer of the original poem is credited. The form was developed by Terrance Hayes, with this, based on a well-known poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. Actually, Hayes’ poem is a double golden shovel.

David P. Miller’s chapbook, The Afterimages, was published in 2014 by Červená Barva Press. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Ibbetson Street, Painters and Poets, Fox Chase Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Oddball Magazine, and Incessant Pipe, among others. Work is forthcoming in Main Street Rag and Clementine Unbound. Anthology appearances include Tell-Tale Inklings #1 and three Bagel Bards Anthologies. His poem “Kneeling Woman and Dog” is included in the 2015 edition of Best Indie Lit New England. He was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years, and is a librarian at Curry College in Milton, Mass.

Alisha M. White, Ph.D. is an a/r/tist, teacher educator, and assistant professor at Western Illinois University. Her work revolves around disrupting constructions of ability, integrating arts into her research, and teaching future teachers the potential for using the arts in teaching English language arts.