Assignment 9: Surrealist "Found" Poem

Home
Found poem by Brenna Thummler

Home is the dishes still in the sink

And the muted gleam of white appliances

Home is my father’s favorite color of breakfast cereal

On a table spilled with color:
Vermilion and mango, bright yellow and violet.

Home is looking across the street

Where Cinnabon breaks the silence.

I spit out all my coffee.

It won’t happen.

Home is my boyfriend jeans, apple wrap,

Daily dose of lusciousness with

$15 off a purchase of $75 or more.

My shank, my Q-tips, the tiny Visine bottles

Where I keep the ink I manufacture.

I wish I knew more about horticulture.

Home is up the hill on a vacant lot on Collier Street.

An elephant perched among pink pillows and satin blankets

Until she falls asleep.

Surprising a real family of chipmunks and feeling a bit jealous.

Home is hardly a meat market

Or even just a nice field with sheep or cows.

Home is a concrete bunker lit with blinking fluorescent,

Floor littered with sand, sun leaking from

So many tinted windows, unbound now.

Home is the last couple of nights

For when you’re strong, you sparkle

It is his town I will be allowed in

His school where I will study

I awake in a haze

He strides to the window, the only one close enough to look into

Then he pulls the curtains closed.

Home is mostly empty

But it’s where you’ll be sitting.

(Lines pulled from the following selections: Harvesting the Heart - Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart - Jodi Picoult, Girl in Landscape - Jonathan Lethem, Flipped - Wendelin Van Draanen, You - Austin Grossman, The Hunger Pains - The Harvard Lampoon, Seventeen Magazine Vol. 69, No. 8 August 2010)