There are a lot of books with titles made up of just three repeating words. Really. A lot.
So, I tried to make poems out of them. It was so much harder than anticipated!
 
 
 
 
A colleague requested that I use Dennis Lee's classic book of poems, Alligator Pie. There's a lot of ways I could have gone with it, but when I found the fairly new title Toads on Toast, I knew it had to have something to do with weird animal foods.
 
Today was a day where I needed a reminder to hold on to hope. Explosions at the Boston Marathon. How does one even begin to process that? How do you even contemplate how that could be a target? So, I changed up the more friviolous spine poem I had in the queue and went for an old one from last year, and a new one I'd done on a whim. Both are about holding on to hope. Sometimes, that's all you can do.
 
 
 
 
It seemed necessary, on a bitterly cold April day that had enough freezing rain and ice in the forecast that they closed both school boards, to write a spine poem about the winter that will. not. end.

It turned out to be a poem with more depth and meaning than some of the others I've spent far more time on.
I meant it to be literal. I think it actually works even better on a figurative, literary, and ... well ... poetic level.