Obsolete: An abecedarian of traditional poetic forms

Lily van der Spiegl is one of the main characters in a series of short stories I’m writing called Miniatures. The characters are inspired by the “people” who live in the dollhouse my dad made for me when I was 5. Lily is a lexicographer who has recently discovered she’s a poet, too. Since her favorite kinds of words are the ones that are sliding into obsolescence, and her favorite kinds of poems are the traditional-form ones that most people don’t write anymore, she decided to combine those two loves into an abecedarian poetry collection featuring obsolete and archaic words. She’s calling it Obsolete. A selection follows. Miniatures and Obsolete will be published as zines.

The Ballad of Benison and Malison

Benison and Malison met one day.
Malison said, “Benison, go away.”
Benison did that face he does
when he’s upset, because he was.
“Why don’t you like me, Mal?” he said.
“Because you’re a loser. I wish you were dead.
The clothes you wear offend my eyes.
Your humor’s uncool. You realize
I’m not the only one who thinks this stuff.
And if that hurts your feelings, tough.”
Malison smiled the smile he makes
when he’s being hateful, in Benison’s face.
Now, Benison hadn’t done anything wrong.
He was ususally nice. He just didn’t belong.
Because of Mal’s meanness he went home to hide,
got social anxiety and stayed inside.
The point of this story is that there’s not one.
Some people just make life less fun.

malison is an archaic noun meaning “curse”;
benison is an archaic noun meaning “blessing.”

Noctuary

If a diary is a record of what happens each day
then a noctuary attests to events of the night.
I didn’t make this word up; it’s real, but it’s rare,
and I’ve borrowed it to tell you, as I sit in a room filled with early spring light,
about the sound I heard yesterday evening, just before bed.
I sat at my desk, at my computer, with everything quiet
except for my tapping. I was in my own head. Until
the unmistakable, throaty-deep hoot, and I wondered why it
was here in the suburbs, this large-sounding owl, lush though they are,
instead of under the eaves of a barn or up high in a wood.
But he was here, oo-oo-ooing outside my window, a brush with
the wild that my cat just ignored, but I listened as close as I could,
laptop forgotten. I peered out the black-ice window to the horse chestnut tree
but the glare of my own light was all I could see.

Stiricide (A Sonnet)

Sounds like a kind of a murder, doesn’t it?
It could be. Let’s say a person was out on the street
walking under the buildings, tall buildings, and wasn’t
looking above, but down at her feet
as the icicles dripped. Drip, drip, drop,
one plop could warn her
as her heels clip clop
as she turns round the corner.
What if the ice on the roof, on the eaves,
clinging, head down, like a see-through bat
lets go and drops like leaden fall leaves
to the place where our well-dressed lady is at?
It's enough to keep you from walking at all.
Stiricide means when icicles fall.

Unbecome, A cinquain in two stanzas

One can become. One can hatch, be pushed through,
gulp air, scream, move in space and thrive.
Think: points of green in the dirt in the spring,
the blank-eyed sweetness of brand new things,
the idea of learning to be alive.

There’s an un- to our doing, though, just as gradual.
the ache, the falter that comes before
our fall. Think: death-edged leaves, God’s subtle gilding;
movies—balletic, catastrophic—of implosions of buildings;
gas slipping under a tightly shut door.

“unbecome” is an obsolete word meaning to misbecome,
which means not to become or not to befit. i’ve reimagined it
here to mean the opposite of becoming.

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