Visual Poetry by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose
MASH (A CENTO GAME FOR POETRY LOVERS)
M— “The mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night”1 A— “An apartment….the hall bulb burned out, the landlord of Greek extraction and possibly a fatalist”2 S— “The whole shack: shaking, drenched in mild sauce, sweet spirit, baptized”3 H— “The burned house…eating breakfast. You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast”4 | |
Future Spouse/Partner 1. “What God felt when he pressed together the first Beloved: Everything”5 2. “Not a red rose or a satin heart [but] an onion….It will blind you with tears like a lover”6 3. A love “Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it….which remembers to plant bulbs….which upholds the permanently rickety elaborate structures of living”7 4. A lover whose “tongue is made of honey but flicks like a snake’s”8 | Future Children 1. A son who “looks at [you] the way Houdini studied a box to learn the way out”9 2. “A small daughter…like a golden flower”10 3. A baby who “would have been born into winter in the year of the disconnected gas and no car”11 4. You will be a mother of “other kingdoms, rock every other species to sleep—the green and howl and pulse and bloom”12 |
Future Pet 1. “A real live barking democratic dog engaged in real free enterprise”13 2. A cat that “will teach you to be still as an egg”14 3. A fish “weary of analysis, the small predictable truths”15 4. Horses with “bodies of sand…who [are] maps drawn of blood”16 | Future Job 1. A bug wrangler “jailed for cruelty to insects”17 2. A poet with “enough paper to make mistakes and go on”18 3. “Working the night shift…riding the cab of an iron dungeon creeping over bumpy rails to a steel mill”19 4. “Moving a stone from one side of the road to the other”20 |
How to Play: 1. Find your magic number by drawing a spiral until the person you’re playing with tells you to stop; then count the gaps between the lines of the spiral; that’s your magic number. Start with the M at the top, moving clockwise, counting each option until you reach the magic number. Then cross off the option you land on. Continue, skipping the marked off options until you only have 1 option left in each categories. This is your future.
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1 Kahlil Gibran, “On Houses”
2 Ruth Stone, “The Cabbage”
3 Nate Marshall, “Harold’s Chicken Shack #1”
4 Margaret Atwood, “Morning in the Burned House”
5 Natalie Diaz, “Postcolonial Love Poem”
6 Carol Ann Duffy, “Valentine”
7 U.A. Fanthorpe, “Atlas”
8 Ross Gay, “Love, I’m Done With You”
9 Sharon Olds, “My Son the Man”
10 Sappho, “Cleis”
11 Lucille Clifton, “the lost baby poem”
12 Kai Coggin, “It’s Not that I Can’t Have Children”
13 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Dog”
14 Marge Piercy, “The cat’s song”
15 Rita Dove, “The Fish in the Stone”
16 Joy Harjo, “She Had Some Horses”
17 Mike Doughty, “The Bug Wrangler”
18 Jane Hirshfield, “The Poet”
19 Edward Hirsch, “That’s the Job”
20 Bob Hicok, “After working sixty hours again for what reason”
Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose (she/her) is the Creative Writing Program Coordinator at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY, where she has also been teaching trauma-writing workshops at the Breast Cancer Coalition since 2007. The author of two chapbooks, Wild Things, (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Imago, Dei (winner, Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize, 2022), her writing also appears in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Room, Descant, Women Studies Quarterly, and Clockhouse, among others. Twice awarded SUNY Chancellor’s Awards, she was selected by NYS poet laureate Patricia Spears Jones to lead two community poetry projects in 2025. Find Elizabeth at www.elizabethjohnstonambrose.com and on Bluesky @poetlady74.
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