Natalie+Sanchez

**Natalie's Poetry Page ** //**Quote Poetry: **  **"Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success."- Babette Deutsch **//

 **My Two Memory Poems** __** The lazy day **__ Really it was lazy, Sluggish Dormant And still I was in the kitchen Just sittin On a chair Just chillin Mixin But stiff Trying to grip some fresh air into my system Here comes Papita Maybe she can make me a sammich I am kinda hungry now that I think of it You wanna run errands? Why? Can I stay here then? Why not? Hay… está bien So I saunter Through the door Down the concrete stairs Wave at the hobo at the other end of the sidewalk He waves back Quick! Look away! Through the small gate Cross the sidewalk Kick the aluminum can on the ground Sigh… and into the car Then slump… Into the aging, grey car seat that isn’t up to par Man I don’t even care About running Papita’s errands I just wanna be … sittin Just chillin And mixin’ But stiff Trying to grip some fresh air into my system
 * It was a lazy day

I look out the window Man this ain’t the route to Cousin’s What is she talking about running errands? Psh… ta loca She is straight up fibbin Whose house is this? O a friends? Why? Do we gotta go in? But… …I thought…. The errands…. Hay… está bien So I saunter into the house Reluctantly

The strange woman greets both me and my Papita I sit down on her coach She offers me some water “Si, gracias” Then I smile that certain smile that you give to those you don’t Necessarily like I don’t wanna seem rude I look at the television Ugh … Spanish novelas I hate these things It’s always the same old fling Hay Roberto Te amo kiss kiss Te odio punch kick Te mato Slash kill So boring So … Predictable wait here. Okay I say to her I stay where I am Sigh….

Wait! Whimpering? I run into the kitchen and see the most beautiful little pup ever seen She was a miniature pincher Black fur Brown accents A couple of months old, She could barely walk, she was more like, sliding towards her owner. My grandmother gave the lady the money And then handed me my puppy

Princess My canine best friend She loves the songs I like She loves the foods I like And she loves the way I am unconditionally No matter how dorky I may seem

So when we went back As I was just Sittin’ Just chillin’ And mixin’ But stiff Trying to grip some fresh air into my system I had a friend with me named Princess Restin On my lap Being her lazy lil’ self Just Sittin’ Just chillin’ And mixin’ But slick Trying to grip some fresh air into her tiny system Taking very frequent short breathes Under the caress Of my hands My canine Best friend

By Natalie Sanchez**

__**The land with the clouds made of Cotton**__ Just in front of the house I was so anxious I fidgeted with my blouse It was such a long time since I have gone To the land of the clouds made of cotton But never o ever have I forgotten The land of the clouds made of cotton So I breathed deep So deep As to fill my being With air I pushed el portón to the side And breathed deep the fresh Island air I was home For it was such a long time since I have gone To the land of the clouds made of cotton But never o ever have I forgotten The land of the clouds made of cotton So I laid en la marquecina Contemplating the bright twinkling stars Taking in the beauty Of los cocis The dogs The dominoes chiming their beautiful song And my uncle’s coffee brown cigar For it was such a long time since I have gone To the land of the clouds made of cotton But never o ever have I forgotten The land of the clouds made of cotton
 * There I was

By Natalie Sanchez

My Ode ** __**An ode to home **__ Hoping that at least for a week you don’t get fired You wave to janitor Fred He smiles an honest smile You get into your car And sit there for a while Waiting for the motor To come out of its hibernation Trying to settle down in your head Many a situation Breathe in… Breathe out… Then compose your self, as you should The motor has shaken itself off under the hood
 * You leave your dingy office feeling very tired

You start driving down the street Enter the highway start to nod off … BEEP! A horn goes off You wake up And keep driving The headache keeps creeping And you keep dreaming of rest of sleep

finally you get to your street you pray that there’s a parking space but in it’s place finds Pete yes Pete the annoying next door neighbor who once told you to buzz off kid I don’t need your help, not now, not later So you avoid him and go around the block Until finally you see The most welcoming parking space And back up And forward Back And forward Until your car is snug in the middle of Gertrude’s and Nate’s

You saunter to your house Unlock the door Push it with your hips then close it with force You flop onto your coach And kick off your shoes You lay there for a while Just letting you body lose And then you realize That this is home There’s no more worry No more hassle Just a boat load of time to eat to drink to spend time with the kids and a smile creeps onto your face sigh I am home

so this is my ode to home Where you feel like the smallest being in the world Surrounded by a blanket full of love and warmth Where you are free to talk and let your brain lose No worries No pressure No robbers No lectures Just you And your family Be it your dog Or your aunt Ashley You are free you are lose You are wrapped in love and chose To stay in that embrace that is home It is home You are home. -Natalie

My Riff Poem ** **__A Mother's lament:__** **(From Philip Schultz's "The Silence")** **You always called late and drunk,**
 * your voice Rough**
 * and Bitter**
 * you never really asked for me**
 * but for what I could do**
 * and what I could deliver**
 * I always told you I Loved You Son**
 * but those words to me**
 * never did you utter

You always called late and drunk it was Late november**
 * I was away at a place**
 * with no trace**
 * ... of Anger**
 * but there you were**
 * telling me you need me**
 * that you're in Pain**
 * and I told you that I Loved You**
 * and that you'd be okay**
 * I was going to go out with my husband**
 * so with a broken heart,**
 * I said I'd call back, but I Never did**


 * You always called late and drunk**
 * but this time, to my surprise it wasn't you**
 * It was your wife**
 * your liver, she said, Drink had Destroyed you**
 * My heart was shattered**
 * as a vase that would hit the floor**
 * knowing that she was not going to land on fair ground**
 * without the dominion to stop herself**
 * from Falling**


 * You always called late and drunk**
 * and now I stand here before you**
 * delivering daisies, and roses,**
 * and tears and churning poses**
 * you always called late and drunk**
 * and here I am calling you**
 * crying for you**
 * seeking you**
 * but my message was**
 * too Late**
 * to come Through**
 * By Natalie Sanchez**

<span style="background-color: #06c3d0; color: #800000; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 140%; text-align: center;">**My Sonnet** <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"> **__Near the Ocean__** A creature with blue eyes did I meet He said that in fact he did have the key To the heart of the one that I longed to meet
 * On a morning as I walked towards the sea

So slowly did I walked towards him And then sat and chatted for a while With this creature whose name was apparently Kim And who secretly started to beguile

Me, with my innocent heart open And ready and willing to listen To the lies he told me by the ocean There I sat heartbroken yet smitten

The final lesson to this story is key**
 * your trust do not place on strangers you meet

By Natalie Sanchez

<span style="background-color: #06c3d0; color: #800000; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 140%; text-align: center;">Analysis of my Writing ** I have also been trying to experiment with some new elements. I usually don’t play with formatting very much when I write poetry, but during the course of this Mini Project, I have been starting to play with my formatting a little to better match the tone of my poems. I try to play with the capitalization of some important words or the breaks of some daunting lines, indent or put ellipses on parts where I want a pause or where I want the meaning of my poem to really sink in to my readers. I have also been trying to loosen up a little bit. I usually try to rhyme a lot and make my writing very neat and tidy, but recently, I have tried to add a little bit slang and freestyle to my writing so as to not have just rhymes and ordered lines. I think these changes make my poems a bit more interesting and give them a sort of fresh and unique feel.**
 * Whenever I write poetry, I try to write about something that is relevant to my life. I almost always write about past experiences in my life, my ambitions, my concerns, and my sorrows. Poetry is a way to let my feelings out and my thoughts are most definitely reflected in my writing. I don’t really use a lot of metaphorical/ theoretical writing as much as I use literal writing. I almost always picture my thoughts in my mind, make a scene out of those thoughts, and then try to describe said scene with words. I noticed that I don’t really have a steady rhythm. I might rhyme on some end sentences, and then repeat that same end sentence or a similar sentence a little later on, but between those lines, I don’t have steady end rhymes on every line. One line might rhyme with the prior line, but the line after that, doesn’t rhyme with the one before. For example, in my riff poem “A Mother’s lament” I wrote these lines “delivering daisies, and roses,/ and tears and churning poses/ you always called late and drunk/ and here I am calling you/”. The first two lines rhyme, but the next two don’t rhyme. So there is definitely a lot of rhyming and flow in my writing, but I don’t really have a set rhyming pattern (such as A,B,A,B).

<span style="background-color: #06c3d0; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 13pt; text-align: center;">**<span style="background-color: #06c3d0; color: #800000; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 110%; text-align: center;">Philip Schultz Poems ** <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">

by Philip Schultz ** //<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**for RJ** // > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**You always called late and drunk,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**your voice luxurious with pain,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**I, tightly wrapped in dreaming,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**listening as if to a ghost.** > > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**Tonight a friend called to say your body** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**was found in your apartment, where** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**it had lain for days. You'd lost your job,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**stopped writing, saw nobody for weeks.** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**Your heart, he said. Drink had destroyed you.** > > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**We met in a college town, first teaching jobs,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**poems flowing from a grief we enshrined** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**with myth and alcohol. I envied the way** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**women looked at you, a bear blunt with rage,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**tearing through an ever-darkening wood.** > > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**Once we traded poems like photos of women** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**whose beauty tested God's faith. 'Read this one** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**about how friendship among the young can't last,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**it will rip your heart out of your chest!'** > > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**Once you called to say J was leaving,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**the pain stuck in your throat like a razor blade.** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**A woman was calling me back to bed** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**so I said I'd call back. But I never did.** > > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**The deep forlorn smell of moss and pine** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**behind your stone house, you strumming** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**and singing Lorca, Vallejo, De Andrade,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**as if each syllable tasted of blood,** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**as if you had all the time in the world. . .** > > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**You knew your angels loved you** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**but you also knew they would leave** > <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**someone they could not save**
 * "The Silence"

=<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">"Failure" = <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"> **By Philip Schultz To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable. The rabbi who read a stock eulogy about a man who didn't belong to or believe in anything was both a failure and a nobody. He failed to imagine the son and wife of the dead man being shamed by each word. To understand that not believing in or belonging to anything demanded a kind of faith and buoyancy. An uncle, counting on his fingers my father's business failures— a parking lot that raised geese, a motel that raffled honeymoons, a bowling alley with roving mariachis— failed to love and honor his brother, who showed him how to whistle under covers, steal apples with his right or left hand. Indeed, my father was comical. His watches pinched, he tripped on his pant cuffs and snored loudly in movies, where his weariness overcame him finally. He didn't believe in: savings insurance newspapers vegetables good or evil human frailty history or God. Our family avoided us, fearing boils. I left town but failed to get away.**

=<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">"The One Truth" = <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"> **By Philip Schultz After dreaming of radiant thrones for sixty years, praying to a god he never loved for strength, for mercy, after cocking his thumbs in the pockets of his immigrant schemes, while he parked cars during the day and drove a taxi all night, after one baby was born dead, and he carved the living one's name in windshield snow in the blizzard of 1945, after scrubbing piss, blood and vomit off factory floors from midnight to dawn, then filling trays with peanuts, candy and cigarettes in his vending machines all day, his breath a wheezing suck and bellowing gasp in the fist of his chest, after washing his face, armpits and balls in cold back rooms, hurrying between his hunger for glory and his fear of leaving nothing but debt, after having a stroke and falling down factory stairs, his son screaming at him to stop working and rest, after being knocked down by a blow he expected all his life, his son begging forgiveness, his wife crying his name, after looking up at them straight from hell, his soul withering in his arms— is this what failure is, to end where he began, no one but a deaf dumb God to welcome him back, his fists pounding at the gate— is this the one truth, to lie in a black pit at the bottom of himself, without enough breath to say goodbye or ask for forgiveness?**

<span style="background-color: #06c3d0; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 130%; text-align: center;">**<span style="background-color: #06c3d0; color: #800000; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 140%; text-align: center;">Philip Schultz Poetry Analysis ** <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"> In his poetry, Phillip Schultz reveals a lot of his past. He almost always writes in lamenting, pitiful, or angry tones. These tones are used to express the hardships that he went through as the son of a Jewish immigrant in the streets of New York. His family would be followed, watched, and harassed by their Russian and Polish neighbors. He mentions a lot of the people that were apart of his life in his poetry; sometimes subtly, and sometimes clearly. In his poem “The Silence”, he writes about a friend who had personal problems. He drank to get away from them emotionally. One day, He received a call that his friend died because of excessive drinking. This story resembles that of his friend's. In his autobiographical poem book, Living in the Past, he mentions a friend that he had. He used to cover for him at school while he worked at Jewish markets. One day, he found his friend hanging in his closet with a sign attached to his tie that read "Among Jews, you shall not perish." In my opinion, his friend was most likely hanged and killed by his racist polish and Russian neighbors who were always out to get him and other jews like him. It is very possible that Schultz's poem "The Silence", was inspired by his friends' death. This poem could've also been written in memory of his alcoholic uncle. The line "You always called late and drunk" alludes to this. It is very possible that his uncle died because of his alcohol addiction and Schultz expressed his mourning for this loss through this poem. There is also a note under the title "The silence" that reads "for RJ". Whom this "RJ" person is, remains a mystery to me, nevertheless, this poem reflects Schultz's loss of some sort of friend or family member. Looking at Autobiographical poem book, it is very possible that his uncle, or his friend were his inspiration. Philip Schultz also rights about a hopeless life in which there was no belief in God, despite his family's religion (Judaism). He mocks the rabbi of his church a lot and uses many lines that allude to his disbelief stating "no one but a deaf dumb God", " praying to a god he never loved for strength, for mercy,", or "He didn't believe in...God". This disbelief could've been conceived by his family's beliefs and the influence that they had on him. In his autobiographical poem book, he states that his grandmother would constantly blame God for the misfortune that fell upon their family, or blame the Rabbi for the loss of future generations of Jewish families because he cut 1 cm too close during a circumcision. He seems to have a sort of hatred towards God for how his life turned out and never really got over it. God was the only one that he ever blamed in his life because most of the things that he went through were not in his power. He expresses these feelings in his writing. In his poem "The One Truth", Schultz wrote about an immigrant that passed many hardships just to live "the american dream", but at the last, ended up being punched and killed. The line "after being knocked down/ by a blow he expected all his life," hints that this blow that killed this immigrant man was not unexpected. This fact might be pointing to the fact that Schultz's family lived in a racially separated neighborhood in Rochester, NY. This man must have known that he was going to be attacked by a member of a different race because of the racial tension that was alive in Rochester, NY. The line "after one baby was born dead,/ and he carved the living one's name/ in windshield snow in the blizzard of 1945," lets us know that this immigrant was in fact Schult'z father. It says that one of his sons died, but the other one was still alive. Schultz was born on the year of 1945, meaning that this baby, whose name was carved onto the window, was in fact Schultz's name and that this man that carved his name on the car window was actually his father. Schultz adds many hidden clues in his writing that actually reveal little snipets of actual life experiences, you just have to know how and where to find them. Because of this, Schultz's writing is very secretly revealing and personal. Because of the hardships of Schultz's life, he usually writes in sad melancholy tones. One of the ways that Schultz expresses his melancholy through his writing are his strange breaks. He doesn't break where you would expect poets to break their lines; after rhymes or after a certain amount of words. He almost always breaks in the middle of sentences and does not finish them until the next line. These breaks are awkward and not expected, making you read his writing with more detail because it is not the norm. Since you have to read the writing with more detail to know exactly where you are going to stop and to pause, you are also unconsciously forced analyze his writing in a deeper sense and you start to actually think about what you are reading instead of just breezing and rhyming through the lines without paying attention to the message that they carry. Philip Schultz's writing definitely carries history and reality in it in a very unique way. It carries his feelings and ideas. He writes about his truth, which makes his writing all the more powerful to most who read it.**
 * Phillip Schultz was born the year of 1945 to Jewish immigrants in racially separated Rochester, New York. He lived in a small apartment with his grandmother, his emotionally disturbed and alcohol dependent uncle, his mother, and his hard-working father who seemed to constantly be working. He is a poet and a writer and has won many awards for his works. He founded The Writer's Studio for New York based writers. He now lives in East Hampton, New York with his wife, who is a sculpture, and his two sons.

<span style="background-color: #06c3d0; color: #800000; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 140%; text-align: center;">**My Artwork** <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 120%;">**//"Poetry comes from the heart and then runs through your veins, seeps through your pen until it gets to the ink, and then splatters on to your paper."//** <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">**-Natalie Sanchez**