Tara Campbell Week: Breakfast of Champions and Other D.C. Poems

Tara Campbell’s debut novel, TreeVolution, was released Nov. 1 from Lillicat Publishers. All this week on Queen Mob’s Teahouse we celebrate Campbell’s book by showcasing her work. 

 

Breakfast of Champions

in Columbia Heights

 

Bowl at my feet

spoon stilled

Lucky Charms shipwrecked in an ocean of milk

on a stoop

unaccompanied save for a hollowed-out pack of

Marlboros

consumer long departed

in search of destiny

and, perchance, wings

 

screen-shot-2016-11-04-at-7-49-47-am

 

Mt. Pleasant Haiku

Hydrangeas disrupt

my power walk. I stop and

bend to better scents.

 

Chicken bones rattle

on brick, amuse bouche before

fortified dinner

 

Man grunts frustration

Paper flutters to sidewalk

Lottery ticket

 

Dinner with a view

of the Orkin truck, but hey,

it’s still happy hour

 

Gentrification:

Little Free Libraries start

outnumbering bars

 

Not the same now, since

baby strollers found the end

of my bus ride home

 

The troubadour shouts

His songs into the morning

Mariachi rage

 

Breakfast en plein air:

Lucky Charms shipwrecked in milk

Marlboro chaser

 

Convenient Store, please

don’t change your sign. Convenience

isn’t everything.

 

Park Road’s grandest dame

wears yellow crayon scribbles

and tricycle art

 

Screen-lit faces of

Pokemon hunters drive the

drunks to drink elsewhere

 

Park Road Painted Lady

 

The grandest dame of Mt. Pleasant

stands on leaf-green lawn,

adorned in daffodil yellow with bands of orange

and splashes of lime.

Candy-red tricycles sport in a pyramid before her,

rainbow flags flutter from her porch,

a canary crayon scribbles up her firm brick side.

Just around the corner

brave belle of the ball

highlight of the hood

loud, proud and enduring

the fairest of them all.

 _dsc8520-2 treevolution_frontcover


Tara Campbell is a Washington, DC-based writer of crossover sci-fi. Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, she has also lived in Oregon, Ohio, New York, Germany and Austria. Tara is the grateful recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ (DCCAH) 2016 Larry Neal Writers’ Award in Adult Fiction, and the DCCAH31st Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist. She’s an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse, and her monthly column at the Washington Independent Review of Books, Text in the City, covers all things books and writing in the DC area. 

Submit a comment