Three cube poems // John Meyering

I am an architect living in the Shenandoah Valley, designing buildings by day, and building with words by night. On an overcast December day, while in Architecture School, I opened a leather pouchful of 21 cubes, bearing a simple English word on each of their faces – this being the game Sentence Cube Scrabble. I proceeded to engage a literary friend in battle, each sparring to compose as long a sentence as possible with the 21 randomly-tossed words facing us, in turn. Then, we had an idea. Sitting side-by-side, we again rolled the cubes, and searched this new combination of words for what they could tell us, began arranging these into lines of poetry.

Cube Poetry was born.

Alone afterwards, I allowed the cubes to further force me to squeeze meaning from our simplest vocabulary, experimenting with more stories of only 21 words each. In time, I put away the cubes and wrote longer poems, but always with a reverence for brevity and the mystery of pouring thought into the children of our alphabet.

-John Meyering

Hate, when held

Hate, when held

is a cold lady

I ate of my bare, hard heart for her

and tasted a white beast

To please you

"To please you

I shall pluck the heart of a child"

(red fruit)

Later

I smeared new joy over your face

Why I got up

Why I got up:

(a small thing)

This dirty face

saw clean heart

Laugh, and our time may live

-from me

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