Cher
from an exercise from Joe Millar

I wanted to be Cher, tall
as a glass of iced tea,
her bony shoulders draped
with a curtain of dark hair
that plunged straight down,
the cut tips brushing
her non-existent butt.
I wanted to wear a lantern
for a hat, a cabbage, a pińata
and walk in six-inch heels that buttoned
up the back. I wanted her
rouged cheekbones and her
throaty panache, her voice
of gravel and clover, the hokum
of her clothes: Black fishnet
and pink pom-poms, frilled
halter tops, fringed bells
and that thin strip of waist
with the bullet hole navel.
Cher standing with her skinny arm
slung around Sonny’s thick neck,
posing in front of the Eiffel Tower,
The leaning Tower of Pisa,
The Great Wall of China,
The Crumbling Pyramids, smiling
for the camera with her crooked
teeth, hit-and-miss beauty, the sun
bouncing off the bump on her nose.
Give me back the old Cher,
the gangly, imperfect girl
before the shaving knife
took her, before they put
pillows in her tits, injected
the lumpy gel into her lips.
Take me back to the woman
I wanted to be, stalwart
and silly, smart as her lion
tamer’s whip, my body a torch
stretched along the length
of the polished piano, legs
bent at the knee, hair cascading
down over Sonny’s blunt fingers 
as he pummeled the keys,
singing in a sloppy alto
the oldest, saddest songs.

    --Dorianne Laux

 Laux wrote "Cher" after he husband Joe Millar gave her 10 words and told her to use them while saying something she'd wanted to say but hadn't. Laux took the chance to talk about her Cher envy.

The following poem below is a variation on Laux's poem. It has the ten given words, but it also uses a recurring syntactical structure: "for every [this], a [that]." 

For Every Too Little, a Too Much

To make my wife less anxious
about my stacks of papers in her office,
your letters, Dad, were the first I recycled,
unread. She begged me not to read another
after what you sent the second time you left me. 

Into every holiday, a little highway.
Before that Thanksgiving dinner
I’d been rambunctious about Reagan,
remember? I’d rudely punctuated
your lecture with a request
to see your clip file, your book or
someplace where your conservative
blather didn’t fill your mouth
like a stone you couldn’t spit.

For so much uncut grass, a little less sky.
So I let you go a second time,
and you finally wrote letters like water,
legal threats not to see my half-sister.
I admit I read eight or nine words,
hoping the tone would change, but
I could never climb lower than
the rung of your first threat.

Now your grandsons look at Iraq.
Onto every holiday, a hat.
How about a helmet?
Vietnam, I tell them, is the way
to know Grandad and the peril of his family values.
And your patriots talk
to make themselves deaf
so they don’t hear
those they devour.
I thought about burning
your letters in the barbeque
but recycled them because
I know how you hate “eco-think.”

So from every little madness, a little more.

Directions
Using the 10 words below, write down something you've been wanting to say. Use concrete details and don't layer emotions onto the images; instead, trust that in the processing of selecting images, the emotions will emerge from them.

Use the phrase “In the final _________” at least three times. Write no more than 35 lines. Good luck.

Resources Cited 
Cesmat, Brandon. "For Every Too Little, a Too Much."  Magee Park Poets Anthology 2009.  Carlsbad, CA, 2009.
Laux, Dorianne.  “Cher.”  River Styx 72 (2006): 16-17.
Laux, Dorianne.  “Writing Workshop.”  Tuolumne Meadows Poetry Festival.  Yosemite, CA; 18 August 2007.