Prose format with stanzas and specific line endings

[Janice L. Carroll]

Below is an example of the stanza that is blocked but has specific end of lines. I started out with doing these blocked cell 1 with cell 1 runovers.  It looks funny in braille.  Should I do each line as 1-3 in the instead of following block?

EXAMPLE 1

I like to touch your tattoos in complete

darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of

where they are, know by heart the neat

lines of lightning pulsing just above

your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue

swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent

twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent

and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss

the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until

you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists

or turns to pain between us, they will still

be there. Such permanence is terrifying.

So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

 

EXAMPLE 2

This example is of a stanza and the first line is indented and I guess would be paragraph format however again there are specific line endings.

ocean visible in the edges cut by it,

cloud color reaching into air,

the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,

salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and,

as if that wasn't enough, all of it

ending up almost every evening

inside our speech—

coast canal ocean river stream and now

mother and I drove on and although

the mind is unreliable in grief, at

the next cloudburst it almost seemed

they could be shades of each other,

the way the body is

of every one of them and now

they were on the move again—fog into mist,

mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze

that lay on the railings of

the house she was dying in

as I went inside.

Thanks for any help.

[claurent]

Poetry format is 1-3 or 1-5, 3-5.  In your first example, you would do the poem with 1-3 margins.  In the second example, the only question would be whether or not that indention on the first line represents a pattern (for instance, is every other line indented to 3?).  If there is no pattern, than the same 1-3 margins should be used.

Cindi

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