2022 Prompt a Poem Submissions

As we near the end of National Poetry Month, we have a revision exercise brought to us by the poet Jon Holland.

Step 1: Find 4-6 of your unfinished poems that are centered around the same subject. Define “unfinished” however you wish. Sometimes I feel like “finished” means roughly the same thing as “published” but I often wonder if anything is ever really done. Alexander Pope and Walt Whitman focused themselves on overhauling and tinkering with revisions and republishing their larger works in The Dunciad and Leaves of Grass for huge chunks of their careers, which suggests that “published” and “finished” aren’t synonymous at all. Obviously it was a different time and Google and first publisher rights were slightly different in the 18th and 19th centuries. Robert Frost published “In White” in 1912 and a better version titled “Design” in 1936 which has always fascinated me. Only you know when something’s finished, so go with your gut. You just want several poems based around the same figure or content or theme or emotion or imagery or…you get it. Group them however you want, but make sure you are getting stuff that you feel like you aren’t done with for whatever reason.

Step 2: Peruse these types of closet organizations as potential for formal innovations (here is a top nine list and here is a Goodhousekeeping Tips list for DIY closet organization). To poeticize the closet space, you’ll probably have to fix a set number of lines as well as a maximum line length before you start (because closets don’t get any bigger as much as you want them to), then you’ll figure out a way to shove everything you’ve dredged up about this theme into the closet. You’ll want a lot of your stuff to be accessible after you’re done, but you’ll bury and hide some things (or maybe you’ll shove so much into the closet that if someone pulls one item out, everything else spills out). Each potential closet organization uses the same amount of space, but each arranges the clutter of items differently from left to right; each uses vertical space in a specific way, each designs drawers and cabinets with completely different functionality in mind. It could all apply to a poetry if we look at the purpose of the object, the way it navigates constrictions and its ergonomic/practical features, then try to set up stanza structures and line constraints that mimic the object (but, like, in a poetic way). For instance, what’s the poetic equivalent of a hanging space for jeans as opposed to the drawer for them? What is the formal comparison of cubbies vs. shelves in poetry?

Step 3: Contrive at least THREE formal constraints. The number three merely comes from this being step three. Feel free to come up with only two formal constraints or several more if you want. But get at least three (or two, I guess since I said that was an optional, but definitely more than one since this is a revision prompt and you already have the fodder).

Step 4: Compose one poem of these 4-6. Be ruthless in your deletions, but don’t cut any emotion or significant moments in the poems. Your goal is to pack every bit of meaning, every bit of significant exposition, every memory/association/anecdote into the CLOSET that you’ve designed for this content. Your reader doesn’t have to be able to decipher everything, but you should know why you kept that random, unmarked DVD or letter or picture and why you stuffed it in the back of the closet and under that box.

Smooshed into the 12-Lines & Confines of our Messy-Wonderful Closet

Scratched, I strain and squint through glasses of pink-champagne,
Alas, a new pair, (remade & homemade) with a subtler shade;

Blue plaid and large print gingham (with fruit)
Cut from the same cloth (stubborn)
Then one day, gingham grew up and plaid just sort of floated away;

Pictures and pictures and pictures and pictures
--- with the same freckles and walnut eyes ---
--- wallet-sized---
--- still uncut---
But he had no picture this year;

South of Bangor, something about this road feels like the end of the world ---
boreal, barreling with heavy hauler trucks.

-MP

Step 1: What’s your first memory—or what do you, now, consider to be the oldest memory that’s still surviving in your brain. Describe that first memory in as much sensory detail as possible.

Step 2: What’s your most recent memory besides doing that freewrite? (Having a cup of coffee or talking to a friend on the phone or folding some laundry or taking a shower?) Describe that, in as much sensory detail as possible.

Step 3: You can shape a poem from this by braiding the two memories together, or simply by placing them in an interesting order and letting their juxtaposition be the bookends of your whole life up until now.

Untitled

O, let the tributaries flow back!
-- she truly dares not
Reread a childhood misplaced
Reevaluate a spontaneous reluctance to thank the first ever connection
she stumbled as if she never stumbles before

Abandoned, devalued, wasted
eternal in therapy, eternal in healing
she rips the water apart
she overdoes something she never is and never will be
she composes pages after pages of confession, that
she is never pretending to weep
Indeed a river of broken trusts
Or isn't time a bittersweet gallery?

As if she is a Benjamin defying river
the present dictates her thousand pasts
are you prepared to sort out
are you managing as your best
--Suspended
Questions never meant to be affirmed

Black is the color of duet
Black is the color of musical instruments
Black deserves to be classicists
Black is one part of the river
And she echoes black
black echoes her back

Being Home 

“I remember it all too well”
I drove down the streets of my childhood,
blasting Taylor Swift and crying while screaming the words,
and reminisced on life.
I remember my best friend,
once a young girl holding my baby sister
on the worn down leather couch,
now a woman getting married.
We were thick as thieves,
constantly playing games
and creating fantasy worlds where we could be
undercover spies,
secret princesses,
anyone besides ourselves.
Maybe that’s why I struggle to grow up.
In my childhood home while attending therapy,
I cried over how I hold high expectations for myself
because I painted a version of myself
that I can’t see anymore.
When I was young,
all I could do was build different personas.
Now, I can barely stick with the one.
“They say all is well that ends well.”

 -Madi Altman

Yesterday you invented a dessert. Now, you will invent a Beast.Yesterday you chose the ‘subtext’ of your dessert before you invented the dessert. Now, you will first invent the Beast and then you’ll decide: what does my Beast say about myself, about a human experience, about an abstraction? Answer some questions about your beast: How many legs does it have—long short etc.? How big is it? Does it have fur or skin or feathers or scales or all of those or something else? Hooves? Claws? Toes? Teeth? Lips? Describe your beast, and then give your beast a name, which will be the title of your poem. 

Blalogo

And will you say
That they heard the hooves before I arrived
And that they smelled my mane
Splattered with the salty water of the oceans
Before my bellow touched their eardrums?

I had stopped for a minute to think before the fatigue made me sit down.
It was getting so dark so rapidly
That I didn’t see it, but I felt the ground soft, dry, comfortable,
So I sat and then lied on it.
I closed my eyes for an instant that seemed endless,
Hoping to find some new sun when I looked up again,
But I opened them, still in that darkness.
A grain of light was then revealed to me, so I blew it away.
– I don’t like having anything sticking to my body.
But the grain floated still, asking to become something,
So I thought it into another and another and another grain.
And then I thought the grain into a rose, a loaf of bread, a crab, a river, an ocean,
The caress of a mother, a hand, the algae and the birds, a city with no walls.
I thought it into a boy.
Then I closed my eyes again. I was tired, as always, very tired.

I opened my eyes again, after resting in that night with no time,
And it was light.
I slowly collected myself and was surprised to find the ocean before me.
Perhaps it had been there, all throughout, but I was so tired.
So, I slowly walked towards it, and slowly untangled hair after hair of my hirsute mane.
Slowly brought my hooves in, and slowly got used to the water.
Everything is so slow in me; I was born so old that everything has always come so slow to me.

The blue of my skin almost stained the sand
But the piercing sun shimmered in my beautiful black eyes.
A city, with its many houses and its many doors and no walls, stood behind me.
I could not see anyone, but I could feel them – someone.
I knew I could touch them, but I could never reach them.
Perhaps, in another time, when I knew all the languages of the world,
But it’s been so long, I’ve forgotten them know.

I pranced across the labyrinthine path before me,
– Seeking to scape this weary monotony –
Each step looking to be a tad closer to deliverance,
And got lost among the city’s white houses with their crumbling rooftops.

At the turn of that other corner
A young man, almost a boy, was waiting for something, for someone.
And when he saw me, the red paint on his face grew darker, as I smiled a quirk smile back at him,
While he wiped off the hairs away from his face, determined, one by one,
As he understood that he had been waiting for me all this time,
And let out a war cry.

Years later, by the fire, he would always end the story for his grandkids,
Still trying to piece up the puzzle:
“Would you believe it?”
The blalogo barely smiled.

-Katherine Tapia

Step 1: Consider an abstraction (fear, love, friendship, despair, etc.) Don’t think too hard about it. Any abstraction will work. Just choose one and stick with it.

Step 2: Consider a weather event or condition (thunderstorm, hurricane, blizzard, etc.)

Step 3: Free write for a few minutes on the abstraction, and then free write for a few minutes on the weather event before you look at Step 4.

Step 4: Look at what you have written in each free write and create a dessert out of it. You can write a recipe, or a list of ingredients, and/or describe this dessert—eating it, where one would eat it, all the sensory details, any hint of narrative. If you didn’t make it, who did? Does it tell a story? Does it cure a disease? Would you serve it to your friend or to your enemy, etc.?

Step 5: The name of the dessert is the title of the poem.
 

Molasses Cookies

Rolled in sugar,
warm and dark and walnut-sized
(like my great-grandmother's eyes, my mother's, my brothers', my cousins', and mine)
they bake -- and I wait,
hopeful,
and in community with the overwhelming scent of cinnamon and cloves that sits by the late October blaze of a campfire or a maple tree or Friday night lights near the lake or a sunrise over the fields of a cross-country meet.

In spring, I skip the rolled sugar -- and wait --
(poised in the sweet and strong anticipation of a collective and singular faith that all that is and has been and will be need not be in vain)
-- 8-10 minutes for them to bake;
I drizzle them then in an icing of orange zest.

Red Velvet, Or the Attic Star

I thought I would clean the attic.
You see, it’s time. It’s been much neglected for much long.
I had to navigate my way through it, I knew that,
So I brought some scissors along,
And a mop and a bucket, and water, and my will.

Nothing had changed much, really,
As things who are still and neglected
Seem to also have neglected themselves to live a life of their own,
Forgot to carry on, carry on…

Still, I thought my heart would stop when I saw it:
There it was, right where you left it,
The white dress and the horrible white box,
With its little white doves and its corny white hearts.

I didn’t really want to do it,
– God knows I hesitated before getting myself to it –
But, oh, well, here we go.
I thought it would be harder to open,
But I didn’t even have to prop it:
As I walked closer nearby, my foot got caught in a lace
That got caught in a veil, that got twisted around the back of the chair, that was pushed forward
And down it came: it was a miracle, it was meant to happen.

I don’t know many things in life,
But I sure know when I’m smelling something rotten.
I smelled it when they tried to sell me that old fish as fresh,
At the shop, down at Nancy’s,
And I smelled it on you, at your first lie.
So, I knew what it was.
I still couldn’t believe, though, that I hadn’t brought myself to throw it away, yet,
And only now, so long and so late, I had happened upon it.

I moved the lid from the top, breaking a white dove while at it,
And there it was: an extremely rotten piece of red velvet cake.
I had wanted red velvet for our wedding, our special day.
But two marriages and three kids after, I was not so sure anymore.
Why had I wanted it, anyway?
The caterer was most puzzled when I insisted, casually,
As one would talk about the weather,
That it would not be a nutty or fruity delicatessen,
Just my old, trusty, red velvet tasty buddy.

The baker wanted to quit on the spot, I remember that,
But mother always said that the key to our future lays in our hands.
I never really knew what to make out of that.
What was I exactly making?
So, the way I saw it, it could only mean two things.
Either I could break and concede, so the baker would take care of our wedding, properly.
My hands would then be used to sign the peace treaty.
Or I could use my hands to hold life by its horns and bake the thing myself.

I remember, it grew so quiet.
I needed the stillness of a surgeon performing a coronary artery bypass graft.
I had never fried and egg or even boiled water,
Let alone mixed eighteen eggs, nine cups of milk,
A pinch of salt, a drop of vanilla scent, two or three cup-ish of oil, and six boxes of cake mix.
It was insane and it was pure.
So, I needed all the quietness possible
To take a deep breath and grasp what I was getting into.

It was not that bad, really, as box instructions never disappoint.
So I enjoyed it, while it lasted, but, remember? We decided to save some, for later.

I remember you thought it was the weirdest and most disgusting thing
To keep the cake for two days later to feed your white lab mice.
So you made the trip to the attic to set it aside,
But out of sight, out of mind,
And I forgot.

But now, after trying on the dress to find out if it still fits me – frightenedly, it still does –
I had time.
And, after sitting down in a rheumatically painful crisscross applesauce,
I had even more time
To see the little creatures, the shadow bugs, coming to take a piece,
Slithering critters, the darkest ones, crypt-like kind,
Unnamed bugs, biting on it, even ants,
All taking the no longer red meat of the cake apart, piece by piece, crumb after crumb,
Savoring every morsel of decadent ruin, the white covering no longer white:
It was a reassuring sign, though, that I had done what was needed,
When not even the rats wanted to bite on that.

-Katherine Tapia

Step 1: Think of an object you own that’s larger than, say, a toaster. It can be as big as a couch or it can be smaller. A stuffed animal. A pillow. Etc. This can’t be an outdoor-friendly thing (no bikes, for instance). After you choose an object, stick with it whether you wish you’d chosen something else or not. (You may do this exercise repeatedly if you so desire!) Now, imagine your object outdoors, in the street or in a park or on a lawn or on a roof. It’s raining. Your object is being soaked with rain. Describe the object and the rain and the state of the object in the rain in as much sensory detail as possible.

Step 2: Now, use EVERY detail from this freewrite in a description of either your best friend or a favorite family member. If your description has soggy cardboard or rust in it, you still need to use that in a description of your best friend or favorite family member. You aren’t describing the appearance or physicality of the person. You’re describing something intangible about the person, and what this person means to you.
 

A Tanka for a Close Relative Who Originally Lived in Chicago

Spurned in a small town,
she yearned but couldn’t return.
Her heart became a
soaked sofa, left in the rain,
never drained completely dry.

-Renée Szostek

Untitled

Bedsheets hung out to dry
Folded and flipped
Corner to corner
And clip to clip
Across the line
Left too long outside;
Soaked in the rain
(And again and again)
In the sun to fade and the wind whipped to fray;
Bedsheets,
Your very fibers-braided,
-- Changed --
Left out too long
In the sun and the wind and the rain.

-MP

Step 1: Think of an object you own that’s larger than, say, a toaster. It can be as big as a couch or it can be smaller. A stuffed animal. A pillow. Etc. This can’t be an outdoor-friendly thing (no bikes, for instance). After you choose an object, stick with it whether you wish you’d chosen something else or not. (You may do this exercise repeatedly if you so desire!) Now, imagine your object outdoors, in the street or in a park or on a lawn or on a roof. It’s raining. Your object is being soaked with rain. Describe the object and the rain and the state of the object in the rain in as much sensory detail as possible.

Step 2: Now, use EVERY detail from this freewrite in a description of either your best friend or a favorite family member. If your description has soggy cardboard or rust in it, you still need to use that in a description of your best friend or favorite family member. You aren’t describing the appearance or physicality of the person. You’re describing something intangible about the person, and what this person means to you.
 

This prompt comes to us from the poet Jonathan Holland.

Step 1: Pick a bug any bug. Don't think too much about it other than you have to have experience with it. List 8 to 10 memories that contain that bug.

Step 2: Describe the bug in vivid detail. List any notable pop culture references, poetry references, musical references, common allusions, clichés or tales or sayings about the bug. Try to get to 8 or 10. The last ones, the ones you really have to claw for, will probably be the best.

Step 3: Research that bug. Where did its name/nickname come from? Is it a symbol for anything? What are its mating habits and infestation habits? What environment or season does it prefer? Are there any interesting applied uses for it (i.e. use in medicine or science or apothecary or folklore, etc.)? For instance, maggots were used to remove dead gangrene flesh according to an episode of House that I saw. List any interesting factoids you can find about the bug.

Step 4: Now, from a third-person narrator (pick any distance you want, omniscient, limited, objective), rewrite two or three memories in vivid detail, using information from your research to inform the narration.

Step 5: Use these notes as the basis of a poem. If you haven’t already latched onto something, maybe try to write from the bug’s perspective. Or, write a poem to that bug (or from the bug to you), or change the P.O.V. of step four, and allow that first-person narrator—who now has research fueling the elucidation of the moment—back into the memory. Or, you can write a poem without a bug, allowing images, scene, and sound to give us that buggy feeling, but you never actually have to mention the bug. Or, hopefully, in the process of doing any of these steps, you latch onto something I couldn’t conceive until I read yours and think, I wish I had that idea!
 

Untitled

In Charleston we saw a palmetto bug,
that's what they called it, a palmetto bug,
-- but it looked like a cockroach to me;

In Charleston we saw a palmetto bug,
that's what they called it, a palmetto bug,
clung tight to the side of the Battery;

In Charleston we saw a palmetto bug,
that's what they called it, a palmetto bug,
smooth and easy, a palmetto bug,
-- but it looked like a cockroach to me.

-Meghan Prindle

FLYING HUMANOID WITH WINGS CAUGHT ON FILM OVER PHOENIX ARIZONA

The internet and the newspapers are full of important news, which is being missed by the general population. Find one of the strangest or inspiring of these and use the newspaper or internet headline/clickbait as the title of your poem. Don't read beyond whatever opening text caught your eye. Describe (beginning by freewriting for 10 minutes) the events or story suggested by that title in as much sensory detail as possible. (If you can't find anything, you can use the above!)

Spain Investigates Private Taxidermy Collection with More than 1,000 Animals
A Villanelle

I could not leave my pets or say goodbye.
We’d been such friends I could not let them go.
I wanted them around—they could not die.

Each one unique—smooth fur or gleaming eye.
To have mere memories, I just said, “No.”
I could not leave my pets or say goodbye.

The birds became my pets, high in the sky.
Once dead, descending here to earth below.
I wanted them around—they could not die.

Some squirrels scampering—I cannot lie.
I posed their tails and little toes just so.
I could not leave my pets or say goodbye.

A tax collector takes the hide—not I.
I stuffed pets’ skins and scrubbed to make them glow.
I wanted them around—they could not die.

When I explained, the cops exclaimed, “Oh, my!”
Complaints from folks complete my tale of woe.
I could not leave my pets or say goodbye.
I wanted them around—they could not die

-Renée Szostek

This prompt comes to us from the poet Keith Taylor.

Step Out onto the Planet and Find Some Poems
On May 23, 1971, the great Beat poet, Lew Welch, walked out into the forest that surrounds Gary Snyder’s isolated home in the High Sierras. He was never seen again. That has become the Legend of Lew, and it’s a strong one, so strong we often forget what he wrote. Early in Ring of Bone, his Collected Poems, he draws a beautiful circle with a calligraphic brush, and below it writes:
Now: step out onto the planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.
Inside the circle are 300 things nobody understands, and, maybe nobody’s ever really seen.
How many can you find?
Step 1: Choose from these something that you know nothing about; that is surprisingly easy, even for folks who spend a lot of time outdoors. The thing you find works best if it’s organic, although the inorganic (rocks, stones, pebbles, sand) can do the job too.
Step 2: Study that thing, focusing on it, and writing down detailed descriptions of it. Yes, you can write your reactions to it, too, if you want to. But force yourself to keep looking, keep writing, for an hour. This is the hardest part of the whole process.
Step 3: You can do this while you’re still outside, but I give you permission to come back inside if the weather has turned nasty, if night is falling, or if the mosquitoes have gotten bad. But now try to shape those notes – either into lines, or sentences. You could even impose a little narrative on them if you want to.
Step 4: You could do this before Step 3 if you wanted to. That’s OK. You could even skip this entirely, although I think you’d be missing something if you did. NOW try to name the thing you looked at. Check out field guides, the internet; ask an expert or a knowledgeable local if one’s around. Try to figure out where the name came from and why. The scientific name often adds a whole new dimension. Then see if this information changes or adds to the piece you’ve begun to shape in Step 3.

Helianthus

I would look up, but the sun is blinding.
Still, no choice: I have to.
I would look up to my name,
How some of its parts ground me,
Fixating me to an immobility that I cannot bear.
I am here now, but I will be gone with the summer
And come back again with the new season.
Here, then gone, but I always come back,
Only that, now, I don’t know if it’s the same me, now.

I always enjoy when the kids try naming me,
Such a complex, long name
For such a simple, short-lived creature.
But I’m more than that, the poet has said.

The many pictures taken
By the women in yellow, glittery dresses,
Sometimes complemented better by a straw hat,
Others by a bold bow.
I much rather feel the soft yet rough caress of the innocent toddler,
Who can barely wrap their fingers around my body
And close it in a tight, firm, honest fist
– At least I know that if they hurt me, they haven’t done me any purposeful wrong.
And then there is the senseless smothering, pushing,
Almost bending to the side and to the ground,
And the pulling – oh, God, worse of all, the pulling, because that’s the end of it.

And if there’s a God in the sky,
To which I have no choice but to turn upwards to watch,
Then I hope that this God hears my praying:
No pulling, no pulling, they’ll be gone soon, it’s time to close, it’s almost nighttime now.

-Katherine Tapia

Before you start your freewrite, read a poem (written by someone other than yourself) aloud to yourself. Now, put the poem away. Now, set your timer. Now, use your memory of the poem—its sound, its sensory details, its emotional tone, its point of view, its line length, as well as whatever you felt was emotional or physical about it that’s still echoing around in your brain, and write that poem again. (This isn’t plagiarizing. This is inspiration. No poem has ever been written since the world’s first poem that didn’t take its essence from a previously existing poem. If you find your freewrite is too close to the poem your read, revise it when you revise it: you could make it the opposite of that poem by turning a love poem into a hate poem, or a poem about childhood into a poem about old age, or a poem about spring into a poem about winter. If it’s still too close for comfort, dedicate your poem to the poet whose poem inspired yours.)

Untitled

Increments of time
In these increments of time
I can smell the sweetness of opportunity
Future caresses me as time circulates my veins
The wind brushes across my neck
I can feel Grace
Grace in its nakedness
As the dawn breaks, grace quickens me
Grace, underlying every circumstance in its entirety
These moments we have diminish into memories
Upon these vivid moments we fear the ending
We then fall into the exact moment we don't want to be
The end
While in the fear of ending vivid moments in time
We reflect on these times, as the perceptions of these moments expire
Embracing newborn moments as we perspire
With anxiety we push to tear the veil of next
That word NEXT being our frenemie
Our most loved enemy
Only because our good times diminish as we fear failure
And our failure decomposes as we long for what's next
AH!
The possibility of success
Our potentials undress us
To help us to understand and stress to us the importance of growth
So looking outward we are moving inward toward our greater self as we have never known
Facing our fears on our own
In our darkest moments we find peace
Peace that surpasses all understanding
Peace eternal
Peace within
And this is were we win
In the midst of each failure
We find peace
Peace to get back up again and fly
Even when the flapping of our wings get tired and feel we want to die
We find rest in the embrace of
God
God being the wind that our wings chase
Peace in his mere presence
So that no failure can take that away and we can truly keep a move forward
(moving forward) Realizing that before
We failed to realize that times of failure are funny in times of success
So as we embrace our next we hold on to the memories of the good times, the way WE know them
Placing our expectations in a glass and allowing the embrace of the experience
BEING
cooled by the aid of truth,
Like
liquid redemption
Allowing Grace to be our exemption
We are alive
We have survived
These increments of time

This two-part (April 12 & 13) prompt comes to us from the poets Jennifer Metzger and Scott Beal.

Dancing by Myself: PART ONE

Step 1: Choose a piece of music that you like to dance to, and dance to it. If it’s a song, dance through the whole thing. (If it’s shorter than a couple minutes, dance to it twice.) If it’s an extended composition, like A Love Supreme or Shostakovich’s Symphony #5, dance continuously to at least 3-5 minutes of it. And don’t just sway and nod your head a little -- really get in there. Clear some furniture out of the way. Work up a minor sweat.

Step 2: Immediately freewrite for 5-10 minutes about the dancing experience. How do you feel right now, having finished dancing? How did you feel while you were doing it? Imagine yourself watching yourself dance: what would you have seen? What was the best part? What was the worst part? Describe all your dancing and/or post-dancing sensations in as much physical detail as possible.

Untitled

Like a bird I stretch my wings
Like a song is made to sing
Hands a feet up in the air
Flying high all in a pair
Clouds and sky confuse me
In a magic all to see
Light, I feel I see I smell
All my senses swell
In a moment that has to be
All the life that is in me.

-Miria

Jot down the name of someone you haven’t seen or heard from in at least two years. 

Jot down the name of a place you’ve never been.

Write to that person for ten minutes in a note from that place. Describe this place you've never been in as much sensory detail as possible. 

Untitled

jeli, when I think about you, I almost cry. My eyes well up on the bottom lashes near my cornea until my vision becomes blurry. When it clears, I see spring flowers, lilacs, poppies everywhere. They grow on the walkway to that little cafe that nobody goes to. The green door, its boogery kind of shade, may turn others away, but when you enter, you find a woman, whose eyes scream of sagacity, where not only does spring start opening up and revealing herself, so you do too, to her. She has burnt croissants, but she bakes it that way on purpose because she is filled with childlike laughter and has savings that leave her enough. She does it to laugh and remember joy. She wishes she mended old relationships that meant all the burnt croissants in the world to her and wants to share them with you. She hopes you think often about her. Not with derision, indifference, disdain, but with a fondness that I feel as I write this to you. I’m sorry.

-Karla W.

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Dear Robert,

I hope you’re doing well. I miss you. It’s crazy that we’re about to graduate college. Well, at least I assume that you are, but maybe you’re taking an extra semester or year. I wouldn’t know.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friendships; how they begin and end, what they mean to me, what I want out of them, how the people in my life change me.
I remember walking home from middle school with you on Wednesdays, eating homemade wraps in my kitchen, then you taking much needed naps on the couch. You would be so silly just to make us laugh, because you knew we would never laugh at you.
You told me that you thought the sexiest underwear a girl could wear was maroon bottoms and a black bra. I thought that was an awesome answer. We were 13, and I had only kissed one boy.
You told me that you hated running, even though you were amazing at it. Now you run at Syracuse. I hope that you learned to love it.
I wish you could meet Charlie. We’ve been dating for over a year and he reminds me so much of you. He also bikes, likes building things and taking them apart, whip smart but hates school, tall and funny but bashful. Lived years ahead, years before he should have. Just like you. Loves his older sister and his dog. Just like you. He cares about the people in his life but lives so much of it in his head. Just like you.
My mom says that when she runs into you in the grocery store, or at Karma coffee, you are always so excited. You talk to her.
I hope I run into you at the store.

Love,
Sophia

P.S. I forgot to write to you from Paris, I got too sucked into the past.

Weinkeller 

Hey Pa,
haven’t seen you since November 13, 2010.
I wonder if you can see me all grown-up.
I’m in Berlin right now,
and I absolutely love it.
I never got to talk to you about traveling,
never was able to ask about where you’ve been.
I wish I had been older when you left.
Anyway, back to Berlin.
I took German in high school,
so I have been looking forward to the day that I get to visit.
I saw the remnants of the Berlin Wall,
tested my lack of German skills,
took pictures of the Brandenburg Gate.
I saw a sign that looked like your last name:
“Weinkeller”.
Close enough to Winkler, right?
I wish we could have experienced this together
or I could have at least come home and told you about it.
I feel like you’d appreciate my stories,
but what do I know?
You only ever heard my jumbled thoughts
when I was only a child.
I miss you.
I hope your spirit is here with me,
enjoying the sites our ancestors saw.
Ich liebe dich.

-Madi Altman

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Do you remember the night we watched Aladdin over the phone?
I am in Abu Dhabi and thinking of you.
The Sheikh Zayed Mosque reminds me I am in a whole new world
As if the cloth covering most of me lets me forget
Although it does in a way making me invisible among the chaos of city life
A princess in disguise, nothing compared to your disguise to get by
Iftar with lions the loudest one nicknamed Rajah tonight
No tigers I am afraid and no friend as solid as you
The air is redolent with Turkish coffee and hot
compared to the snowy flurries I left behind and know threaten your weekend
One minute a modern city is bustling around you
and then a call to prayer sounds and the world slows, responsive, mutes
it feels like you have traveled back in time back to complete trust
Connected with something bigger, deeper older
Like befriending a genie knowing you are nothing but a street rat.

This prompt comes to us from the poet Jonathan Holland!

Draw a map of a communal space that you’ve been a part of, that existed before and/or after you (whether imaginary, like you could imagine it before or after, or literally, it existed before and after you). Either way, pick a space and draw an overhead layout with items you remember (like if it’s your high school locker room, draw the benches, the showers, the mold in the corner of the shower, the equipment room door with the lock that didn’t work, the shelves of never-to-be-used again cups, etc.). You could draw a park or an old job or the Christian camp bunkhouse that you went to in 6th grade. Just imagine and map the space.

Write 10-12 memories on that map in the approximate location of their occurrence. It doesn’t have to be pretty or have straight lines. Don't spend too long on the drawing aspect of this. Just use the map to help conjure memories for your freewrite!

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My home office has only enough room for a bookcase, a desk and a lamp, plus some random things that belong nowhere else. One of those things at the moment is a Pallas’ Cat, who is crouched on the middle shelf of my bookcase, between the museum textbooks and the composition guides. She scowls at me, her round pupils a deep pit of black staring at me as if I were a vole or a rat. She will hunt me. She will rip my throat out by day’s end. She will turn my decades of experience in higher education, my professional accolades and my few but fascinating publications into a mass of red pulp.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” I try, a small piece of Gouda in my hand. I cannot help but imagine my death in the jaws of this absolutely adorable wild cat as something close to performance art, a minuscule endangered predator with a taste for bespectacled academics. Is this the ultimate price for human encroachment on wild territory? Will I die in my favorite jacket with the really big pockets? Do I have a lesson plan ready for next week’s discussion? Will my student loans finally be forgiven?

The cat is gorgeous, in full winter coat despite the calendar date of mid-April. Her grey ruff shows thin strands of tan, while dark spots roll back over her head in chevron pattern. Her whiskers are wide enough to obscure the titles of most of the books on the shelf. Her tiny nose sniffs at me, sniffs at the books, sniffs at the air, just before she turns her head to glare directly into my face. She is not in my office; I am in her den, and she too appreciates a good book now and then.

I get up quickly and go to the living room, where I keep the fiction. A Pallas’ Cat is native to the north Asian steppes; would she prefer something that reminded her of home? Or would she like an adventure, someplace new and fantastical, as far away from yaks and Yetis as possible? Would she simply want something we can read together? I grab an armful of books and come back to the office, where she has now pounced on my desk. She is gnawing at the corner of my laptop.

I lay the books out on the floor – magical realism, Mongolian folk tales, the latest by Charlie Jane Anders, a few children’s classics. She leaps off the desk in a heavy arc, her stocky legs and thick body landing hard on my floor. As she paws at the books, I flip them onto their backs so she can read the dust jackets. She chooses a translation of The White Cat – not the new one by Zipes, but Rachel Field’s version. The book is battered and childworn; I have owned this copy since I was six. She reposes as well as a wild cat can, her haunches still slightly stiff as I read aloud to her. The snow is falling outside, growing heavier with each page.

-KT Lowe

Rocky River Middle School (the old one)

Not an ice cube
but a warm brick one
with a simple, stately look;
it's the old High
settled on a corner
in a grove
on a slight hill
for nigh on a century;
cubed inside and out
3 stories up and hollow down.

Not an ice cube
but a glass one
with a stacked locker room;
settled onto the front
of the old High
in the grove
on the slightest hill
for quarter-round a century;
cubed inside and out
3 grades up and 2 flights down.

Not an ice cube
but a galleria
with a galley of Pirates on a blue carpet sea
(hulled in orange and olive green);
Settled on the side
looking back up
at that old High
from a century nigh
cubed inside and out
3 stories up and hollow down.

-Meghan Prindle

Wherever you’re writing, assuming it’s indoors (if not, go indoors please or at least in a car or bus or public restroom): there’s the appearance suddenly of a wild animal in that space, something undomesticated. It’s not supposed to be in here. What is it? What is it doing? How are you going to deal with this? Is person above there with you now? Or remembered?In as much sensory detail as possible, describe this animal and what it’s doing, and what it’s presence is doing to you. You may need to describe the space, of course, to evoke this animal’s impact on it, and on you. (Are you sweating? Did it bite you? Where’s your phone? Are others seeing this wild thing or are you alone with it or are you in a crowd but the only one who sees it or is it pandemonium in the crowd? Is this a real animal or a supernatural animal? Extinct? Mythological? Or just a chipmunk?Okay! I suggest you write and set a timer for ten minutes and then return to it later. But, you got this.

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Bark-brown bristles on a plump, fluffy back
Tangerine feet skitter and scrape
Along the coated wood.
Its chest pulsates, its nose frisks
Tiny chirps burst from its throat--
It gnaws with its broken buck teeth
On the nylon strap of my backpack
Beats the black cloth into briny bumps
And I
Curled around my bedrail with naught but a tissue box for a weapon
The corners bent and bulging in hands sticky like butter
Ponder how in the hell
A Diag squirrel broke into my dorm room.

-Michele Jennings

Wolves at the Door

Last night the doorbell rang. When I opened the front door, three wolves were standing there under the porch light holding brochures. They looked nervous. One of them kept looking up and down the street as if he or she expected an angry mob to come after them at any second. They said they were collecting for a charity, or could I give them directions, or something something the afterlife or were we satisfied with our current internet provider. It was hard to tell exactly what because they didn’t enunciate very well. They were canines, after all. I said I was sorry but not right now and then lied that we were eating dinner. They seemed disappointed but said nothing, just slunk off into the night without looking back. The smallest of the three paused in the middle of the sidewalk and lifted a leg. Who is it, asked my wife from the living room. Nobody, I replied, just the wind.

-Peter Anderson

It seems true that everyone has a moment in life when it’s suddenly clear that someone we thought had everything under control may not, at all, have everything under control. This could be a parent or another relative, a friend, a teacher, a coach, a doctor, spouse, etc. Think about a time like this, when you may have realized that someone you thought was capable, could be counted on, and was in charge, proved not to be.Thought of someone yet?Okay….In as much sensory detail as possible, while considering this person, freewrite for ten minutes on the contents and/or appearance of your messiest room or drawer or closet or shelf.  

Revising

Twisting my covers I dive into yours
and breathe you in
page upon page
verbs tumbling nouns into poignant arcs
aching
over jostling naughty delights demotic aristocratic pidgin pastiche sly words softly spawning bullets
firing into the cruel absurdities of the world and taking no prisoners but me

oh my word magpie

who now crazes me with silence punctuated by banality

I have swept you into a drawer with the
lidless gift boxes and a plastic bracket that should be stabilizing my shelves
and the almost-new keyboard missing its e
into the drawer of socks that one day will be pairs and the old jeans that don't fit anymore

This prompt comes to us from the poet Emily Pittinos, who was an undergraduate studying poetry at the University of Michigan not that long ago!

EKPHRASTIC GOOGLING PROMPT
Step 1: Begin by Google Image-searching a word or object or abstraction of interest to you. (i.e. “Venus” or "locusts" or “envy.”)
Step 2: Scroll around a bit and select the image that first leaps out at you. Free write about this image for five minutes or until you have nothing left to say. Anything is fair game—visual descriptions, surfacing memories, historical/scientific knowledge, word associations, etc.
Step 3: Go back to your image search and choose another image much farther down the page. Do five minutes or so of writing about this one.
Step 4: Go back to your image search and choose another image — or you can even do a new search and choose something from that, just don’t think about your choices too hard — and write for another few minutes about this next one. By this point, you may already have a poem brewing, and, if so, go for it.

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Your name. I call you by thousands of them,
all secret and exclusive. They are all ground into powder
I whisk them with matcha
serve them with flowers
it is spring and the snow has melted for tea.

You have broken my bowl. If you are willing to fix it, here are the instructions.
Fix it, then name it. We’ll be talking about it for the rest of our lives.
I have invited you to my table; I have shown you beautiful things
I have chosen all of this especially for you and this moment.

Look, I even select the right side of the tea bowl for you. Just for you
because I love you with a deep love that can only be drunk
with broken things. I sit before you, cracked and golden
covered in sweat and tea stains, ready to serve
ready to drink and feast before the spring fields turn to mud.

-KT Lowe

Anxiety

An illustration someone made inspired by me covering my face:
A cloud made of strokes revolves around my head.
Each stroke is made of condensed words,
words evaporated by the heat in my mind.

I fear it's about to rain, once again.
All the words in this language are wetting my hair.
I see them, all over the place.

They come one by one:

Worry, Fear, World, Class, Poem, Pain, Chain, Change, Gain, Shame, Blame, Math, War, Ignorance, Hate, Faith, Game, Policy, Money, Why, How, When, Us, Them, ...

They come in pairs:

'Bad decisions', 'forgotten dreams', 'tired heart', 'distant friends', 'sleep deprivation', 'fire alarm', 'washing machine', 'mumbling doubts', 'intrusive thoughts', 'your silence', 'present tense'...

The rain is getting heavier.
The first triplets start to fall:

'This is scary', 'I miss you', 'It is overwhelming', 'I am afraid', ...

Beloved little friend, it's a brainstorm indeed.
How I am supposed to draw some rainbows if it does not stop?

I don't want you to get wet in this rain.
But I wonder if you would let me be next to you and stay,
under your umbrella, until the sun in your hands washes the rain away.

- Brian Daza

Once Were Animals

The sheep in this photograph exudes pleasure.
Her body hugs the fence pole.
Her neck wraps around the pole as her
Chin reaches for the sky,
Eyes closed.
I can feel the sun on her face,
On my face.
I can feel the cool air on her lips,
On my lips.
I can feel the soft spring grass under her feet,
Under my feet.

To be an animal,
To be the animals we once were.
I imagine that to be a
Sensual experience, a very
Present experience.

How simple to inhabit the here and now, to
Hear what my body has to say, to
Honor my needs.
There is nothing else to do.

Everything you do,
Sheep,
You do in accordance with your
Sheep nature.
You loll as a sheep lolls;
You chew as a sheep chews;
Rut as a sheep ruts;
Birth as a sheep births;
Die as a sheep dies.

[Die as a sheep dies?
Often you die
Not as a sheep dies,
But as nothing and no one should die,
Marinating in the smells and sounds of fear,
Hounded,
Far from anything that makes sense or offers comfort,
Herded
Onto the assembly line
Inside a slaughterhouse,
Run by

Other animals,
Run by once-were-animals.
Run!]

We once-were-animals,
We broke the animal template, didn’t we.
We defy the definition of animal, don’t we.
Once we were animals, but somewhere along the way,
We realized we could
Bend the rules,
Break the rules,
Burn the rules.
Manufacture new rules.
Market the rules.
Eat the rules.
Shit the rules.
Fuck the rules.

We became drunk on that power.
We chose to forget so, so much.

At what moment did we set our feet on
The path that led us here?
Could we have deviated from that path?

Was all this inevitable,
That we are raising children who are part animal, part … something else;
That yesterday morning
My sons could sit alone at the table,
Eyes glowing,
Watching a video about an endangered species,
Spraying graham cracker crumbs while outside a
Warm spring rain fell?

Why were we allowed to
Become this?
Why were there no checks on our power?

Or are they coming? Will my children suffer?

This morning my children,
Part animal, part … something else,
Wrapped their bodies around a fence pole,
Raised their chins to the sky; they felt the
Sun on their faces,
Cool air on their lips,
Soft grass under their feet.
They are still more animal than anything else.
I love their animal hearts,
I love their animal smells,
I love their animal impulses, and I love their
Animal ferocity.

But I don’t know how to reconcile the
Truth of their animal beauty
With another
Truth of mine:
That we
Once-were-animals are
Actively dying and actively killing as we actively die.
We are suiciding.
We are un-
-natural
We are an ab-
-erration
We are a cancer.

Orange Peel

I am messy, spiraling out to reveal the layers within
Giving, giving until all that's left is a core, of sorts
Navel, Nutrient, Skin
Blood, Mandarin
Imperfect coils discarded, tossed aside or composted.
Worm food for the soul
I am clean, healthy (enough), and whole

-J Milne

At least once, as a child, you got lost at the grocery store, park, playground, movie theater, beach, friend’s house, abandoned factory...(okay, maybe not that, depending on what kind of childhood you had…). 

Pioneer

Was this tree here before?
Where is that rock Daddy said looks like a bear
“Remember the bathroom is just down from here”
Is that Mommy yelling
“Zip up the tent flap already you’re letting in the mosquitoes”

No. That lady is not my Mommy.

“Are you lost, little girl?”
I’m not lost, I was brushing my teeth

I went all by myself
I went by myself with the sun on my cheeks
Kicking the pine cones as hard as I wanted
Swinging the door so it creaked back and forth
Splashing the water down the rust-rimmed drain
But when I came out the world had changed

My parents are right over there
Somewhere
I’ll keep walking
Keep walking so I can tell them
See! You didn’t need to come.

I don’t know these people either.

I like this path so much
Maybe I’ll go up it backwards to see it again
You would too, if you found a path you liked as much as I like this one
Back through the door which doesn’t creak
Back to the cold sloshy sink
Wait.

Guess what, Daddy! That building has two different doors.
Don’t go out the wrong one, or you might get lost.

The chocolate cake at the center of the world

Once, I got lost
in a cup of hot chocolate, in Toronto
the label said Criollo, but it was so thick
I floated on top of it, over Lake Ontario
down the rushes of the St Lawrence
spiraling like a broad leaf in a whirlpool
out all the way to the ocean.

Who knew the ocean was fudge cake
spiced with cardamom and lemon
spun through with rivers of chai and mint tea
who knew that the world smelled of sweetness
and that I could go there to feast

I ate my way all the way home

and when I got there, I went straight to bed
so nobody knew I had ever been missing
so nobody would ask me why I would not share
the giant slab of marble cake under my pillow
(every great adventure needs a souvenir)

so nobody would call me honey
and mean anything but bees.

-KT Lowe

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"¡Libertad!" was the scream of the people craving and fighting for freedom.
A small square in Higos Urco commemorates the day
when the longed freedom appeared in sight.

"¿Dónde está mi hijo?¡Dios mío!"
was the scream of my mom searching for her lost only child.
Near Higos Urco's square, there's a field of green grass,
where my mom finally found me after trying so hard.

There is a small square in Higos Urco,
that thinks it celebrates the people who died for freedom.
But the actual celebrations are in the working days of their grandchildren
fighting for the future of their own little kids, who now
are probably playing in the field around.

-Brian Daza

Pick up the closest thing to you that has a page of words in or on it. A book, or magazine, or pizza flyer. Scan just one page of it for concrete nouns—pizza is concrete (it’s tangible), dog, daffodil, blood, wig. You can take as much time as you like to find the best ten concrete nouns on that page. If there aren’t ten that you like, you still have to stay on that page. Fill out the list of ten with less exciting nouns.

Use those ten words in a freewrite about the last time you went for a walk or a drive or took a bus trip that lasted about ten minutes to get where you were going. Describe that ten-minute journey (time this freewrite for ten minutes, the length of your journey—beginning where you began and ending where you ended within ten minutes). Now, use each of the ten nouns you chose from your page in your description of the journey. (If possible, you could choose the words, and then go on a ten-minute journey, and THEN do your freewrite.)
 

Critic

We can’t live four in a hotel room and plus we can walk
to Plum Market from grandma’s
past the swings that you are too big for, now
while they gut our house, for more than we paid
the year you were born
kids don’t get a vote here
the condo of my cancer-killed mother will be our refuge
in a country under lockdown
their candidate won and we’ll have a bleach enema
after we pick up our lattes and organic pastries
she would scoff at my bourgeois softness
she came from the land of coup-strewn corruption
struggle for justice, sure she said, sure
we faced death, every day, as the bombs rained down
concrete nouns exploding intangible dreams

On the Way to the Hospital

The pears come close to exhaustion
being stewed. But
they have nothing to worry about, other
than pleasure. Who

knows what they've been soaking up?

Probably
nothing
but the inevitability of family, heart, hospice, nothing.
Like the space the cat leaps over

between the coffee table and your lap.

What pills? What blood
draw? What diagnosis?
What treatment plan. Is

there anything on Earth
left for us

except for warmth
and love and yielding sweetness and all
that softening & exhaustion?