Tag Archives: writing prompts

WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: “Girl” and “[asking]”

Two poems for this Monday:

Girl
by Eve Alexandra
 
Be careful if you take this flower into your house. The
peony has a thousand lips. It is pink and white like the lady’s
skirt and smells sharp and sweet as cinnamon. There are a
thousand ants living inside but you will only see one or two at
a time. I am like that down there–pink and busy inside. The
dark is a bolt of cloth, crushed and blue, and I unfurl against it.
If you lie down on the floor of the closet the hems of silk will
lick you. My own gown is thin as the skin of dried grass so I
can see the ants dancing down there. The night has big paws.
I imagine the wool of the bears, the cloth of monkeys. the night
smells like vetiver and cedar. His mouth is cool with mint and
warm with rum, and I am not afraid as he rubs his wool against

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WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Mary Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter”

graffiti of black birds on a wire

Starlings in Winter
Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
 
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
 
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
 
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
 
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
 
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
 
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
 
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want
 
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

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WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Dorianne Laux’s “Antilamentation”

photograph of the words "Trust your struggle" graffitied in cursive on a cement wallwritingAntilamentation
Dorianne Laux           

 Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

 

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WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s “In the Animal Garden of My Body”

abstract graffiti, containing an eye and some red flowersIn the Animal Garden of My Body
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Ask me again how the story should go. How much the underbelly of my garden held to bring forth spring, how much hunger I had to devour to get the sweetness I wanted from it. Did this devouring frighten you? I frightened myself in how much I promised to tell you if you asked me again about the water the water the water. What errors I made calculating the downward trajectory of memory rattling loose in the inhale, sharp in the shoulder blades exhaling like wings or whales or swizzles of light. Ask me again what I offered as a sacrifice to the rooster crowing his betrayal of morning. Forgiveness, what a sharp blade I press my body hard against.

 ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

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WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Robert Bly’s Things to Think

photo of a leaf and tendril spray painted on the sidewalk at the base of a pipeGood morning, good morning. It’s early morning in Boston, where it doesn’t really ever get dark – there’s always light from the nearby buildings, the cityscape. I’m not awake yet and I want my tea. My feet are chilly but it’s too warm in the radiator apartment for the wool socks I brought down with me. My car is on the street here – it’s strange for city life to begin to feel foreign. Across the street from me is an MIT frathouse, an old heritage building, probably once a single-family mansion now turned into dorm plus gathering space for the smartypantses of America. On the second floor, there’s a huge window shaped like a bishop’s hat, stained glass amid interlocking arches at the top, and through this I can see a faded oriental rug, dark wood floors, bright lights, a couple of benches. I can’t help wondering how many times that rug has been thrown up on, cried near, how many feet have pressed soles into its shortening naps. I can’t help wondering what that rug has seen.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Things to Think
~Robert Bly

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WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Sheila Nickerson’s Fairy Tale

graffiti image of a woman holding her hands over her chest; branches are growing out of her

Lisbon street art

 

 

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steal your writing time

Good morning good morning good morning — the summer morning outside my window is grey and sounds like the whistle of a train passing through Jack London Square. What is rising for you this morning? What is falling away?

I am entering into a couple-day writing retreat: two days focused on a couple of book projects, two days of stealing away from my regular life, two days in which I give myself permission not to feel guilty if I spend time writing rather than doing other work. This is a stay-at-home writing retreat, and will be interrupted by a trip to the vet and a few other tasks (mostly involving prep for writing groups); still, my primary focus for these next two days will be on moving these books forward.

How often do you give yourself permission for a day to focus on writing? How often do you give yourself permission for thirty minutes, or ten? How often do you feel as though you are stealing time from something, or someone, else in order to write?

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how to fumble more often

graffiti of faces all pressed together in a tube, as the inside of an artery...Good morning good Monday to you — this morning there’s a good weightiness all around me; the world feels solid and maybe not entirely clear but present and necessary and open. The birds are a dawn chorus (thank you for that, Lucretia!), and the candle flickers over the words “Run your finger down the blackness behind my ribcage / make a puzzle of my womb / an alphabet of my fingers” (from the poem, taped to my wall, “Poem,” by Roberta Werdinger). How are you feeling your way into this Monday? What does the week hold in store for you? What are you carrying forward with you from this weekend?

A poem for today:

The Poems I Have Not Written
John Brehm

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems
I have not written would reach
from here to the California coast
if you laid them end to end.

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stay hungry

 

image of a door with black, spray-painted graffiti, "Stay Hungry"

(click on the image to view the full photo, which gives a different context from the close-up here. A whole different prompt, the full view, I think.)

Hello and good morning — happy Wednesday (if it is indeed Wednesday where you are) to you. There is tea here, where I’m writing you from, and candlelight, and a little quiet music. No foghorns that I can hear, just a car now and again, early commuters, or maybe the paper-delivery guy.

What’s it like where you are this morning? What’s it like in you this morning?

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step into the winter dark

sticker graffiti of a little girl in a flouncy skirt, holding a hammer up over one shoulder

she's going in to break it up

This morning I spent an hour writing in the notebook. It’s chilly here in the little apartment, but I got to wrap up in a bright red wrap that was knitted by my mother, so that helps.

What to say on a Wednesday morning? This is the slow time, the molasses time, the bundling time. Why does it, why do I feel, some need to go faster? Faster isn’t possible right now? All the gears are grinding to a halt. It’s not just Winter, the Winter Holidays, or Mercury Retrograde — it’s all of these plus deep inner-work that brings me into contact with my old stories, the ones I haven’t told, the ones I haven’t wanted even to look at, or let my throat and mouth shape.

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