prompt

Write a poem whose vernacular is equally familiar and foreign: a long-traveled visitor overheard in childhood sleep, a great-great-grandparent’s native tongue. Let the poem be strange and unforgiving, let it twist its ribbons into a careening mass, let it speak only in ciphers as it drains its bathwater, rolls up the carpets, unearths the daffodil bulbs and eats them, one by one, there will be no spring flowers but this is winter, child, and winter claims its own. Let the poem face winter one morning across the barren yard, a creature in sodden ferns and a missing tooth, the poem wrapped only in flour sacks and humming its high-pitched song. Stand stalwart beside the poem, hand it the inky rags and the sawdust, the lost keys and your childhood shoes, but do not watch. The poem is thrumming louder and louder and winter sits on its haunches, weighing its choices and tapping a single claw against the ice.

prompt

Write a poem in which two perennial motifs— sweetchild naïf and crackling blackheart— are joined by a third, a robber girl on her mule. Let her enter the poem and alter everything: the shape of the sky, the contours of the story, and the fullness of your breath. In what order will you despise her, desire her, and forget her? How many years later will you realize that you should have followed her out of the poem, knife swinging at her hip, a swig of something bitter in her canteen? In the long hours of the night, try to resurrect the color of her hair, the smell of her fingers. Let her throw you a single thread, and let yourself lose it. There will always be a mitten abandoned in the snow, and a shard of glass in every heart.

prompt

Write a poem that disappeared into the mud long ago, whose bones are water and whose eyes are fish, and who emerges only on the coldest, stickiest nights, trailing its rags and odor, walking window to window in the small purplish town. It’s forgotten the feel of sheets, the smell of turkey, but it can see the tables laid for the morning, can see the pewter and the glass, the gently rounded forms of oil lamps and terracotta flowers. Call to it softly, then stomp the dry grass into the shape of your own body. Let the poem lay itself down, and then back away slowly. Which animals will soon draw near, and which will lie down beside the poem, twitching softly in their hay-scented dreams?

prompt

Write a poem that chooses red when it could be colluding and moves forward in time when other choices are clearly simpler. Will the poem blur its discrepancies or cage them wildly, like parakeets? Will bracken rise from its surfaces, or will its waters turn ashy and monosyllabic, burdened with baby carriages and the cry of a single freight train? Out on the river a girl rides a boat of perfect metaphor: nothing to touch but everything in view, bobbing from shore to shore dry as a raspy bone. Sing her that song she once knew, the one with the billygoat and the necklace of flowers. Someone is burning the fields; someone is misremembering the park in Paris, late in autumn, with the leaves like wet shoes discarded in the night.