Write to the Prompt

Write a story about the time you left your sister’s jacket on the bus, and about the girl who found it, and how she wore it to the fair, even though it was much too big for her. Include details: how the seams enclosed her in a cave of sagging navy cotton, and how she filled the pockets with barrettes and Jolly Ranchers. Tell us about how the heat melted the Jolly Ranchers onto the barrettes, and how the girl, let’s call her Sylvia, dug a cocoon of blue raspberry stickiness away from the clip that held her bangs away from her face. Show us her expression when the candy came away clean and she could see again.
Write a research paper, if you can, about the difference between Ramen noodles and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Explain the exegesis of both forms of nourishment, and allude to the special ways you can address the inherent salty sameness of their bases. Tell us about the first time you made egg drop soup from that dry crackling package of Ramen and how good it tasted with a dusting of paprika across its skin as it cooled. Explain how, when you need to make more than one meal out of something, such a soup can become a casserole of sorts overnight, and how black pepper, when dusted across the surface of this second dish, works its way down into the soggy filaments of noodle, giving the whole thing a deceptive saline freshness for just a moment.

Write a poem about the imaginary creature you built from other animals you knew, back in the fourth grade. Tell us about the fine silver veins that flowed across the wings of the animal and how it had a voice, but one seldom heard, like yours. Tell us about your brainchild's feet, how nimble and creaturely they were, and about the animal’s tail. Tell us how it looped through your dreams as you first imagined this beast, and how it danced and darted like the tail of the Cowardly Lion, off balance and in rhythm with its own inner ley lines, a barometer of all the fears and energies its owner carried through the world. Give it a name, and have it roar.
Write a descriptive paper about a flamingo. Explain the flamingo’s perspective on life and show us all its needs and problems. Let us feel what it’s like to have knees that bend backwards. Have us see the river water it lives in through your new flamingo eyes. Take us with you when you fly away, and have us reach the horizon along with you, a part of one big wing, a rising of color from mud into sky, a departure, a choice, a leavetaking, and a joining, a cacophony of birdvoice dangling down along the joints of flying legs so that all the other animals still hear it, long after the migrating flock has left them behind.

lks 2007

xiii ways of looking at some prayer flags

i.
Despite the cool spring wind
The prayer flags hang motionless.

ii.
I see their soft gray cloth
With the skin of
My feeling mind.

iii.
The prayer flags make friends
With the weathered gray wood
They rest against.

iv.
The travel of hornets
Is all one thing.
The way they buzz
The tattered flags
Is part of that thing.

v.
The old dragon’s mauve jaws
Carry age and the droop of solitude
In the prayer flags’ upper
Left hand corners.

vi.
The prayer flags turn pink
In the softening light
Of April dusk.

vii.
Once a merry string of
Primary color,
The prayer flags take it easy now.

viii.
See how the flags resist
Disappearance.
They hang like pale strips of soft iron
From ten-penny nails.

ix.
Beneath the prayer flags
And boards of smoke-gray wood
A strip of metal
Collapsed in last summer’s
hot June rain.


x.
I tell the prayer flags
A couple of my best secrets.
The gunmetal dog with the fat jowls
Keeps quiet
While I talk.

xi.
I don’t see the prayer flags
In the inky air of this
Thick summer evening.
If I listen and hear
What’s behind them
I can see how their edges
Catch light.

xii.
A thick goldenrod cord
Takes care of all the prayer flags,
Marigold bright
Like a sign
On a highway,
Pinning them to
A buckled gray rail.

xiii.
The storm has taken a long time
To gather.
When it does
It takes the prayer flags with it,
Squares of ash and rose
Cut free
By a big green wind.


--Laura Sorrells
January 2010