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

This Shell

This shell is a silver blanket, wrinkled from travel.
This shell is like the head of a fox, a narrow triangle of clever insouciance.
This shell is a crown with broken edges. Its owner found it in a parking lot, a furl of paper with grease stains beside the fleur de lis.
This shell is a rubber stamp, an icon of ownership and approval.
This shell is a daisy, one of those big ones you see in the median of the highway, with a grainy, tousled center the shade of French’s mustard on a hotdog at a ballgame.
This shell remembers the time you went skinny dipping at Pismo Beach when you were eighteen and the moon was just past being full.
This shell has a way of catching fluorescent light and making it softer.
This shell knows what you had for breakfast, because it was sitting there on your table as you added raisins to the sweet cinnamon soup of your oatmeal.
This shell laughs a lot and was found by a child in a good mood. It needs to be around people who tell jokes.
This shell is like a statue I saw last week, a cherub standing on a pedestal in a garden, his belly round and dark in the afternoon sun.
This shell got chewed on by your Boston terrier and has a set of tooth marks embedded in it now.
This shell came to me in the middle of the night once and murmured something unintelligible to me under its breath.
This shell distracts me from doing my work with its pink luminescence.
This shell is a lava lamp waiting to brighten a very dark room with its tumbling pods of pink and blue liquid.
This shell got dropped on the kitchen floor but didn’t break. It picked up a piece of eggshell with its fine shellteeth though and they are shells of sorts together now.
This shell helps me teach because it looks like anything and everything.
This shell wants to be returned to the dunes. It’s lonely for lots of sand.
This shell puts out fires with the siren song of its contours and the momentum of its whispered wishes.
This shell resembles a Viking. It has that kind of ferocity about it, that invading soul.
This shell resists being mine although I carry it with me in my suitcase when I travel. I’ve nearly left it behind three times now, but I always remember it at the last minute.
This shell won’t pay my bills, but it would if it could.
This shell’s voice resists the kind of language we know.
This shell holds things together with its textures and edges in a way that surprises me every time I see it.
This shell is like an extension cord, a path from electricity’s source to an ear or a tool.
This shell is either a ghost or a wicked witch. I’m not sure which yet.
This shell has a shine like a Coleman lantern inside a tent.
This shell is like rust, a slow devouring of surface, a pouring of bloodtint into what used to be a mild field of plain gray metal.
This shell came from a thrift store and hasn’t been near the ocean in a long time.
This shell is Neil Young’s rusty harmonica, lost among model trains, waiting to buzz its owner’s lips again at the start of a song.
This shell is a place where something small and salty once lived.
This shell holds many stories, each of them a curve of voice and water, a trajectory of imagined seaweed and the remembered currents of fish traveling past.
This shell needs your eyes to do its job.
This shell sounds like the passing beam of a lighthouse moving muffled through banks of Atlantic fog.
This shell is the birthplace of a small mollusk.
This shell won’t tell any tales out of school.
This shell belonged to my cousin Ruth but then she gave it to me when I said I admired its shape.
This shell has an accent all its own, a pidgin burr that makes up its own words.
This shell is a paperweight, and students like to pick it up and check it out. I keep waiting for someone to drop it.
This shell is a way of seeing, a spiral of narrative continuity in the soulspace of my classroom, a harbor for writing prompts, and a way for me to lose myself in daydreams of Monterey and Cumberland Island.
This shell is a gift, a coin, a piece of currency from me to you saying: be still. Hold out your hand. This is my heart, and if you listen, you can hear it beating through the whorls of chitin, a lonesome percussion that needs no turn of phrase or metaphor to give it life.

I wrote this poem during preplanning in August of 2007 after reading a lesson plan in a book by George Hillocks, Narrative Writing, which was about using a bunch of seashells to teach figurative language. A couple of hours later, during lunch, I found in the teacher workroom a brown plastic bucket of seashells that another teacher had evidently collected over summer vacation. I may use them as part of a creative writing exercise after standardized testing is over and I am freer to do such things.
© Laura Sorrells 2007
all rights reserved

Throw Me a Bone

Throw me a bone. Hand me a prompt, a set of words, a place to start, a seedbed or maybe just a seed. Tag me It and push me out from this place of big margins. I don’t need much. Just a few syllables, a sentence fragment even, like this one. Remind me that the weather has a skin, a voice, and some days wings and talons for gripping. Hand me a pencil you found in the hallway. I won’t mind the toothmarks or the empty pocket of air where the eraser used to be. I don’t plan on making those kinds of judgments anyway. Put on some music, something that sounds like something it isn’t: a string that hums like a friendly old machine or a reed that burbles like boiling water. I won’t need anything else. No slices of apple to lick clean of peanut butter, no salty chips to hear crunch while I think. no black tea to befriend until it’s strong and cold, like the big sky we saw that night at the orchard, a fierce and reachless bowl of stars with a flavor like that of sugar on metal. Just this: a shove, a nudge, a chord, a frame, a word. A smallness, waiting to grow layers, to disturb, sing, fracture, collide, transform, and humble. You won’t get back what you gave me but something else instead: a joke where solemnity once lived, a pile of fragrant sawdust where you used to have a two-by-four, a puzzle thrown askew until the spoons and hollows of its picture make no sense at all to the eye you’re used to seeing them with. You’ll have to learn to solve its riddle with another sense, one you might not know you have yet. Not a third eye, but a shudder that alchemizes and translates from just beneath your ribcage and doesn’t mind the scattershot way it has to work to collate and harvest what the world gives it. When you’re ready, you’ll find an ark, a big ship ready for sailing on the roughest mythical seas your storytelling soul can plant and nurture. I’m ready when you are.