I was the last thing –
			    the thing at the bottom 
                                              in the end
                                 at the end 
			when she wanted everything

                                   I was the last thing she wanted.

She couldn’t care less. Even when she cared less,
				she cared the least.
and I was the last,
		        		the last,     the least thing 
				she wanted.

                  The last thing she wanted was me.

---

Prompt: Consider the syntax in a poem, how it turns on a single word. Meaning shifts slightly and creates layers like the rings in a trees, related and repetitive.  Consider the first line the last and the last line the first. Write the poem to be read backwards and forwards.

---

Corinne Walsh earned a Pushcart Prize nomination for short fiction in 2006. Pausing to raise her family, the poetry muse subsists. Her poems have appeared in Abandoned Mine, Acropolis Journal, and Tiny Frights. She is currently working on a full length book of poems.

We are blue together. 
So blue, 
like water.
You run into me, 
and I into you.
Our legs form one fence, 
standing in the green grass.
Above long posts, our round muscled haunches 
float like clouds, billowing in shared sky. 
Young, welded together, we’re in the spell 
of new love.
As we grow, 
weathering storms,
will we part, pulled to untangle?
If so, I’ll remember you 
as blue, shining like ice, like diamond, 
like the clean shell of a new egg.
I will hold this feeling of us 
fitting together, fingers in the same glove, 
generating warmth
into our blue world.

---

Prompt: Start a poem with the line “We are _____ together”, filling in the blank with a color, and see where that takes you.

---

Marjorie Moorhead is author of Every Small Breeze, as well as three chapbooks, and the forthcoming collection, What I Ask. Her poems are in many journals and sixteen anthologies, to date. Marjorie writes from the river valley border of NH/VT.

house-sparrow-sparrow   sparrow-anywhere-and-always
cardinal-anywhere-and-always

hawk-hawk-maybes    diving yards across
some  crow-crow-crow-heavy-landing  on railing

yellowthroat     really?

song? sparrow tree? sparrow 

mourning-dove-or-mockingbird-what-counts-as-seeing
junco-or-sparrow   in-boxwood-depths-who-knows
robin-against-the-lit-up-sky-then-again    many days
house-finch-not-close finch-finch-shapes-on-shed

tufted titmouse Carolina wren Chickadee sunshine

sudden starling-starling-starling-starling-and-
robin-robin-robin   not-intermingling 

wind-lashed-leaf-no-one   except squirrel-of-course

woodpecker-hairy-or-downy   red-bellied-sometimes
upwards-nuthatch downwards-nuthatch blue jay

white-throated-sparrow-sparrow  junco   hopping picking
phoebe-phoebe-phoebe-prelude   dove-dove-necking

---

Prompt: Keep a log of something, anything; sporadically, contiguously; for a short period or over an extended period, and take it from there. It may help to keep the object of your attention concrete and centered around your senses.

---

Burgi Zenhaeusern (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Behind Normalcy (CityLit Press, 2020). She co-edited the translations of the anthology Knocking on the Door of The White House (zozobra publishing, 2017). Her work, most recently, appeared in Little Patuxent Review and as broadside from Ashland Poetry Press.

Sometimes pain hits and I think
soon I’ll arise and go back
to those dark rows of pine 
between the old house and its street. 

That little depleted wood
with its road-bank of starveling brambles.

What was I like as a child?

My mother says easy, my father says “I don’t know.”
My mother says, on your tenth birthday
I remember you climbed a tree
to escape your own party. 

Bark under palm-callous.
Sap lurking in every inch. 

I was fast, and rude.
Another -- girl -- followed me up
got a twig in her eye.

Vast blood smothered it.

Everything obvious needed words then. And long after. 

---

Prompt: What scenes from your own life might be simultaneously banal and uncanny? What were some of your routines, your unarticulated habits, as a young person?  Did they involve moving through particular spaces? Making particular arrangements of items that were important to you? Repeating or writing certain words? What’s the unmapped habitual territory of where you began to become a person you recognize – most of the time – today?

Write down something you used to do all the time when you were younger but haven’t done or thought about for years now. Be very detailed. You could even write it down as a “how-to” list for someone seeking to recreate this remembered set of actions. Once you have the ritual or habit written out, consider: where does it resemble a myth, a fairytale, a ghost-story?

Rewrite your ritual, your habit, and add vocabulary from the weird, the magical, even the apocalyptic. Play with scale. Maybe the objects and events you remember can be represented as much bigger or much smaller now? Maybe they’re ready to burst into cool flame. Maybe some of them have developed voices.

Don’t however allow your recovered scene to be pulled fully into a specific genre of non-realistic storytelling.  Use the first-draft written version of your own habit/ritual to draw those genres toward you — toward what you did and who you were becoming.  

---

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts. She reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine and reviews books for Strange Horizons. Their poetry chapbooks, And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death, and Endeavors To Obtain Perpetual Motion, are available from the Ethel Zine Press.

At first when we return, the animals
do not know us. It’s as if they’ve forgotten

humanness—our noise, our cars
and guns. At dusk, the deer

press close to screened windows,
and their breath trembles

the emptiness suspended
between those fine wires. The musk

of skunks leaks beneath the door
like stripes of light

from clouds in a Constable study: silken pour
of rose-pink over yellow, a hue that refuses

to long for God. The first
day back, I stand beneath

the felled boxelder’s ghost. Now my shadow
will no longer merge

with its shadow, then detach itself
as noon unfurls its hot,

bright shawl. Soon the woods
will rise from their knees

to enfold rabbit and bear
back into their larger dark. Rain

will come sudden and hard, vanishing
instantly into the porous earth. And then

the day will be blue again, blue
and ruined, and the animals

will remember us
and know to be afraid.

---

Prompt: Write into the loss or death of a more-than-human being, and how this loss has changed things for you. The being could be one you felt intimate with, or one that seemed more distant. How is this absence felt in your everyday life?

---

Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Thicket. She lives on ancestral Lenape land in a small town in the mountains of New York State.