My science fair projects were simple
and miraculous. Father taught me 
to float a needle on water, to transform
the carnation’s white petals 
with the food coloring droppers
my mother pinched to dye frosting.

After school 
I collected rocks.
Identified with schoolwords:
Igneous, Metamorphic, Sedimentary.
A bluegreen stone 
I named Greenie. 

My mother had a pet rock in her childhood. 
Her pet rock had a cardboard house 
to live in.

I asked her over and over—
But what did you want to be? 
I wanted to be a mother.
I don’t know.
I didn’t want 
to be anything. 
Maybe a counselor.
This satisfied me. 

When I graduated high school
my fourth grade teacher mailed me the letter
I wrote to myself. My 10 year old voice 
strange and familiar. Instructions
to the adulthood
she designed—
god	         wife
mother write

The first story I wrote was about a 10 year old girl
who loved rocks. The story named them pebbles.
She traveled to Arizona to look at pebbles.
She found a good pebble
and put it in her pocket.

The story ended in that pocket.
 

Prompt
Write a poem that begins or ends somewhere very small—a corner from your childhood home,
the bottom of a flower vase, a cabinet under the stairs, your shower, a whisper, a child’s sock.
Where does that smallness lead (or guide) you?

Millie Tullis (she/her) is a writer, teacher, folklorist, and researcher. Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Millie is EIC of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina.

of the birds we kept 
seeds in our pockets
our hands swooping 
to sprinkle dirt

eyes migrated
to uninterrupted sky
found the bare curve
of power lines 

plastic bags
snagged on branches
the rustle of skin 
scattered song

Prompt

Imagine a world where a single species no longer exists, how might this affect you personally, unexpectedly. What would you miss? What have you taken for granted? Write a short poem that outlines this loss and the behaviors your grief might bring to try and bring the species “to life” again.

Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, and EcoTheo Review. You can find him on his website http://www.jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.

buds open their mouths too soon for a new taste of rain
other flowers blur into brushstrokes this way

petals cling to rain as if this thirst were slakeable
mist nestles in a crevice of petal this way

scent commingles and splits like fingers interlacing 
you lilac the air in every season this way

I pool in the petal sweep of your waist
lick raindrops off the dip of your lips this way

your hand a blossoming of promises tracing
the brief lifespan of lilacs you make me forget this way

Prompt

My poem began with a photo of lilacs after rain that a friend sent with the message that became the title. Find an image or household object that reminds you of someone else. Write a ghazal* that explores the gaps or spaces the object creates and the ways that person occupies or travels those spaces.

*This form tends to appear as couplets with a repeated word or phrase, but you can be as rigid or as flexible as you like. Play around until you feel like the constraints enhance the content. 

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her family, a tuxedo cat, and a tarantula. Her work has appeared in Moist Poetry Journal, EcoTheo Review, Stone Circle Review, CV2, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. Find her chapbooks at Prairie Vixen Press (https://prairievixenpress.ca)

…a single sentence to the seafloor 
	of sky and started to scry 
so hard I laughed aloud,
	laughed a cloud of crickets. 
Cried a crowd of droplets 
	dropped to earth. Ate my worth
in gold. Got told lies in cycles by
	magnetite and meteor. Mired 
myself muddy. Bloodied my hands 
	into hammers. Nailed and nailed 
by nothing but nothing. Noted knots on 
	my knuckles matched notches 
in my throat, coated in cough syrup 
	and caught lyric like barbed hooks 
baited with contrition. Choked. Choked up. 
	Battered my voice into submission, 
a clubbed cod deck-drawn and drowning
	in open air. Open to where clouds 
gather and gasp into the shape of gone. Gone
	into great arrangements of rain,
great downward embraces. Rainheld hands 
	who tickled the peninsula's misty toes. 
The land laughed my voice back. Tides 
	of laughter echoed all along 
this woeful shoreline. Wave-traced, no man
	—I am an island—
nor sound returned to listen, but 
	I had heard my own raised fists,
quotation marks of my voice’s 
	vision, lift as they said…

Prompt

Grief Alphabets & the Alliterative Engine – being bereaved can sap one of language. When I’ve come up, head first, against that great, deadening silence, I’ve found (only after long, difficult periods of trial and error) that language contains the spark of its own re-animation. I’ve also noticed that nature offers Their own recourse. Rhyme and alliteration, like tiny flames, carry thought and meaning through their flickering as it alights from one line to the next. Suddenly, a poem condenses; is created.

Make one column with an alphabetical list of words you associate with grief or the loss you are experiencing. Beside that column, make a parallel list for each letter of features in the natural world that begin with that letter. (For example, the columns for “A” might read “anguished | allium”). Once you have exhausted the alphabet, and/or your energy, revisit the lists together and pick out and elaborate on any patterns or droplets you devised. What anguished allium blossoms may sprout?

Adrian Dallas Frandle (they/he) is a poet and queer fish who writes to the world about its future. They are Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Press. Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth out now with Kith Books. Read more at adriandallas.com