1. Read the below poem by Judith Barrington, Why Young Girls Like to Ride Bareback, out loud several times to find the rhythm of the poem, noting how the title gives you a specific entry point and physicality to follow, but the word choice, tone and structure, line breaks and all, give us a parallel experience of sensuality, eroticism, and/or young sexual awakening.

1. Next, write a poem about doing something like washing the dishes, cleaning your car, planting a garden, roller skating, walking alone by the river–anything you know how to do well that you can describe in a similar way as Barrington. The more mundane or ordinary the better! Write into a kind of hyper-description, choosing diction, sounds, line breaks, etc. that create a suggestive parallel experience to the thing you’re describing. For example, how can washing the dishes suggest deep grief?

WHY YOUNG GIRLS LIKE TO RIDE BAREBACK

      by Judith Barrington
 
You grasp a clump of mane in your left hand,
spring up and fall across her back;
then, pulling on the wiry black hair
which cuts into your palm and fourth finger,
haul yourself up till your right leg
swings across the plump cheek of her hindquarters.

Now you hold her, warm and alive, between your thighs.
In summer, wearing shorts, you feel the dander
of her coat, glossy and dusty at the same time,
greasing up the insides of your calves,
and as she walks, each of your knees in turn
feels the muscle bulge out behind her shoulder.

Trotting's a matter of balance. You bounce around
unable to enter her motion as you will when the trot
breaks and she finally waltzes from two to three time.
Nothing to be done at the trot but grab again that mane
that feels, though you don't yet know it, like pubic hair,
and straddle her jolting spine with your seat bones

knowing that when the canter comes, you will suddenly
merge -- you and that great, that powerful friend:
she, bunching up behind, rocking across the fulcrum,
exploding forward on to the leading leg, and you
digging your seat down into the sway of her back,
your whole body singing: we are one, we are one, we are one.

Tara Shea Burke is from Paris, Virginia and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Visual Arts Center of RVA. Her writing, both poems and short creative nonfiction, is recently published in Moist, Screen Door Review, Shenandoah Literary, Khôra, and Southern Humanities Review. Their creative practice has recently expanded to textiles and sewing, quilting, collage, and lyric prose–both a memoir in essays and spec fic about living in the in between of climate change. Her teaching focuses on the human mind, memory, writing, thinking, and creating as a process, and our experiences in and of the natural world.

Setting Limits

When drafting new work, topical prompts almost never work for me as a writer. If you tell me to write about a time I was surprised, my whole life will suddenly roll out before me like a scripted narrative, no surprises to be found. I work better by giving myself constraints, so today I will offer up one of my favorite options that may help you expand your 30/30 drafting possibilities into new territory.

Number Systems

Write about a topic of your choosing, but give yourself one (or all) of the following numerical
constraints:

● each line must be the same number of words or syllables
● generate a random six digit number and then use that pattern to determine how many
lines will be in each stanza of your draft
● Choose a number that is significant to you in some way – the birthday of your first
love, the phone number of your childhood home – and write a poem where each line
contains the same number of words as each digit. Repeat for multiple stanzas (For
example, a birthdate of 2/18/68 would give you a five line stanza with 2 words, one
word, 8 words, 6 words and 8 words per line.)

Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Unrivered ( 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Baltimore Review, Salamander, and many other journals. Donna lives in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. She is the co-founder/co-editor of Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.

Write a poem about a memory as if you were teaching others to recreate it as something physical: a recipe, a pattern, an instruction manual, etc. Use the terminology of the specific craft or activity (e.g., crochet, woodworking, electronics, car repair). Include materials and tools. Assign it a skill level (novice, intermediate, advanced); would it be useful to have any skills or knowledge before they begin? Give detailed instructions, handy tricks, cautions. Embrace absurdly literal implications.

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet and songwriter from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her family and a variety of interesting critters. Her work has appeared in print and online at Moist Poetry Journal, Full Mood Mag, Stone Circle Review, Contemporary Verse 2, The Fiddlehead, Capital City Press Anthology (Vol. 4), Ghost City Review, slips slips, and elsewhere. She has published two chapbooks through Prairie Vixen Press, and her third chapbook, Amphbiography, is forthcoming from Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Press in Summer 2026. 

Write about a city (or place) that you changed your opinion about.

Note from J.D.: I’ve thought about this a lot as I have gone back and forth through the Bronx while travelling. I always thought of the Bronx as pretty much the worst part of New York, but now whenever I drive through it I feel so happy. The topography and the woods. The architecture. It’s so lovely.

J.D. Ho was born by the sea, raised on a rock, schmoozed in Hollywood, drove to Austin, Texas for an MFA, and now lives among foxes and deer on a sliver of east coast green. J.D.’s work has appeared in Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals. J.D. is the author of Backyard Alchemy, a new nonfiction collection from River River Books.

Write a poem about something beautiful in what is seen as ugly, like the calf in Laura Gilpin’s poem “The Two-headed Calf”:

The Two-headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
 
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

Kevin Philip lives in North Carolina and currently studies AI, Robotics, and Gaming at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He enjoys playing the guitar and annoying his dog Polly.