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

which direction are you from here
kidding I know it’s down

I would be a wretched river
so weary of waiting to be traveled to

my darling westward witch
my east my Eden my every

each of us one single individual water
amid all the many waters

nostalgic for spring & source  
before we bend around the first bend

(facing the audience) you know
how long this took us 

you think it’s easy to meander
for a thousand years 

in a ditch made by melting ice
(back to you) join me 

the rocks are slippery
the cold takes the breath

Prompt: Write a poem whose syntax makes you slightly uncomfortable, a poem with an inconsistent but intentional relationship to the sentence, a poem without comma or period but maybe parentheses.

Amorak Huey is the author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021). Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Notice the red tongues of cannas flowering at the front
of the house, the dog’s slow arthritic rise as he wiggles over 
to lick your hand. Ignore the weeds sprouting from between 
the paving stones, no matter how often I tug them out. 
Come in and kick off your shoes. Or don’t, the floors never 
quite clean, littered with pebbles of gravel unlodged 
from the soles of my trainers after walking the path around 
the lake. We can visit there later, watch the herons wade 
majestic, stir the shallows with their legs then dart long beaks 
beneath the surface to catch their lunch. But for now, help 
yourself to a drink. Never mind the smudges on the refrigerator, 
the handle always just a little sticky, the odd dish in the sink. 
Sit anywhere—at the kitchen island, edges chipped by 
my son rotating back and forth on the metal chairs, or on
the brown chaise that fits perfectly beneath the dining room 
window, part of an old sectional I couldn’t bear to discard.
Come sit beside me as the dew burns away and the sun glides 
higher over the cottonwoods and pines. The dog will curl 
at our feet to warm his slow bones as condensation forms
on our glasses of mint tea clinking with ice. Don’t bother 
with a coaster. A mark will remind me you were here .

Writing Prompt

Choose an abstract concept or emotion that might show up to visit, whether it is welcome or unwelcome. Using either second person and/or epistolary form, write a one-sided conversation with that concept/emotion about its visit. Try to incorporate images that illustrate or imply its meaning or feeling and how you are reacting to it. Use at least eight imperative sentences.

[If you hate writing titles (like I do), call your draft “When _______Comes to Call, I _________”]

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.