How to Write A Paint Strip Poem #2

How to Write a Poem from Paint Strip Prompt

Materials needed:
paint strip assortment

Directions:
1. Choose 3-5 paint strip color names that appeal to you.
2.  From your color name choices, settle on subject matter that first comes to mind.
3.  Wait for the first line to form in your mind and write it down without editing.|
4.  Continue writing without editing until you feel you have something.
5.  Set it aside for at least a week.
6.  Revise. Set the poem aside. Repeat.

This is from a paint strip-inspired poem I wrote five years ago and revised today. This is the first revision.

 

Blood Prophet

Danna

The prophet discovers her shadow

in the guts of her beloved.

She finds her darker self

emerging from that other body,

a red wine blush.

The prophet is a covered

bridge, blood, like hidden water

tunneling through her, its silent currents

eddying the rivers of her body,

until she, herself, is pierced by probing hands.

The prophet knows it is possible

to find the shape of her heart

beneath the ribs of a stranger,

refracted through the dark mirror
of humankind’s reflection.

The prophet is a kind of artist, her oracle a burin,

inscribing prophecy in careful runes on our copper hearts

Writing Days: Talent - February 28, 2012

February 28, 2012

Figment Daily Theme:
What are you really good at doing/making? Explain this talent of yours in a few sentences. Then, create a character who also has this same talent. BUT, this character must be the opposite sex of you. Next, have this opposite-sex-from-you-but-same-talent-having character wake up from unconsciousness on the side of the road in an unknown location, unsure of how he/she got there.

As this character tries to figure things out, begin to create a new world that he/she is struggling to understand. How will his/her talent fit into this situation, if at all?

Talent
Danna

My Sunday School teacher Miss Winterfield always looks straight at me when she tells our class it is a sin to hide your talent under a bushel. Miss Winterfield thinks my talent is the oboe, and my refusal to perform Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf at the Merry Miss talent show, evidence I have my talent stuffed under a bushel.

She's wrong. Music isn't my real talent.

I've been playing oboe ever since I was a little kid when I found my great uncle's oboe in the attic. Uncle William died in WWI and no one else in the family played. No one in the family wanted to give it away, either. When I told my aunt, William's sister I wanted to learn oboe, she looked at me like she might slap me, but instead told me she'd pay for lessons. I've been playing for eight years and I go take lessons at the University in Salt Lake from a professor who also is the principal oboe in the Utah Symphony. He says I should think about a life in music.

I've never told anyone that when I found my uncle's oboe, I also found his letters. From the stories his sister and my grandfather tell, I can tell no one ever knew him.

I think if he had lived, even though he would be old, we would be friends.

Writing Days: Place - February 10, 2012

February 10, 2012

Figment Daily Theme:
Through your writing, return to a place that was once significant to you that you've not visited for years. What is clear in your memory? What can't you quite remember? Where are the holes? Go to one of those holes and using what you can remember as clues, invent what might have been there.

In addition to Figment's prompt, recent news inspired this piece.

Place
Danna

February 10, 2012

Figment Daily Theme:
Through your writing, return to a place that was once significant to you that you've not visited for years. What is clear in your memory? What can't you quite remember? Where are the holes? Go to one of those holes and using what you can remember as clues, invent what might have been there.

Place
Danna

She stands on the uneven grass before her grandfather's grave and lays her flowers down. He was a man who was clear in his actions and affections. He didn't have much use for granddaughters. Or daughters.

Her daughter is playing among the dead, running between the headstones, careful not to step on the graves, as instructed. She is pretending to read the engraved words and says goodbye to each as she runs. People gathered in small groups smile as she skips past them.

The woman small talks about her iris bouquets and the heat, until she realizes she no longer hears her daughter's singsonging. Time freezes and a small fist pounds inside her ears. She sees the blond halo of her daughter's head and her breath returns. Her daughter is standing silent and completely still twenty feet from her.

Her daughter turns, a serious expression on her small face. Momma, come here.

The woman calls to her daughter to come back, but her daughter is resolute in her demand her mother come to her. She is ready to join in the game until she recognizes the name on the headstone. Her daughter is standing before the grave of Mr. Schoenfield.

Momma, come here. He wants to say hello.

Something close to a scream rumbles through her and she rushes to her daughter, grabs her up, and hurries to the car. Her daughter screams, I want to go back! I don't want to go!

Quiet, she says.

Once inside, she turns the air conditioning on high, and hides her furious tears behind sunglasses. Her hands grip and release the steering wheel.

I don't want to go! I don't want to go! her daughter screams and bucks against her car seat.

The woman thinks to drive to a nearby store and buy a knife, return when the crowds have left for their Memorial Day family picnics. She will leave her child with the sitter and come back and tear the grass over his grave to shreds as warning to stay away from her child.

She is sorry that Mrs. Schoenfield must spend eternity in the ground next to this man.

Writing Days: Syllable - February 9, 2012

Feb. 9, 2012

Figment Daily Theme:
This is a prompt I love to use when I first meet a new class. I tell them to take out their pens and write me a piece--the theme is up to them. It need not be long. But it needs to be a real scene. And the sole rule that frames what they write is this: You may not use a word with more than one syllable. It sounds hard, but "syllable" is the lone word used here that has more than one.

Syllable
Danna

You want my heart. You say it should be yours. My heart is mine. It is not yours.
You say you will die if I keep my heart. I say die.
You say I have no heart. I have a heart. It is mine. It is not yours.
You say I can not see your pain. I have eyes. They see. But they are mine. They are not yours.
You say I am stone. Yes. Yes, I am stone. I am like Mu.

Mu is mute, a place of gold and stone. Close the lips. Close the eyes. This is Mu. Mu floats in the mind of the past. Mu is old. Is Greek. Is root.

I say, this day, close your lips, be mute, close your eyes, float.
Forget your past, forget my heart, my eyes, me. Cut your roots, be stone, but not gold. Be old, but not Mu.

No, never Mu. I am Mu.

Writing Days: Over - February 8, 2012

February 8, 2012

Figment Daily Theme:
A character realizes that he or she has just outgrown—emotionally, physically, spiritually—something or someone that was once very precious.

Over
Danna

She is parked with the car running, listening to the local news, in a retirement home parking lot. A young nurse in a blue uniform is helping a resident, who is bent over like a fencing nail, walk around the small courtyard. She turns off the day's litany of woes and unrolls the window. The early autumn air still holds summer's promise. From the car it appears to her that the nurse is really taking an interest in this old man. The nurse walks in tandem with the old man, without looking around to see if anyone is watching. The nurse doesn't look toward the parking lot, or road, or anywhere else, wishing himself somewhere else. Wishing himself anywhere else. The nurse bends toward the old man and laughs, lays a hand lightly on his shoulder and gives him a light pat. The old man's laughter sounds like notes in b minor.

It reminds her of the tone of her life these last four years. She rolls up her window.

Even though she's not yet forty, she hopes that if she has to be in a home, there is a young person like this nurse who will listen to her stories, place a knowing hand on her shoulder.

She turns the air on and feels it blow her hair around her face. She calls her husband's cell knowing it will go to voicemail. She thinks to leave a message asking him if he'd mind moving his things out of their home. She asks what he'd like for dinner. She's thinking of making gyros.

The nurse is pushing the old man in a wheelchair back toward the home's back doors. She sees two women and their caretakers gathered under a large khaki umbrella. The womens' white hair lifts and shimmies in the slight breeze.

She leans into the air. She will ask him tomorrow.

Writing Days: Insult - February 7, 2012

February 7, 2012

Figment Daily Theme:
On occasion, we all accidentally say something stupid/awkward/insulting enough that we replay the offending conversation in our heads again and again, agonizing over our own doltishness. Write about a character who is currently being plagued by the recurring embarrassment of such an incident. (Or if you’d rather, write about your own experience trying to get over a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease.)

Insult
Danna

I'm a member of the weeding.

Who says such a thing? especially followed by, Jacob there is the farmer, and his little overgrown bride, the weed.

Followed by the standard prognostication of the bitter and disillusioned, I give them six months. Eight. Tops. Want to lay bets?

Who says such a thing?

Apparently, I do, right into the karaoke microphone,after three champagne toasts, two shots, and one Xanex.

Brilliant! Mature! You're PhD in Ethics really sheared the rough edges off of you. God, I behaved like that character from that ridiculous Julia Roberts' movie. What business is it of mine that she wore a celery-colored green sash? Or that the guests were actually expected to sing K.C. and the Sunshine Band? Barry White? Madonna? Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant, Sara!

Note: if you're tipsy and feel the need to gamble at the expense of your best friend's future, make sure the mic is OFF!

Jacob hasn't spoken to me since.

Writing Days: Inside - February 6, 2012

February 6, 2012
Figment Daily Theme:
Set a scene inside an institution of some kind (a school, a hospital, a bank). Now take us to a room that only a few people normally have access to (a janitorial closet, the morgue, an executive suite). What happens when someone gets in who shouldn't be there?

Inside
Danna

I haven't been to my husband's office since his new assistant redecorated it for him. I'm surprised that it looks more den than office. This is where he spends almost every moment of his waking life, when he's not in his man cave talking in low tones. Two stuffed pheasants occupy the majority of his desk. His laptop looks like an afterthought. Both pheasants are male, no surprise here. I have a flash of scissoring the bright plumage from the stuffed forms and throwing it up and watching the feather confetti flit all over the drab Berber carpet. Instead I spit in his black leather chair. I thought I was past this.

I'm not supposed to be here. I don't care where I'm supposed to be anymore. I'm supposed to be one building over with the rest of his office and their significant others, getting kissed on both cheeks, making nice with the other wives,and not noticing how my husband and his tweedy assistant always seem to go missing at the same time. The expectation makes me imagine a technicolor scene where I set my hair afire and run for the nearest cliff. Instead I open his receipt file and finger through until I come to the receipts I knew would be there. I mark the place with a post it, strip a feather from the smaller male pheasant, then make two copies on the office copier. I walk back into my husband's office and return the receipts to the file folder. On my way out I paper clip a feather to one of the receipts and put it on top of my husband assistant's closed laptop.

Some people from my husband's office are outside smoking. They wave. I wave and head for the car.

Writing Days: Secret - February 3, 2012

February 3, 2012

Figment Daily Theme:
Invent a secret for a character. Instead of deep and dark, make it pleasant and pleasurable, but a secret nonetheless. Now narrate a scene where your character is forced to reveal this hidden tidbit. For an added challenge, write an additional scene that takes place later, after the big secret has been divulged. How has this revelation changed the way your character feels about this once precious secret?

Secret
Danna

Alchemy is my favorite word. I've made the word every part of speech. Alchemical, (adjective), is my favorite, mainly because it tastes like dark chocolate infused with just a hint of chili. Dark and spicy.

No one, not even my husband knows that I taste words.

My earliest memory of tasting words was in the first grade when Mrs. Abshire read from See Jane Run, and my mouth was suddenly filled with the taste of apple pie with a slice of sharp cheddar on top.

Grade school instruction was filled with fruit of every variety, mixed with complementing cheese, until fourth grade. Everything changed with Mrs. Pierce and algebra. It wasn't Mrs. Pierce's fault. She couldn't help it that math was her subject. She thought I hated her, and from the disgusted faces and dry heaving I exhibited all through her lessons, I can't blame her. Algebra was the problem. The word, algebra, and all its mixing of letters and numbers tasted like rotted celery gone liquid. Fourth grade was a terrible year. I had to be excused from class, even after we'd moved on to the county seats, or Utah history. My teachers thought something terrible must be going on at home, My mother thought I had an ulcer.

Huff Post & Figment: Daily Writing Prompts to Inspire You

The generous folks of Figment have just launched Figment Daily Themes. Sign up to receive a daily writing prompt via email, January 2 through March 30. This is just the thing to jumpstart you out of your woe is I slump, off the couch and into your writing desk chair.

The Huffington Post provided a list of writing prompts to inspire. Here's to a writing- filled weekend!Lev Grossman And Others Provide Writing Prompts To Inspire You