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Jan 30
1 min

At Seventeen: Poetry Prompt

Happy Sunday! I am giving you three choices for your prompt this week. You can choose one or mix and match, depending on how much of a challenge you are up for. Prompt 1: Read today's poem, Count Down, by Robin Morgan. Then write an unrhymed sonnet of any type that plays with one or more cliche phrases. Prompt 2: Write a poem that examines what it was like for you at seventeen. Prompt 3: Write a poem with seventeen lines. Each line should have seventeen syllables in each line

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Christine Delea

Jan 30
1 min

Count Down by Robin Morgan

Count Down by Robin Morgan Survival is the final offer that arrives at the eleventh hour just when pain to the tenth power would kill you with another ninth degree. By then, relief strikes you brief as an eighth note; you wear doom proudly; it’s your seventh seal. But life whispers through your sixth sense of what might await you in some fifth dimension where miracle is saved for the fourth quarter. Tricked, you sigh and rise on the third day. You know better, but with no sec

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Christine Delea

Jan 26
1 min

Wildlife by Heather Treseler

winner, 2021 WB Yeats Society Contest Wildlife by Heather Treseler All strut and gibbering, wattles and caruncles, tom turkeys parade at dusk, panoply of feathers fanned, snoods engorged and dangling over their sharpened beaks while their heads turn from red to white to blue in tricolor blush, pulsing placards above their sexual taxis. Hens, loitering in shade, graze acorns and the occasional grub, an eye cocked, nonplussed. They've seen this all before. Ben Franklin thought

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Christine Delea

Jan 23
2 min

Summary Sonnet: Poetry Prompt

Use today's poem, "The Fall of the House of Usher," by Reed Whittemore, as your inspiration for this week's prompt. This prompt has two parts. Feel free to do just one. Part One: Choose a well-known piece of literature or a movie and summarize it in a poem. Part Two: Use a sonnet form for your summary poem. Whittemore used the Italian sonnet form (also called Petrarchan) for his rhyme scheme and the stanza form of English sonnets (also called Shakespearean sonnets). His sonne

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Christine Delea

Jan 23
1 min

The Fall of the House of Usher by Reed Whittemore

published in A Geography of Poets, Edited by Edward Field The Fall of the House of Usher by Reed Whittemore It was a big boxy wreck of a house Owned by a classmate of mine named Rod Usher, Who lived in the thing with his twin sister. He was a louse and she was a souse. While I was visiting them one wet summer, she died. We buried her, Or rather we stuck her in a back room for a bit, meaning to bury her When the graveyard dried. But the weather got wetter. One night we were bo

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Christine Delea

Jan 20
1 min

Winter In Another Country by Ai

published in Poetry, March 1980 I was born in Cologne. That word again: Cologne. I let my mouth fill with it as my mother did when the pains began and that word was black currant jam on her tongue. The sweetness filled her, as the iron bed painted gold gleamed, as the cottage began to spin, as she herself spun on the sharp end of nothingness, until even her brunette hair had become blonde, her skin, her irises blonde and she became her own memory. I wake beside the wicker bas

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Christine Delea

Jan 16
1 min

Stormy Weather: Poetry Prompt

Ugh. I have a cold (which is why I am posting this prompt so late in the late). But having a cold led to my thinking of cold and hot, warm and chilly, clear and cloudy, and all sorts of weather words. Today's prompt? Write a poem in which the weather plays a part in some way; it could be the setting you describe, a metaphor for a relationship, an excuse to dip into some etymology, or something else. Here's wishing you warmth and sunshine (if that's what you like--if not, I wi

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Temptation of the Composer by Airea D. Matthews

Christine Delea

Jan 16
1 min

Temptation of the Composer by Airea D. Matthews

published in Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Temptation of the Composer by Airea D. Matthews Oh Shepherd, our honeyed marriage bed in the meadow was too narrow and though you herd wild things, you were deaf to my footsteps. As you lay there in the dew of me, curled, satiated, I tiptoed backwards toward our door under twisted reeds. Out where pasture led to brackish waters and red-hot mists rose from qu

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Father’s Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

Christine Delea

Jan 12
1 min

Father’s Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

Father’s Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez from The Small Claim of Bones, 2014 Softly, it always began softly. Then slowly swelled to a wail. Men’s voices. Maybe seven of them up on the hill behind the house. A breeze through the window stirred the curtains like clouds. I was five, or six. Around midnight it would start—such a doleful sound. They were drinking. It was Saturday and the mines were closed. Their song would wake me—their longing. It was

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My Baby Just Wrote Me a Letter: Poetry Prompt

Christine Delea

Jan 9
1 min

My Baby Just Wrote Me a Letter: Poetry Prompt

No, this prompt does not involve The Box Tops' 1967 song, "The Letter" (but if you can work it in, go for it!). Rather, write a letter to your younger self. This type of poem is called an epistolary. The tone of the poem can be whatever you wish. The form can be free verse, a prose poem form, or a traditional verse form. You can write a letter of advice, comfort, or a look forward. You can focus on one meaningful event (parents' divorce, first heartbreak, etc.). You can take

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Christine Delea

Jan 9
1 min

Decency by Emily Jungmin Yoon

published in The Paris Review, Issue 227, Winter 2018 Decency by Emily Jungmin Yoon When a man threw his fist into a wall next to my eye I said that was love, that love was rage. I was in the habit of loving anyone who laid a cold hand on my face and said he’d pray for me. Or anyone who prays. I thought apology was love and so I loved to hear a man say sorry. I loved to forgive because it meant I was a goddess. I forgave because he couldn’t possibly forgive himself.

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The Sun Never Pointed Out That Metal Piece by Ayesha Asad

Christine Delea

Jan 5
1 min

The Sun Never Pointed Out That Metal Piece by Ayesha Asad

published in Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Issue 26, FEB 2021 His beard was stained straw, smoked by desert wind & lipped by sand. His clothes, greased, & his dog, pale & red-rimmed, lion eyes steered by the North star. I watched it kick up the dust that settled around, drag its belly across dried green undergrowth where the neighbor’s dog waited with barks that echoed in ringlets across the darkening canyon. We were parched, & our tire was whittled clean through by sharp silver m

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Christine Delea

Jan 2
1 min

For a Lyrical New Year: Poetry Prompt

This week, let's try to write a pure lyric poem. Put your speaker in a specific moment and then describe the scene. Focus on tangible details that, taken together, connect and make a whole that goes beyond the parts. Resist the urge to describe everything. Avoid adverbs. Be particularly aware of the speaker's tone, and use it as a tool to convey not just attitude but the point of the poem. Concentrate on the language, and use one or more of the following: assonance consonance

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Breaking Down in the South by Gail White

Christine Delea

Jan 2
1 min

Breaking Down in the South by Gail White

Breaking Down in the South by Gail White It knocked me over to learn there’s no such thing as a nervous breakdown. My aunts and uncles had them all the time. It was spoken of in whispers, like drink, divorce, and cancer. "Aunt Leona had a Nervous Breakdown back in ’67, and never took communion again—she thought the devil had her." Enviable Aunt Leona, sure of her standing with the Lord and Satan. Uncle Eugene got violent when he drank and ended up in a Home. They never said w

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