I love buffets! I can try lots of different foods in small amounts. I don't have to decide between a garden salad and a Caesar salad--I can get both! I can try just a little of the salmon in the unrecognizable sauce--sometimes it requires seconds (or thirds). This week's buffet is a word buffet. Your challenge is to choose two words from each group and use those words in your piece. As with all of these prompts, and all prompts anywhere, is to use the guidelines for your firs

Silver Falls by Melody Wilson published in Cleaver Magazine, 2021 We have driven east this bright afternoon, the two of us, young parents on a break from entropy. I am drowning in something I can’t define and the day reels out like un-spliced frames of someone else’s life. We park the car and skirt past other people’s happiness, past picnic tables and barbecues. You take my hand and we climb to the falls. The noise of life filters up: laughter, singing. I am relieved when the

So Chinese Girl by Dorothy Chan published in The Cincinnati Review, 2018 Anyone who makes tasty food has to be a good person, because think of all the love that goes into cooking: salt and pepper, sprinkle a little extra cheese, and pop open a bottle of Syrah, or if we’re eating at my parents’ in Las Vegas, we’re drinking Tsingtao beer, my father’s favorite, and he adds more bamboo shoots and straw mushrooms and baby corn, and fun fact: When I was a

What I Mean When I Say Truck Driver by Geffrey Davis published in Revising the Storm (2014, BOA Editions) During the last 50 miles back from haul & some months past my 15th birthday, my father fishes a stuffed polar bear from a Salvation Army gift-bin, labeled Boys: 6-10. I can almost see him approach the decision: cold, a little hungry, not enough money in his pocket for coffee. He worries he might fall asleep behind the wheel as his giant, clumsy love for that small word—so

Today's prompt was inspired by a poem I wrote recently. My father and I were driving together (no worries--I was the one driving!) and he was telling me about his grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I only remember meeting one great-aunt and her husband, but I did remember hearing about one of the uncles. He was a professional gambler whose existence is mysterious, as he did not keep in contact with the family. My father told me another (new-to-me) story about him during this dr

February by Bill Christophersen published in Poetry, February 2002 The cold grows colder, even as the days grow longer, February's mercury vapor light buffing but not defrosting the bone-white ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot. This is the time of year that's apt to put a hammerlock on a healthy appetite, old anxieties back into the night, insomnia and nightmares into play; when things in need of doing go undone and things that can't be undone come to call, muttering r

I love odes, as you can tell by the number of odes I have posted on this blog. I especially love odes like the one by Kevin Young that I posted today, poems that are both celebratory and critical (or at least open-eyed) about the thing they are ode-ing (not a word). These odes are more honest and are more surprising for the reader, which is what a great poem should be--not shocking, not out of the blue, but there should be something of a twist. For this week's writing piece,

Ode to the Midwest by Kevin Young published in Poetry, July/August 2007 The country I come from Is called the Midwest —Bob Dylan I want to be doused in cheese & fried. I want to wander the aisles, my heart's supermarket stocked high as cholesterol. I want to die wearing a sweatsuit— I want to live forever in a Christmas sweater, a teddy bear nursing off the front. I want to write a check in the express lane. I want to scrape my driveway clean myself, early, before anyone

History Lesson by Natasha Tretheway published in Domestic Work (2000, Graywolf Press) I am four in this photograph, standing on a wide strip of Mississippi beach, my hands on the flowered hips of a bright bikini. My toes dig in, curl around wet sand. The sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet glinting like switchblades. I am alone except for my grandmother, other side of the camera, telling me how to pose. It is 1970, two years aft

How It Happened by Chelsea Rathburn published in New Ohio Review, 2011, republished at Verse Daily I blame that little village in Spain, the one with the whitewashed houses in a crescent along the sea, a fleet of pastel fishing boats, and that celebrated coffee with brandy. A sour wedge of apple lurked at the bottom like a tea-leaf fortune. Because we couldn’t afford the fish we ate pizza with peaches and oregano on the beach, the sun and breeze conspiring. Seeing us there b

We are going to use today's blog poem as the basis for this week's prompt; be sure to state after Chelsea Rathburn in between your title and your poem (or essay or story). But before we get to that, a little commercial, which also ties to today's blog poem, How It Happened. This poem is a "love" poem, and I will be leading a workshop on "love" poems on February 19. This workshop is online, from 11:00-2:00, Pacific time. It is a pay-what-you-can workshop, with all fees going t

If a Plane Crashed Exactly on the U.S.-Canadian Border, in Which Country Would They Bury the Survivors? by Jeff Mock —for Margot published in Sweet Lit, issue 9.2, 2016 After I crawled away from the wreck And smolder, I toured the dazed woods —In circles within circles, I’m sure. The descent was still in my stopped heart. I hungered and learned the hard way Which berries not to eat. I wintered on brown pine needles In a hollow in the roots of a black oak And let my bones knit