published in Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Temptation of the Composer by Airea D. Matthews Oh Shepherd, our...

Father’s Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez from The Small Claim of Bones, 2014 Softly, it always began softly....

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...

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...

published in Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Issue 26, FEB 2021 His beard was stained straw, smoked by desert wind & lipped by sand. His...

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...

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...

Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls Into Besieged City by Thomas Lux Early germ warfare. The dead hurled this way look like wheels in...

Use Kooser's poem as inspiration! Write a 7-line poem that finds satisfaction in the ordinary on a special day. You don't need to use...

A Happy Birthday by Ted Kooser This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a...

“Philadelphia isn’t as bad as Philadelphians say it is.” —Billboard on Interstate 95 Paris in the Spring, Autumn in New York, Singers...

We are going to use today's poem, "Open your almonds slowly," by Jessica Brown for today's prompt. Tree: Choose a tree that produces food...

Open your almonds slowly by Jessica Brown published in Honest Ulsterman, June 2018 The air is so still I worry something bad is Coming as...

published in New Ohio Review, Issue 4, Fall 2008 Anderson Inside the Hurricane by Stefi Weisburd The wind has come to remind us of our...

The oil painting shown below is entitled Dreams. It was painted by Vittorio Matteo Corcos in 1896. The woman was the daughter of a friend...

Prairie Work by Susan Niz published in Ponder Review, Volume 2, Issue 2, Fall 2018 I walk fatly through field Like a freckled,...

We Lived Happily During the War by Ilya Kaminsky from the book, Deaf Republic, published by Graywolf Press, 2019 And when they bombed...

This also works for nonfiction and fiction! In their ground-breaking book, On Grief and Grieving, Elisabeth Kübler Ross and David Kessler...

soil by Irène P. Mathieu from the book orogeny, 2016 Bob Kaufman Prize, Trembling Pillow Press the way you say soil sounds like soul, as...

Winter Trees by William Carlos Williams All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon...