(semi-) WWP 11

Jerry Uelsmann

I blink, and a thousand thousand years pass; the land around the hill I stand on fills with water and a pine forest grows around me, tall straight trunks that are stricken, one by one, by blight or age or fire until only a few trunks perch wind-twisted and reaching on the land, now worn rocky and barren.

I wipe the stain of the past from my eyes and set out to continue my task.

Yeahhhhh that's all I've got for that one. I'm sure there's a story here, I just have no clue what it is...

WWP 10: Forever Lost

This week Mackenzie and I decided to collaborate and as I am too lazy to post it myself you should all go read it over on her blog.

WWP 8

Sam Weber

October:

I turn orange and brown,
come all to pieces on your lawn,
dry, crumbling bits
of braid, shoulder, smile
scattered across your grass.
The sun shines low and golden through my spaces.

Last spring
I stood pale green and
dewy here, you
appearing when I called
whistling about me, whispering of always

into June, when
we blazed sleepily,
sun-deepened, familiar
our arms rooted fast
in the soil of us

until October:
we erode

Better late than never? Also, is the ending too sudden? Is this just the worst thing I have ever written? Why am I the worst judge ever of my poetry?

WWP 7: Hanging Man

Sam Jinks

Tonight I come home angry and so it is difficult to loosen and shed my skin. When I finally do and hang it in the hallway next to the others by the skin of its neck it resists me, shifts with the win to fall back on to me, but I am firm and on the hook it stays. I move my naked bones into the kitchen, where I think I see you for an instant, staring in the window at my weathered weary skull with hope drawn about your shoulders like a warm woolen shawl, its fringes growing tendrils down your arms, beneath your skin. I wonder for a second if you can not even shed your skin at night, if it has grown into your bones, tangled itself around and around inside you, and the thought makes me grow sadness from my fingertips for a minute or two as I think of the weight of skin forever pressing in on you before I close the curtains.

In the night I am haunted by the thought of you and several times I grab at my arm and expect to feel a skin surrounding it. It was naught but speculations and yet I can not shake the thought of your skin growing tighter and tighter until it becomes a part of you as surely as your bones and blood and sinew, and I wonder at the strength of that emotion. When I sleep at last, I dream of your face, gaunt and unchanging, in my window.

I wake in a sweat and walk downstairs to find that something has tangled my skins, wrapped them brittle and shredding around one another, and when I disentangle one from the pile it is two sizes too small. I think of you and your skins, too small like this, and I think how it would feel to be your bones. I have never thought of you so often as I have today.

So someone in my creative writing class told me last class, "You should use more punctuation." I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT.

WWP 6: Excavation

James Jean

When she left she told us to stay with you but we couldn't let her go so we shook and we shook and we shook off our skins and we left you bundled in them and we bounded after her, held together by muscle and sinew and love, following her into the cool arms of the night and the woods and the wind, shedding drops of blood behind us. We padded silently just outside the shallow puddle of light cast by her candle, gnashing our teeth at the things whose scents and secrets crept about on the clear night air. When she came to the pool she blew out her candle, smelling like snowdrops in her calm and her blindness, shed her pale blue gown, and stepped into the water. We who felt the wind whispering through our bones could not be any nakeder so we stepped in after her. We could not help but yelp at the cold water that rushed through our paws, but she did not scold us, just walked on reverently, and so we yipped and yarooed joyfully at her and the pale thin moon above her.

Soooo yeah. I wrote a paragraph this week. Way to go, Emma.

WWP 4

http://buttercupfestival.com/

You sing
and
I see the universe:

the vast darknesses of your notes,
punctuated with bright fiery fermatas
collapsing into black hole rests
when you breathe, pulling
me in closer, stretching
me thinner
until

at the
edge of your
event horizon

you

sing once more
and I
see the whole universe
but no light escapes you.

Still not satisfied with the ending. But oh well.

Possessions, Possessions - Writing Prompt No. 3

Possessions, Possessions by Maggie Taylor

Before the flood, Margaret had been possessed of:

• One (1) house, brick, of middling size, and assorted furnishings therein;
• One (1) husband, a mildly prosperous merchant;
• Sixteen (16) apple trees, planted in neat rows, raised one by one by her from cuttings from her mother;
• Two (2) daughters, now grown and moved away;
• Seven (7) dresses of which she was inordinately fond, and several others towards which her feelings were less enthusiastic;
• One (1) bookcase, containing fifty-two (52) volumes, one for each week of the year;
• Five (5) gold necklaces, three inherited, two new;
• Five (5) coordinating bracelets;
• And one (1) small yippy dog named Max.
  

Afterwards, she was possessed of:

• The clothes she wore, including a green dress, which she liked moderately well, white silk stockings, several hairpins, and various undergarments;
• One (1) black patent-leather shoe, the left;
• One (1) purple silk fan;
• One (1) wooden chair, to which she owed her life;
• One (1) baby carraige, newly removed of dust;
• And one (1) lemon.

I'm not sure if there's more. I feel like it might be complete.