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Friday, November 12, 2010

Writing Exercise #25

Ingredients:

1. A person you mourn (living or dying) and yes, it can be abstract. Yes, it can be an old self of yours. Make a list of things you recall about this person. Be specific. The red sweater with the hole in it. How their hair hung above their left eye.

2. Write out the event that caused the mourning, even if you aren't exactly sure. Decide, right now, what it was. The last straw. The breaking.

3. A place you will never go.


_ _ _ _


The title of the poem is the person you mourn. You don't have to use a name. It can be "The Boy in The Red Sweater with a Hole in the Sleeve." What was the first to go? Write the specific things that disappeared first (the list from #1) What grew or fell in its place? What of these things is inside you now? Pick one image from #2 and send it somewhere far. Send it to number three if you want, (even though number three is where, when you think of this person, your heart goes).


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(This prompt was inspired by the line "A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel's heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goosebumps. Six goosebumps on her careless heart," from Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.