Jonathan Cardew – February Day 2

(This may be too late, but I kept working on it--a combo of the first and second prompt--or the first prompt inspired by the idea of doing the second in the future.) The Watcher When I think of movies from my youth, they have the same plot: there’s a girl in distress...

She must have stalked the soft grass of the inhabited oasis to sip the night water, must have wandered silently searching for the softest safest spot to queen her litter. Hunger must have driven her close to the tents of those who would stalk her for her hide, whose...

1) Be sure you have someone to take you home. Anesthesia and pain medicine will make it unsafe for you to drive or get home on your own. The Croatian brothers offered me mushrooms. Invited me to watch them fuck the groupie pressed between them. I giggled when Luka...

...or is it a rap? That was, hands down, the best writing I have seen in one of these workshops. Inspirational. I had to hold. myself. back. from. writing. gah. I'm finishing up a few comments and then I'll be hopping back into each story later today to see if there...

The house was a pretty dilapidated rancher, built in the 1960s or 1970s--I have never been good at estimating things like age or the time it takes to drive somewhere when you’re already late or how long it might take to end a marriage when the love part of it...

We cut our summer vacation short since a boy drowned in our pool while we were down in Miami swimming in my in-laws’ pool. Life can be a real motherfucker dot com. The kid was just some kid that lived in our neighborhood. My wife had seen him around, riding his...

Headlines Cooper skimmed the tape from the Associated Press, preparing for his broadcast. He frowned. Wasn’t there good news when he started this job? Weather. He could depend on weather for something less than terror. Winter storm continues The winter storm...

Something about Neil’s eyes said he’d seen more, too much more, sailing out of the harbor in the misty coastal Cornwall morning and while he wasn’t old and his tour boat was modern and sharp, the craggy rocks and tiny islands carved from mineral shorelines and high...

Holly leaned me against the cold industrial refrigerator in the just off-stage closet that seconded as a cafeteria bookstore, we worked together all year. Last day of school. In part, because I was senseless, her move on me felt like an act to be cruel…to be kind. She...

Connie balanced on an imaginary line along the Caribbean shore. Her foot slipped and her toes sank under the lapping water. She laughed, brushed a few strands of hair behind her ear and glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Slanted palm trees bristled in the...

I sit here far from the River Rushi, having known many northern rivers not unlike that channel rushing by Basho, off on his narrow road to the deep north, and wonder how a child might be intentionally be left there, on the banks, behind and abandoned. There are only...

Even in my teal appeal I feel the need for more. I am a walking painting answering the phone. My chairs and my walls match my pot and my mom. The painting is a Maisel vase spilled over. A wine glass, turning purple the blue. I am a stealthy lawn care seller. The phone...

[using Google translate (Serbian, Vietnamese, Georgian, then back to English) on an old paragraph about a friend and I wandering Peru -- then later expanding and editing] After we finished eating, Maria and I searched the city for a hookah bar. Along the...

I didn’t intend to break in to the bird sanctuary to set fire to the border patrol truck but I didn’t not intend to break in to the bird sanctuary to set fire to the border patrol truck Is a thing you might say and your attorneys might advise you not When the judge,...

Todd We’d read our book reports aloud in my treehouse. He’d read first. His dimples and his cupid lips. He played clarinet and on the opposite side of the room, I blew the baritone. He never looked at me during Band. Alex Walked him to his dentist appointment in 7th...

For Conceit Don’t say Polka Dots & Moonbeams. Don’t look it up on your phone. A phone is for talk: the wall that grew into earth in The Echo Chamber sent off to residential school at seven came home with the wrong mother tongue all red wine from conjugation...

Even as little as five years old, you would stand in the doorway that wasn’t even a doorway, just a spot in the park your father walked you to, told you let’s build a house right here that only the two of us know about and I can say something like Parkhouse in the...

he doesn't think he's a poet he just likes to write things in his phone every night and every morning he deletes them birds flying away at a faster pace than normal they make her nervous I like the birds that fly together I don't care how fast they fly or where they...

From the thrum of his hospital room my father asks for my elegant friend– Laura with the starlit hair, so I don’t remind him how he’d once picked me up at midnight from the now-suicided Laura’s house in a country that spat on justice, a country we’d left long ago...

(For this first one, I stopped at Jonathan’s “We did not kiss” and wrote it out, including his (ironically). She Said I Looked Like Jesus She said I looked like Jesus and therefore would no longer kiss me. I’d grown a beard. Let my hair run a little. We’d been married...

Hello Day Two-ers! Wow, I'm still reeling from the magic of your words. I feel like I've just read A VERY GOOD journal and I've been able to communicate with the authors immediately. What a gift! What a learning process! As you've noticed, I've been nudging a few...

The gray pebble on my bedside table nestles between my teacup and my sleeping pills. On the nights my husband and I drink too much wine, it’s the morning tor for a forgotten painkiller, or a nipple ring. The week between Christmas and New Year it’s buried beneath gift...

Welcome to Day 2! Happy Writing 🙂