Category Archives: prompt responses

Chewing grey

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Day 112 without Danny. July 5. This was written on Tuesday in my writing workshop (June 30, 2026).

I’m chewing grey and it tastes like shit or rather, it tastes like nothing at all with a mouth-feel of wet cardboard.

Where is that online-photo of a Black girl dressed for prom in a chartreuse gown? I’d like to nibble that hem and restore myself. Audrey came by, as people of character do, with calla lilies the color of dried blood.

The air around those proud upstanding blooms quivers with grief and we all know why.

Three days ago my temple kept jangling with pain – sudden and sharp. “Inexplicable” is a word I use too much and it was that, the pain — until I remembered, remembered that the right temple is where Danny held the gun and pulled the trigger. Funny, I don’t hear the sound. “A 9 mm,” one of the sheriff staff at the site announced, weirdly with a kind of proud, know-it-all tone. Like, of course it was a 9 mm. Maybe to you, Shortie (and yes, I get to call all manner of people short and you don’t need to say anything about that) — It may have confirmed your map of reality, Shortie, but it’s nothing but news to me. He was grey, that guy, striped with a sick yellow, probably due to move on to brighter and cheerier colors but not yet. Maybe attending too many scenes of violent demise stripes an aura with sickly yellow.

I’m due for a purge, a cleanse. Can’t I be purple for a change? You know, royal, at peace? Instead, I’m going through my days like an octopus, indigo one minute, heavenly green the next, hiding among the rocks except I am (or feel anyway) so very conspicuous in my grief.

Danny was a dull brown at the end, wanting, I suppose to return to the earth. Brown is underrated as a color, don’t you think? Our living room is taupe, a custom blend based on a Martha Stewart interior we saw once. Audrey’s very classy handbag matched our walls so closely it warranted comment. She wore white. Elegant, as usual. I also wore white, with pale blue pants, but somehow I looked like a refugee.

Speaking of brown, there are worse colors to be – acid orange, for instance. Putrefying, ghastly ghost white for another. Face and hair of a monster, I don’t need to tell you.

We all make accommodations to the horrors around us. My sleep runs gold, though. I’m not sure what I did to deserve that, but I’m oh, so grateful. It would be hard, hard, hard to walk around a jagged red-striped no-nonsense black if I was also exhausted. Of course, I AM exhausted but that’s the grief speaking, or so they all say. Grief lives in your body. No shit, Sherlock. You had to form a platform and monetize it to share that? Of course, I’m not paying, taking the free stuff only. I pay for Marc Elias and Sherrilyn Ifill and that should give you a hint as to where my priorities lie.

Audrey didn’t know I had finished and published my novel. We both raised two boys. My older and her younger have been fast friends since kindergarten. I gave her a copy. I hope she knows the dedication includes her. To the American enslaved and their descendants with gratitude. I was hoping to hear that her younger son was planning a wedding because that might mean my only surviving son would come East for a few days. She shrugged and laughed. “I don’t know!” A point of commonality – the vague, unknowable plans and inner workings of our sons. It’s a theme: what I could’ve known but didn’t know, what perhaps I should’ve known and didn’t know, and all the things I could not in a million years have known.

If her son did have a wedding, would his bride wear white? White chomps down on landscapes with a voracious purity, by the way. No matter what it devours, it remains white. That is its power. Its majesty. Danny wore green Converse high tops the day he died and that’s all I’ll say about that. Green eyes are a mutation, did you know? I can relate to being a mutant more than I can relate to being a daughter descended from a long line of Irish women. Why is that?

I’m worried that if I perform an Ancestor exercise, nothing will be given me. I’ll leave with empty hands and a puzzled heart. Don’t I deserve gifts from the Ancestors? Nana Jacques could recite poetry, as one can if an Irish immigrant, though truth be told it’s not entirely clear if she was born in County Cork or here in Brooklyn. That uncertainty itself speaks to an ancestral knack for storytelling and feels more apt perhaps than knowing a clear geographical starting point. Who knows where my other grandmother was born. Eastern Pennsylvania? I know so little. So very little. She ended up in Queens, though, that I do know.

The not knowing is a vibrating pink. A pink that invites the imagination to start swinging other colors at the walls. Danny was named after that poem-reciting grandmother of mine, Nana Jacques, nee Healey. Daniel Healey Potochnik. Cary was named after one of his grandmothers – Carolyn. No Williams or Franks in our line, although Cary’s middle name is Francis. His father’s middle name is Francis. My paternal grandfather was Francis and my husband’s Dad was Frank. But “Cary Francis” ? – Really, Mom? I have to put a ‘mister’ on my resume. I suppose these days he could simply include his pronouns. She/her is yellow, by the way, and not pink.

A Grief Companion’s favorite color is purple she tells me after I say I want to send her a gift. Do I have any little quilts featuring purple or will I have to start from scratch? I wish starting from scratch offered a more powerful new beginning than merely rifling through fabric bins and sitting down to sew. What is Tuesday? Coral, I guess. It’s a coral day that tastes like ash.

€€€ many collages featured here were made quite a while ago — 2012, 2019. Many collages are made with one or the other of my boys in mind. The ones shown here were referencing Danny. Top photo: one layer is Assisi. Neon signs: from a fairly recent exhibit at Boston’s MFA.

We’re All We Have

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In yesterday’s AWA workshop, Kathleen Olesky supplied a Langston Hughes poem entitled Tired as a prompt.

Will 50 million protest this weekend? 70 million? If we are all we have, it had better be a good showing — the signs held high, rage surging on the street. We are all we have, our signs, our rage, our collective refusal to go along.

Let us take a knife and slit the skin somewhere obvious, but not life-threatening. Let us then watch vermilion beads of blood form along the edge of our self-inflicted wound. And then let us turn toward a person near, not unlike those handshaking mandates issued from the pulpit, introduce yourself, offer a greeting of peace, except this time let 25 million people turn to the other 25 million people and take blood oaths — “We swear we will not lie down in defeat. We swear fealty to each other. We swear fierce loyalty to our discernment, to our bones filled with the marrow of justice. We let our lungs breathe in freedom, which resides somewhere in our atmosphere, and likely somewhere reachable.”

Our blood-sealed oaths will signal a willingness to protect one another, to go the distance, to scar the skin in service of a better America, an America ready to be restored and go not one, two, or five, but 10 times further in the departments of honest tolerance and government that serves all.

The vermillion beads of blood will not lie, they cannot. Neighbor, put your sign down for one minute and trust my blood as I shall trust yours. We swear. We swear not to give up.

“Is it time for the tar and feathers,” asks one purveyor of the early history of our revolution. Is Renee Nicole Good like the fallen Bostonians of 1770, five of them, whose arbitrary and unfair deaths at the hands of a tyrant’s occupying force triggered the revolution and made Thomas Paine write the pamphlets that ignited the populace to take up arms?

We are all we have both inspires and terrifies.

Five years after the Boston Massacre, which was hardly a massacre but certainly what we would today call a mass shooting, five years later, a resolution was put forth. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. “The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” That was 1775. Now 251 years later we ask, we wonder, must we also take up arms? Is that what it will take to redress our grievances, to act in defense of freedom?

I still can’t quite see it, but I can easily imagine canceled midterms and maybe a rerun of Jan 6, this time with rainbow-striped flags.

I am so tired of waiting and wondering how this is all gonna turn out. The ancient political scientist online piping up,“we won’t recover from Donald Trump.” The Canadians on my feed screaming, “Don’t just complain do something!“ causes a private smile at the not very funny circumstance of an insane tyrant, shitting all over America and our allies being what it takes to crack that polite Canadian veneer.

But nothing is funny about this. The stakes are too high. He cannot be allowed to attack Greenland, can he? Little Pixie Speaker of the House says of the Venezuela bombings and abductions (practically under his breath and walking away, always walking away from the cameras), “It’s inappropriate.“

Inappropriate? Is that what we’re calling lawless violent tyranny now?

But honestly, that he said anything even mildly opposed to his Dear Leader shocked me, so complete has been his subjugation. Lindsay Graham crawled out of hiding. Where has he been? Speaking of unabashed Dear Leader recitals. I didn’t remember what an awful bite he has and here I refer to his teeth and jaw, not his powers to menace.

In other news, we can drink again and eat all the meat we want again as long as it’s organic. Things are upside down. So does that mean we can be fat and drunk when the measles rash erupts on chest and neck?

There’s nothing funny about this. We are all we have. I don’t have time to read about how this absolute firestorm of destruction has been decades in the making. No. No. Just swear to me, let our forearm blood, smeared one on the other, act as a pledge that says we are not finished.

The moral arc may have long ago snapped, but it doesn’t mean we are done. Let us become good and kind. Let us become good and kind, even in the face of illegitimate and rampant destruction. Let us breathe and bleed and resume carrying our signs even if we can’t quite believe that that is what it will take.

Later, I will sit down on a bench in Boston Common in view of The Embrace and eat an orange I quartered before leaving the house because no matter what, oranges are tasty in the winter.

There are no worms eating at the rind, no dessication, no mold – just sweet and juicy fruit that eats like sunshine.

Because I’m not actually recounting the events of the day here is a link to a Threads account that does so.

Rant/Lament 11/20/25

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When the fence goes up, jackhammering can’t be far away

This piece was written to a prompt in an AWA workshop about two weeks ago. Is it a rant or a lament? You decide.

The squirrels can have my edits. Torn, tossed, soggy with rain or blown by bitter autumn winds, I don’t care. You didn’t believe me, did you? Fine. Continue. Square the circle, whatever that means, and purge. Continue the scrabble. No nest-making now, but nest-undoing. You thought you knew me, but you didn’t. And anyway, I ran away. Chicken bones near the curbs — evidence of unruly neighbors. Pork cutlet remains, too. Who eats a cutlet in the car and then tosses the bone out the window? It’s as astonishing as it is common.

Another page, another paragraph. Can I run screaming from the room now? He’s defeated. Wilted and decomposing before our very eyes, but still entrenched. The paralysis of immorality must be overcome. My toes are numb. I can walk. I can climb stairs. But it is hard for me to put on my sneakers. Hard to shove the lower veggie drawer closed with my right foot. I have to stop and think: “Not right foot. Left.” Marching orders. Unanimous consent. A disappointed pixie. Short jokes from someone 4’11”? I’ll take them! Like the one about a good snowstorm in Chicago swallowing Bovino whole. Lake-effect weather vs. a little beast in tactical gear. Who knew whistles on neck ropes would become essential urban wear and PS not purchased from Target or Amazon? Costco delivers, I’ve discovered. Two shirts on their way. Somehow I don’t have many long-sleeved shirts anymore. Not sure how that happened. When is the BIG BOYCOTT by the way? “The Big Boycott” sounds like a federal bill or a boy band. Because we’re out of food. I’ll cook up cabbage remnants with red onion. Open a can of chic peas. Or something. In case today is a day not to shop. Nov 20.

Have you noticed the banners on Amazon? No, of course not. You’ve quit Jeff Bezos and good for you! The banners read BLACK FRIDAY WEEK. How to erode traditions and gut meaning, calendars, and sense with greed. Can’t wait to see the Met Gala this year. Maybe Lauren will show up wearing a fig leaf and nothing else. Betty Boop pumps and a black lace jumpsuit (unlined) will not do. Are long-sleeved shirts like socks now — vanishing into an inaccessible alternate universe? I’d like to go home, whatever that means. Years versus preference. For instance, I like the Berkshires and haven’t lived there for more than forty years. We were talking about boycotts and now all I can think about is Brodie Mountain Road, how it curved up and over and then down to home. THAT home. The one I lived in for all of a year, so make that  make sense.

Shit in the attic. Shit in the basement. But only a few long-sleeved shirts and by the way most of the ones that remain are pink. How did THAT happen? “Love is as essential as air.” Who said that? Seriously, do you know who said that?

There’s peanut butter in the house. We won’t go hungry. Oh, and ravioli in the basement fridge. How bad can things be with peanut butter in the cupboard and ravioli in the fridge? Costco ravioli, it should be said. I put the pasta on a waist-high shelf so I wouldn’t have to bend and open a drawer or think about which foot to slide it shut with.

It’s cold out there and I don’t want to walk the dog but will. Walking the dog is one of those things that keeps me whole, offers up a physical prayer to the neighborhood, as if showing up on the streets religiously says, “Here we are world, making the rounds, grateful to be alive even with the detritus of pork bones and yet another house being torn down.”

“Another House Being Torn Down” could be the caption for my town. One chapter would be about the buildings coming down and another about the buildings taking their place. Generally: no traditional roof lines, no color, ugly siding. It’s a thing. A style? I call it “Dentist Office Chic” because that’s what these oversized homes look like — office buildings. It must be cheaper to skimp on clapboard and angled eaves because, you know, greed. Even if this town had felt like home before, the furiously noisy pace of tear downs and the questionable taste of their looming replacements would make me a stranger here.

Flash fiction — Priscilla

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Old collage : paper

This piece of flash fiction was written in class last week. The prompt was a few lines from a poem, describing the heart.

Priscilla — woman who dies; mother of Jeffrey

Jeffrey — estranged son of Priscilla, married to Nancy.

An unnamed dog

Unnamed EMTs

*** ***

It is a pump, a muscle, a churning engine, delivering blood and oxygen. The tasty foods of a lifetime line its pipes with plaque. Genetics has a hand. One day it will seize and though she expected it, its refusal to continue will shock her.

No tunnels of light. No slideshow of memory. Just a clamping pressure that will not let her breathe. No more breath.

Lying on the floor, clutching her shoulder, there will be no one near to offer compressions, no paramedic with electric paddles to try and shock that muscle back into a working rhythm.

Her last thought was typical of her — criticism, bordering on complaint. She thought, I wish this would go a little faster.

The silence that follows her last breath is not golden, secret, rich, or even personal. It’s a blank page that is not in a hurry. Whether another actor comes along with ink and turmoil isn’t of any concern to the blank page – it could hold its absences indefinitely.

But a dog climbs up the stairs. Noses the body in desperate repetition. He howls. He howls and a little spit lands on the face of his friend. She does not move, his friend.

By the time any human notices that Priscilla is gone, her body will be cold and past rigor mortis. Had she been alive to count the endless hours, she’d have felt a mighty sense of grievance, but since grievance is allotted only to the living, the discovery of her body is a mechanical matter. Not her business. Doctor to pronounce death, certified documents to be signed, the gurney to be hoisted up the narrow, definitely not-to-code staircase.

“At least she’s not a 300-pounder,” one of the EMTs remarks. A Worcester pick up the prior weekend had necessitated employing extra hands, revving up the extra wide van, and hauling out the reinforced gurney. Some people impose all manner of inconvenience, even after they’re gone.

No, Priscilla (they’ve been trained to avoid calling corpses “it” or “the body”), no, Priscilla is a scrawny old bird and all of the men secretly wonder how a heart attack felled one so rail thin.

Priscilla is incinerated according to her wishes. The son she hadn’t talked to in 13 years took care to contact the life insurance company and a realtor days before he arranged to turn her into ash.

Making her wait satisfied him. Being in charge of her body felt like retribution, one that offered scant justice, but justice nonetheless. She waited in one of those stainless steel, chilled drawers at the morgue.

While on hold with State Street Bank, Jeffrey, though not given to thinking abstractly, thought that a cramped and chilly dark drawer was a pretty good metaphor for his childhood.

Will he tell Nancy about the metaphor when he gets back to Houston? No. No. Because she would then insist on details and when your survival strategy has been to move on, never look back, supplying metaphorical details is not in your playbook.

But being in Priscilla’s house, talking to her insurance agent, her estate planner, and going through her papers and drawers makes his blank-slate-approach unworkable. Unworkable. He will have to confront his past whether he likes it or not and his stupid belief that all the hundreds of thousands of dollars coming his way would offer a kind of balancing pleasure was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Shadow speaks

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I sometimes find it useful to write the unspeakable. Grain of salt time, folks.

Yesterday’s workshop writing prompt was a quote taken from the recent HBO series, Task: “Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a river.” I posted the screen shot from the series as well (above). Central to the story is the idea that we sometimes do terrible things for good reasons. Villain as hero stuff.

Also of note: the workshop took place two days after 8MM Americans showed up in the streets to protest autocracy.

🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋

He was shabby and short and wanted to burn it all down. Sound familiar? John the Painter. Red hair, fiery temperament, a Scotland-born American enthusiast in England at a divisive time. “No Kings” the ultimate distillation of revolutionary thought then as now. Early in December – what year, don’t ask, I don’t know yet — he set fire to buildings near the wharves in Portsmouth.

I can’t focus. He didn’t burn ships as intended. It was ruled an accident. Does that mean James Aitken a.k.a. John the Painter failed? He was dubbed both a saboteur and a “frightened little man” and ultimately was executed.

I have a massive cloud in my forehead or I might be able to supply more details. If the “frightened little man” escaped, how was he put on trial? Ah — now I see he lacked coolness and guile and confessed.

Shabby little saboteur with red freckles and a fondness for arson, holder of big revolutionary ideals, lacking guile and coolness.

I keep going back to Luigi being captured in Pennsylvania while having breakfast at a Burger King. I think that’s what was but it could have been lunch at McDonald’s. Luigi also showed a lack of guile and you couldn’t help but wonder if he wanted to get caught.

Then there’s Jason Fairbanks, infamous murderer of Dedham, Massachusetts, who in 1801 after breaking out of prison stopped for a bite to eat at the ferry depot near Lake Champlain (or wherever) – long enough to be captured. He was executed. John the Painter was executed. Someone somewhere is calling for Mangione’s execution. Anybody and everybody who resists the post-capitalist order or the GOP is a domestic terrorist now, apparently.

Did it bother the little revolutionary, John the Painter, that the fires he set were deemed “accidental?” Meaning the only way to claim credit for his pro-American stance (was that even a stance then?) (make that: his “anti-Kings stance”) was to confess.

A man being little and being referred to ever and on as little, does things to a man’s psyche, none of them good. Refer here to Stormy Daniels’s comment about a certain pro-King’s appendage.

I’ve said two things so often that I’m sick of myself and they’re not incontrovertible, but here they are. One, if Trump had a big dick, we wouldn’t be in this mess, and two, if Hitler had been a talented painter, met with acclaim and reward, Poland’s genetic pool would be vastly more interesting today.

Say what you will, but we are at a “Sons of Liberty” kind of moment and I wonder just how long the peace will hold. Images in my mind – Liberty Poles (Fairbanks’ kin got in trouble for erecting one), the Liberty Tree near Boston Common where the Sons of Liberty would meet, now a mere plaque because the British understood its significance and axed it down. It was a time of ragtag collections of men, barely armed, of treatises proclaiming this freedom and that freedom, taxation without representation being called BS.

Does it always come down to money? Well, penis size and money and by the way to look at Jeff Bezos’s clobbering walk with his new bride is to perhaps see an overlap.

If only we wonder, we tired-at-times-hopeless-modern-day-liberty-lovers — if only we had atoned for the great sin of slavery. If spiritual and financial reparations had been made — where would we be now? Certainly not in the maw of backlash to an elegant, moral Black president who loves his wife and brought a dog into the White House, which is being shredded, even as I write.

The Liar-in-Chief promised he wouldn’t touch the structure, but promises be damned and by “promises be damned” I mean we the American people be damned. The aptest, most stomach-churning metaphor around — a power-crazed, mentally unwell man with a little penis is tearing down walls of the White House and in true autocratic fashion demanding that the press not show pictures of the demolition. They’re upsetting, those pictures.

But back to coin and cock. The issuance of tariffs has long had swinging dick energy to it. Why is this not commented on more? (You can’t swing a mushroom, but the point holds). 40%!! 60%!! You’re an ally and there’s no trade imbalance? 120%!! He’s hoarding the cash, circumventing Congress’s power of the purse in yet another outrageous fashion. Lest I sound too New York Timesey here, let me be clear: he is violating the Constitution, he is breaking the law, he is committing impeachable offenses. Daily, mind. Every god-damned day.

Back in the day, patriots were busy, doing things like founding Plattsburgh and casting a massive Liberty Bell in bronze and stitching up the first flag. Did they have less to lose, I wonder, or was it easier to take up arms against an occupying force when you’ve been slaughtering Native Americans for 15 years or more? Bloodshed normalized, and anyway if a stray bullet didn’t get you, the pox or yellow fever likely would.

General strike? Cancel Christmas? It’s hard for us Americans to imagine an uprising being effective without money at its center and it’s also hard for us to be inconvenienced.

Who is suspect? Whose lies get the biggest megaphone? Whose disgusting and sacrilegious AI tomfoolery gets put out to millions without consequence?

Armed revolt, I say. Armed revolt. Or poison, poison would be good. I’d start with Johnson, Trump, and Miller. Arsenic — a little at a time.

“Relax!” you say. “Relax.” You go relax. Go relax somewhere else, anywhere else, but not near me and now I’m out of time and maybe we are too.

[I was scanning pages from this book while writing]