Category Archives: prompt responses

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]

Prompt response 6/17/25

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Here is the prompt:

Forgive the repetition from earlier posts. Also it might be unfinished, or at least ending in a strange place, but that’s the nature of a timed prompt.

What if home is not a place but a feeling? Not original. Begin again.

What if home is a favorite author? A totetable collection of pages that opens worlds and never lets you down? A writer whose storytelling makes you swoon and whose characters grab you from the get-go. What if home is the space between Best Buy and the highway? No man’s land.

I wanna gather up all my tops and cut up the shirts with stains. Today? A faint coffee blotch mid-chest. Which leads me to say: home could be not caring about all that.

Home these days is to worry, worry, worry. To be infuriated and overwhelmed and embarrassed and deeply out of sorts. Our country, in other words, our country defies home. This regime turns home inside out. It shits on the founding fathers. It acts as middle-man for the bottomless greed of those in office.

I sit cross legged in a mid-century modern chair in a mid-century modern house. Outside helicopters offer occasional menace. Counterpoint: the neighbor’s water feature. Ah!

Ravens are much bigger than crows. I don’t know if they’re smarter or not but I can’t help feeling that every time I’m on the driveway or out on the deck, they’re sizing me up. On the path that winds around Mount Washington, they dropped walnuts in our path. Near misses. “Oh, that’s on purpose,” my brother would tell us later.

I was not one of the 20,000 people that walked shoulder to shoulder in downtown LA this past weekend. Glendale’s closer and I didn’t go there either. The tension around staying put surprised me. If I’d had a vehicle I could comfortably drive (not my brother’s truck, that’s for sure), I’d have left him with my husband and at least driven by to honk and show support, my tiny “8647” sign on the dash. But I can barely get in the truck, never mind drive it, and while I know some parts of Glassell Park and East LA, I don’t know the way to Glendale.

How easily I am undone here. I can’t find shit in the kitchen – the rasp, the second cutting board, the meat thermometer, a mixing bowl for Christ’s sake. None of the knives are sharp, turning the pink hump of a shallot into an adversary. There’s no oven fan meaning that every time you open its door, furnace-like heat blasts out and you better not have your face too close. It also means cooking lamb chops stove top set off the smoke alarms, necessitating dashing about setting up floor fans, opening doors. Needless to say, I prefer cooking at home

So maybe home is where you can find things in the kitchen.

Every other plant here has spines. Spontaneous weeding, which is how I typically weed in Massachusetts, is not a good idea here given how close many of the invasive grasses and clovers are to nasty cacti. The nettles are no fun either. Gloves, a must.

On the pleasant side: a lozenge of a swimming pool filled with salty warm water. What a pleasurable way to end an afternoon! A dunk. A paddle. A blowing of air into bubbles, life-affirming bubbles. 

The sun sets over the fence that lines the pool – making the giant ficus back there go inky black. Which reminds me, when I get home, the 350-year-old beech behind my neighbor’s house will be gone. Will it even feel like home anymore?

The stupid limits I set. Once it was: when and if New England Mobile Book Fair closes, I’m leaving Newton. Then it was, if that copper beech ever comes down, I’m leaving Newton. I looked at that tree while prepping veggies or while rolling out a dough. The setting sun glared through its branches, visible from backyard, deck, family room, and dining room. Upstairs from the bed, I might see the moon wander through its dark tangle of branches.

It got sick. Many beeches in New England are getting sick. It’s not 120° temperatures or catastrophic sudden flooding, or fires taking out entire neighborhoods, but it is climate related and a grievous loss. 

Imagine how it might feel (speaking of trees and regimes and protests), if our government embraced the urgent need to slow global warming. Imagine if that corrupt pretense that it’s a hoax dropped away and reality shone through, its terrifying dimensions relieving compared to denial. What if our government acted like having a future mattered more than satisfying the energy lobbies? What then?

A collective sigh. A dropping of the shoulders. A leaning into whatever it would take (and trust me when I tell you it’s not recycling). Rather, we’d feel determined and maybe even optimistic, willing as communities to endure hardships in service of the future.

Truth, in fact, has been sacrificed to profit to Murdoch to Trump and his dumb shit children, to the tech bros, who now want to violate whole communities to keep their crypto and AI factories cool.

Five million people is a lot of people. Trump coming home early from the G7 because he’s tired, defeated, out of his league, and a shell of a man is evident to everyone. I applaud the European sneers and Canadian interruptions. Our national demon spends too much time insulated. Oh, look, there’s Pam Bondi singing his praises and declaring burners of Teslas domestic terrorists. But a murderer of Democratic lawmakers? Not so much. So maybe he doesn’t quite know how incredibly reviled he is.

The reels from all over the country bringing us to tears. How unified and gratifying the crowds! The vast protests in Idaho, for Christ’s sake. North Carolina, North Florida, Oklahoma. This was not exclusively a Boston, LA, Chicago, New York thing by any stretch. He had to have seen a minute or two of coverage? But even if he’d been shielded from it all, every single world leader whose hand he shook had seen the footage and understood the import.

So I guess what I’m saying is that a return to sanity would feel like going home. This isn’t wishing for some mythic past that never existed, but for a kind of normalcy that might allow us to progress one foot after the other. Or maybe even running to preserve the oceans, the ice caps, clean water, trees.

If hate could take a person down, Trump would be long dead. How often that wish comes up in conversation amazes me. Everyone, not just my radical friends, but all of them, wish him dead and say so.