Category Archives: prompt responses

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.

June 5 stream. Rant or Lament? You decide

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Written on 6/5/25 to the prompt: Suddenly, she’d forgotten…

In my neighborhood

Suddenly she’d forgotten how to pay the bills, missed the feel of coins at the bottom of her purse and the ease of inserting one into a meter. She didn’t know where to find their retirement accounts online or how to enter them if she did. Except it wasn’t sudden, was it? The gradual usurpation of pen, ink, envelopes, and stamps worked to her detriment. The last time she’d been in charge of paying the bills, the checkbook, with its tactile register and reassuring march of check numbers and dates, had been at the center.

Passwords were the bane of many people’s existences and she was no exception. Everything she did to make life more streamlined – facial recognition on her phone, passwords stored on her phone, credit card numbers stored on her phone – also made her vulnerable. And that was last year. Who knew what DOGE’s data-scraping and now Palantir’s insertion into government would do?

Longtermism was explained in horrifying detail in The Atlantic article she read before getting out of bed. It was so stunningly elitist a philosophy and so lacking in empathy and so embedded with the levers of power, that it’s amazing she got out of bed. It’s also amazing she didn’t stomp on her phone just like that heavy-booted villain in last night’s murder mystery which – talk about horrifying — she can’t remember the title of or the setting of, just the memory of that black boot stomping the protagonist’s phone to shards. “What then?” she asks for him. “What now,” she asks for everyone else.

She knows to turn facial recognition off when she flies and for once she’s grateful how invisible old women are, especially very short old women. The specter of being found out as a Trump-hating-elitist-east coast-liberal haunts her now and amplifies the years-old questions – Why blog? What is the point? Now instead of being mystified by people who have zero internet footprint, she envies them.

So many specters to face! The specter of widowhood and having suddenly to pay the bills and manage the accounts and pay the taxes. She only hopes she dies first – in her sleep, suddenly and painlessly, of course. The specter of white nationalism and criminalized miscarriages and bird flu and now – who knew? – the advance of a flesh-eating fly coming up from Panama.

You’d think longtermers would accelerate our response to the climate crisis. But no, these selfish pricks would rather, with their billions of dollars and mega-egos, hallucinate about colonizing Mars or about manufacturing islands as paradise-like as they are exclusive. Burning peons for fuel gets closer and closer to the national agenda.

It’s one thing to watch Gestapo Barbie, blinking furiously, define habeus corpus as the exact opposite of what it is or to see the wide-eyed freak-show heading the FBI casually and duplicitously declare that the budget will get done when it gets done after he talks to some people. It’s another thing altogether to watch Russ Vought, Project 2025 author and current head of the OMB, in full sentences and with smug authority declare why HE has not submitted a budget. His chilling narrative implies that the Impoundment Clause of the Constitution doesn’t matter anymore and why not? Because he says so, I guess.

Destruction is the name of the game.

I wish HE was a robotic clone who could be powered down by some secret cabal of MIT zoomers.

Who will save us? What will be left when this regime is at last toppled?

Chris Murphy’s new beard turns him into the age’s soothsayer – the truth-telling King of Swords slashing the air with his blade. “Focus,” he shouts, “on what they’re doing NOW, because there may not be 2026 elections.”

Installation celebrating early free Black community in Massachusetts. Walden Woods

The Atlantic article referred to is here. I learned about the flesh-eating flies in the recent Atlantic as well.

Insomnia collages from first week of June

 

Dusty collarbones

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You could stitch a dotted ring around an indigo moon. The houses below evidence diamonds and trefoils and zigzags, all manner of pattern. Somewhere a child bellyaches. Somewhere else an owl calls out, mournful. Haven’t we expressed all our sadnesses already? The trefoil stamp of trauma, the zigzag edge of semi-repair?

You can’t fool the moon or the lightning striping the sky at dusk.

When the red-tailed hawk screeches, we know to look up. But that’s all we know.

Make your move motherfucker is one way to respond to upcoming events on The Hill. Preemptive bullshit. Flowing like a river into microphones and screens. I wish we hadn’t needed a word like “sane-washing.” And journalists? Please! Even Carl Bernstein wishes he was still on the beat. Imagine Deep Throat withholding evidence to promote his upcoming book release.

The hawk rides the thermal climes – yes, we have thermal climes even in suburbia. If you’re really blessed and it’s a clear day, the sun will illuminate the red wedge of her tail turning feathers into stained glass.

Who you gonna call? Motherfuckers of so many ilks, it makes the head spin. To say “felon” doesn’t quite capture the in-law’s tawdry sadistic infliction of pain upon his own sister. Too bad the French won’t say, Sorry motherfucker — your visa is no good here. So many roiling nations – it’s as if our national disaster is contagious – France, South Korea, Germany, Syria. And Gaza can’t catch a break.

We look for heroes in the strangest of places. Turns out the healthcare CEO assassin comes from money and privilege. Sorry, ladies. Worse, he liked posts by the South African Dipshit Brigade.

But what of poetry you say? What of the elegant, nearly effortless dip of the hawk gliding on the air currents, currents that sweep over even your suburban rooftops? What of these expressions of grace?

The greasy bundle of vice is no longer a fluke. Not a despicable and regrettable error this time. No. Americans knew who they were voting for. Sort of.

He’s grinning in front of Notre Dame and shaking Macron’s hand like he wants to rip that man’s shoulder out of its socket. To see it is to wonder: how will I survive this? How will we survive this? Will we survive this?

Hope is a scratchy wool cape that I put on to address certain people. Underneath, endless itching. Underneath, angry red striping rashes that cannot be ignored. Underneath, deposits of body-ash and rubble-ash that floated in from Gaza. The dusty grey evidence of wickedness lines my collarbones. What washcloth is up to the task?

Get fat. Go hide. Get fat and go hide. Gather preemptive condolences for the retirement of your former self. Sputter, motherfucker, motherfucker, like somebody’s listening, like it’s a badge of honor even if no one is listening and it’s not a badge of anything.

The heat wooshes, reminding me that all the coming misery will take place on a timeline, in a framework of seasons. Does it help to think that? Does anything?

A Green Moon

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His hips were the hips of a boy,
his eyes the eyes of an old man.
An impossible moon graced his father’s
shoulder, one of many transmissions.

How it turned green in the
passing, that orb. How it
highlighted the similar bone
structures. How the snake draped
across the boy’s shoulders glinted
in its light.

Denim is manly. Or not.
The moon is not.
A snake for a boy signals
not rising kundalini, but
the rising sap of manhood.
How will he hold his lover’s
hand through the hail? How
will his lips find another’s
when the elevator jerks to a
stop, no clear exit?

And will he remember how
sturdy, how firm a father
he had, the day his dad
gave him the moon?
Or will it, the moon, cause
the boy/man’s bangs to stick
up, cause a troubling ruffle
in his chest where something
someone is missing, not his
mother exactly, but something
someone close?

The snaps will be undone,
the head shaved, hallowed
music swayed to, meteors
hitting the grey still hills
on a night he least expects it.

And somewhere someone
draws the man/boy a
bath.

SoulCollage card as a prompt.

Writing note: once you begin writing, the prompt doesn’t matter anymore. I was tempted to post the poem without the image, but I couldn’t resist sharing it.

The man here is a the founder of Mitchell hair products, entrepreneur, and billionaire. Thanks, as always to magazines for their fertile images, none of which are being sold.

Later: can’t believe I found the guy’s name: it’s John Paul Dejoria.

Fury on hold

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written to a prompt yesterday

Get it out, the theory has long been. Get it out and you’ll feel better. Rage, sorrow, bitter resentment, or whatever other emotion burbles just below the surface — as if to articulate say, fiery anger, was to put it to rest. But that’s not how it works, is it? At least not every time. Sometimes to spell it out and spell it out out loud lends clarity (think: Audre Lorde saying that ‘anger is loaded with information’). But along with clarity might come a bend in the amplitude, one that offends family, neighbors (if it’s summer and the windows gape open) and sends the dog slinking away to a remote part of the house. How is that helping anyone, including the one with bulging eyes and spittle on her chin?

Some tyranny tiptoes in and robs you of breath just by being silent and unbudgeable. That’s what I married into. I try to think of it as a style, to lesson its defeating force. In the face of such brutal passivity, it’s tempting to view the expulsion of rage as somehow virtuous. But it’s not. Or it’s not necessarily.

Today anticipating more big wind, more torrential rain (one might say the weather is offering its own testimony of outrage), I prepare for fury. Have I ever done this before? Maybe. Maybe the summer the black-robed liars overturned Roe v. Wade and because of a leak, we knew it was coming. (Actually, we knew it was coming listening to feckless Susan Collins’ assessment of Kavanaugh, but skip that lest it sound like bragging, even though every sane consumer of the news knew it was coming).

Let me get right to the point. Why don’t the powers that be care about my outrage? Is it just that our side owns fewer guns?

I prepare a bed to kick and jump on when the Supreme Court of the United States hands down an opinion not worth the paper it’s written on — an expected ruling that, no, Colorado does not have the right to exclude an insurrectionist from the ballot. It’ll be some bullshit about the 14th Amendment, Section 3 not being self-executing or the president not being an “officer.” Or maybe they’ll straight up dish out policy and opine about the importance of uniformity, stability, or whatever, instead of doing their goddamned job which I don’t need to remind you is to interpret and UPHOLD the Constitution.

In not doing their job, the SCOTUS will be signaling that the rage of one set of people, all on the right, matters more than the sanity of the rest of us. The “pitchfork exemption” as Timothy Snyder calls it. To rule in fear of violence means violence wins. Talk about tyranny! No tiptoeing here.

What if I start breathing fire? Climb up a water tower and let loose? Or maybe travel to Maine where some extremist is buying up land and settling in for some siege or other. Who do you think you are?

Meanwhile Justices: Don’t you dare think that ruling there is no absolute presidential immunity (an absurd and ridiculous argument) will get you off the hook on reading the Fourteenth Amendment as it was intended and as it is plainly written.

Originalists and texturalists, my ass!

The rain is expected to fall hard and in volume. The last big wind took out the Internet for three days, offering a revealing lesson about routine and connectivity that might be worth looking at but I’m not willing to do so at the moment.

What is here today, on the page, out the window? Always a worthy question and sometimes all the remedy strong emotion requires. I’ll be hungry later. There will be dog hair to swipe off the floor with the side of my hand, cooked farro to add to soup and reheat. Bath bombs arrived and that means I’ll enjoy a fragrant bath, one with orange-tinted water.

Fury on hold, for now.