Category: National Poetry Month

I stretched the prompt a little today--instead of using the phrase "the last" in my title, I just used the word last. I've never written a "13 Ways" poem before, and I used some of my tweets from last year as sections. I'm pretty sure I'll be changing the first section at some point. 13 … Continue reading Day 11

Write a horror poem. Except I don't really do horror. Never liked horror movies--the closest I've ever come to liking one was "Shaun of the Dead." Even monster movies didn't do anything for me as a kid, and today's torture porn? Ugh. No thanks. But it turns out I did have something to pull from … Continue reading Day 10

Today is a self-portrait, and so I decided to go back to some ground I covered 8 or 9 years ago when I discovered that my father had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease since, like my father, like all of us really, who I am is tied up with the workings of my brain. … Continue reading Day 9

Thursdays are going to be brutal for me in getting this done this month, mostly because I have such a long workday, and fitting a poem into an already taxing schedule is rough. Today's challenge was to write a poem about a tool, and while I admit I was considering making a joke of it, … Continue reading Day 8

Another title prompt--this one asks you to use the word "until" in the title. This one also took me a while to get into, but I'm not completely disappointed with the final product. Just a side note about the way I feel about these poems: I'm self-deprecating about my writing in the first place--it's a … Continue reading Day 7

Today is an ekphrastic poem, i.e. one which responds to a work of non-literary art. I've been kicking this idea around in my head for a few weeks now--okay, years, since I noticed the change in this particular piece just a few weeks after Hurricane Wilma came though south Florida in 2005. Here's what it … Continue reading Day 6

A history poem, huh? I didn't really know where to go with this, since in a lot of ways, most poems I write are history poems--they're histories of my time as a Jehovah's Witness or my relationship with Amy or my daughter or any of the other moments in my life, and I didn't want … Continue reading Day 4

Didn't like today's prompt, to be quite frank. I'm always resistant to requirements on a title, especially one where the rule is to use a word in a particular way, in this case to use the word "partly" as the beginning of a phrase of some sort. Today's offering isn't as good as I'd like, … Continue reading Day 3