Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Orlando” by Megan Fernandes, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a road not taken.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

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Please join us for our next session Monday December 18th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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"Orlando" by Megan Fernandes

The few weeks I was pregnant, whenever people asked
how are you, meg? I’d answer, oh ya know… with child
which I thought was dead funny. I don’t think about it now
except sometimes in a fitness class surrounded by women
trying to shed baby weight and I make the calculations,
(he’d be about fourteen by now) and then I look at myself
in the class mirror while women squat and lift their legs
and think, wow!, I look so good for having a fourteen
year old and then I’d think again, how if he was a reality,
I’d say it all the time and embarrass him in front of his
school friends and for some reason, I think he’d be
a drummer and wear green. I have no regrets,
but I wonder if he’s waiting in the sky somewhere
or doing blow in another dimension where he’s a rocker
and very much flesh. I don’t believe in kin by blood,
but I believe poems can give form to the formless,
that one can resurrect roads not taken in a line
and give it a name. It’s a novel by Virginia Woolf, I’d say
and rattle on and he’d wave me off but maybe read it
one day in college and think about his young mother
who wanted to be a writer and what she might have had
to give up in order to raise him at twenty-three.
He’d write me a song. He’d title it with my name.

Credit: Megan Fernandes. The Nation