Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl” by Dorianne Laux, posted below.

Our prompt was:“What death comes to you today?”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday March 10th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl by Dorianne Laux

Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It’s not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.

Credit: Dorianne Laux

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Last Sky World Burn” by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a clearing for a new world.”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday March 3rd at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Last Sky World Burn by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

what the birds know is the way home

it begins with a door that cannot find its own name

the bird who stitches together the last sky must sing the name into existence

and the door opens into the burning of the world

 

through the door we find each other

and in the wholeness the birds

collective rupture into species being

the last sky world burn sings itself into our feet

soles imbued with prophecy of dirt

 

good lord last sky world burn there is something beyond you

the birds are taking us to find it

you are singing the door open for us

and through it streams the flood of the people

the feet of the flood of the people burn the world as they run

 

the last sky world burn is desperate to open the door for us

there are birds making treaties with the sky to facilitate its arrival

there are feet conspiring with the land to ensure the world burn is total

last sky will empty itself of airplanes and war jets to make room for our spirits

 

the last sky world burn is a sketch of a coming dream

it is our duty to believe in its inevitable birth

the last sky world burn asks a question

it is our responsibility to make the answer

Copyright © 2025 by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 25, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Siren Song” by Margaret Atwood, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a song nobody knows.”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday February 28th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Siren Song by Margaret Atwood

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don't enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

Copyright Credit: Margaret Atwood, “Siren Song” from Selected Poems 1965-1975. Copyright © 1974, 1976 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Houghton Mifflin Company.
Source: Poetry (February 1974)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from the novel “Orbital ” by Samantha Harvey, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about sending signals.”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday February 21st at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

When they hear on a phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep to her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things had shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the dark brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city of Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding of heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plane and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.

Credit: Harvey, Samantha. Orbital (2023). New York: Grove Press. p.132-34.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “The Snow Mare” by N. Scott Momaday, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a burden of being.”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday February 10th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The Snow Mare by N. Scott Momaday

In my dream, a blue mare loping,
Pewter on a porcelain field, away.
There are bursts of soft commotion
Where her hooves drive in the drifts,
And as dusk ebbs on the plane of night,
She shears the web of winter,
And on the far, blind side
She is no more. I behold nothing,
Wherein the mare dissolves in memory,
Beyond the burden of being.

Credit: N. Scott Momaday
Source: Poets.org

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the 1947 painting “Les Clochards, Montmartre, Paris” by Loïs Mailou Jones, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about going our separate ways.”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday February 7th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Les Clochards, Montmartre, Paris by Loïs Mailou Jones

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Breaking [News]” by Noor Hindi, posted below.

Our prompt was: “What buoys me through the world...”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday January 31st at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Breaking [News] by Noor Hindi

We’ll wake up, Sunday morning, and read the paper. Read each other. Become

consumers

of each other’s stories, a desperate reaching

for another body’s warmth—its words buoying us through a world. We carry

graveyards on our backs and I’m holding a lightning bug

hostage in one hand, its light dimming in the warmth

of  my fist, and in the other, a pen, to document its death. Isn’t that terrible?

I’ll ask you, shutting my fist once more.

In interviews, I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible

to consumers.

I  become a machine. A transfer of information. They  become a plea for empathy,

an oversaturation of feelings we’ll fail at transforming into action.

What’s lost is incalculable.

           And at the end of  summer, the swimming pools will be gutted of  water.

          And it’ll be impossible to swim.

Source: Poetry (December 2020)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Another Antipastoral” by Vievee Francis, posted below.

Our prompt was: Begin with “My curious tale...”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday January 24th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Another Antipastoral by Vievee Francis

I want to put down what the mountain has awakened.


My mouthful of grass.
My curious tale. I want to stand still but find myself moved patch by patch.
There's a bleat in my throat. Words fail me here. Can you understand? I sink 
   to
my knees tired or not. I now know the ragweed from the goldenrod, and the
   blinding
beauty of green. Don't you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a 
   wolf spider,
the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doe. I have fallen from my 
   dream
of progress: the clear-cut glass, the potted and balconied tree, the lemon-
   waxed
wood over a marbled pillar, into my own nocturne. The lullabies I had 
   forgotten.
How could I know what slept inside? What would rend my fantasies to cud 
   and up
from this belly's wet straw-strewn field—

                                                                                these soundings.

Copyright Credit: Vievee Francis, "Another Antipastoral" from Forest Primeval.  
Source: Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2016)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Some Things I Like” from Listener by Lemn Sissay, posted below.

Our prompt was: “I like...”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday January 17th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Some Things I Like from Listener by Lemn Sissay

I like wrecks, I like ex-junkies,
I like flunks and ex-flunkies,
I like the way the career-less career,
I like flat beer,
I like people who tell half stories and forget the rest,
I like people who make doodles in important written tests,
I like being late. I like fate. I like the way teeth grate,
I like laceless shoes cordless blues,
I like the one-bar blues,
I like buttonless coats and leaky boats,
I like rubbish tips and bitten lips,
I like yesterday’s toast,
I like cold tea, I like reality,
I like ashtrays, I write and like crap plays.

I like curtains that don’t quite shut,
I like bread knives that don’t quite cut,
I like rips in blue jeans,
I like people who can’t say what they mean,
I like spiders with no legs, pencils with no lead,
Ants with no heads, worms that are half dead.
I like holes, I like coffee cold. I like creases in neat folds.
I like signs that just don’t know where they’re going,
I like angry poems,
I like the way you can’t pin down the sea.
See.

Credit: from Listener by Lemn Sissay.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from the novel “The Tidewater Tales” by John Barth, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about the story you would like someone in your life to tell.”

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday January 10th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

An excerpt from the novel The Tidewater Tales by John Barth.

KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE, 39 YEARS OLD,
AND 8 ½ MONTHS PREGNANT, 
BECALMED IN OUR ENGINELESS SMALL SAILBOAT, 
AT THE END OF A STICKY JUNE CHESAPEAKE AFTERNOON
AMID EVERY SIGN OF THUNDERSTORMS APPROACHING
FROM ACROSS THE BAY, 
AND SPEAKING AS SHE SOMETIMES DOES IN VERSE, 
SETS HER HUSBAND A TASK.

Tell me a story of women and men, 
Like us: like us in love for ten
Years, lovers for seven, spouses
Two, or two point five. Their Houses
Increase is the tale I’d wish you tell.

Why did that perfectly happy pair
Like us, decide this late to bear
A child? Why toil so to conceive
One (or more), when they both believe
The world’s aboard a handbasket bound for hell?
Well?

Credit: John Barth