Jessica
Here’s my goal, stated in public: I’ve got to participate in more Read Write Poem prompts. I love them each week and then I lose them in the stream of work and episodes of So You Think You Can Dance. Since I want to start off fresh with the prompts, I figure that I may as well start with the Read Write Word prompt I help to organize. They are my favorites, after all. Below is my offering:
What I Learned in College
We did not wear fur; we cloaked ourselves in flannel
and denim. Enough to keep ourselves warm.
We coveted fire, the flaming ends of cigarettes, the burnt
scent of mashed potatoes, singe marks on lounge couches.
We slumped and sulked to class. We rolled down hills
on skateboards. We hitched rides. Never walked.
Every night, we hosted seances at a concrete wall. We
conjured spirits then stamped out their memories in inches
of black ash. How did we protect our hearts? We held them
close in our cages, turned them to ice. Even as we coveted
acuity and intimacy, we lost ourselves in empty halls
and the snow gray sky. Before we bought ourselves
work clothes, before mortgages, before copping
sanguine stares from nine to five daily, we once
loitered and loved, studied and slept, argued
and awed. We made and unmade ourselves daily.
The prompt words were: heart, seance, acuity, slump, flaming, sky, loiter, fur and sanguine.
