Use any ideas you come up from these excerpts as writing prompts. Let your mind wander, and let’s write.
Scales glisten;
pink whiskers jut out.
Some are the color
of mud, others
recall the embroidery
of coats placed
on babes one-month old.
Fat, round, small:
they lay on the crushed
ice, stall after stall.
From “Taking Her to the Open Market,” by Wing Tek Lum, Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly, No. 5, December 1979 – February 1980, New Moon
Let’s say that I’m a man; grant me that.
Picture the man sitting in a basement room. Outside of his basement window a flood of women wait to get in; they are like fire hydrants burst down the middle. Upstairs his landlady clucks over the damage, takes estimates, recounts her own versions of the screams, of the rocking work of water, how it sang up her walls through the night and shook the timbers of her own memories of loving. Upstairs it is arid, a jar of Vaseline yellows on the sill. The furniture bites him when he sits down, the doilies all spring to attention. There is no tide, no salt; they argue the new rent; he’s down to his last fifty dollars and she thinks she will e spared the necessity of actually kicking him out.
From “The Gospel According to Their Pants,” by Stephen R. Flick, Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly, No. 6, March – May 1980, First Quarter
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