prompt:we do a lot of writing in this club-- this week, i'd like us all to take some time to revise something. explore something you've written for an earlier prompt and play around with it. this doesn't have to be with the intention of making it 'better'. make it new; make it different; make it truer to yourself. have fun with it

author’s note: this is a revised version of my piece for august 26th. i don't necessarily think it's better, but it was fun to play around with punctuation/separation in it.

prompt:tell a story you want to tell to future generations to come-- whether through a poem, a short story, an essay, a myth-like retelling, or something else

Reva sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, eyeing the big pot of mac and cheese on the stove. The smell of melted cheese drifted through the house, making her stomach grumble, but she knew better than to touch it before her dad gave the okay. The door was propped open, as always– a stream of chatter floating in from the street outside. Her dad glanced down at her and raised an eyebrow.

“Think we’ll need more bowls tonight?” he asked.

Reva shrugged, squinting at the pot like she could measure the hunger of half her friends just by looking. “Maybe. Depends how many friends Raina brings.”

The door banged open, and Raina stumbled in, dragging two other kids Reva didn’t know too well. One of them– a girl with a mop of curls– waved shyly. Reva didn’t wave back, just hopped up and opened the cabinet, pulling out more bowls, just in case.

“Guess we’ll need more,” Reva said to herself.

Raina grinned wide, grabbing a spoon to taste-test the pot. “I brought the new girl from English,” she announced like it was a parade. “And Aaron from art class. You don’t know him, but his mom’s a real–”

“Language,” Reva’s dad said, cutting her off with a pointed look. Raina just grinned sheepishly, then giggled.

The new girl shifted from foot to foot, fingers twisting around the straps of her backpack. Reva watched her for a second. Something about the way she stood there made Reva’s chest tight– trying to take up as little space as possible, like she was afraid to breathe too hard, afraid to want anything. She looked like she hadn’t ever seen a kitchen like this– with kids smiling and the smell of real food cooking.

“Grab a seat!” Reva said finally, pointing to the mismatched chairs around the table. “It’s better if you’re sitting when Dad’s done or you might not get any.”

“Damn straight,” her dad muttered and chuckled, stirring the pot with a big wooden spoon. “Alright, kids, grab some bowls and eat up.”

The scrape of chairs, the clatter of forks and spoons, the way they all piled in at once– no order, no grace, just a mess of hands reaching and laughing and jostling each other. Reva scooted into her spot, elbow-to-elbow with Aaron, who sat quiet and tense, staring down at his full bowl like it was something precious.

“Better than lunch food, huh?” Reva teased, taking a bite.

Aaron blinked, then managed a small smile. “Yeah. A lot better.”

Raina started rattling off about some drama at school, her voice loud and full of life, and soon the kitchen was filled with noise. The new girl finally loosened up, eating with quick, eager bites– her shoulders relaxing a little more with each mouthful.

Reva’s dad leaned against the counter, arms crossed, watching the chaos unfold with a small, satisfied smile. It was like this most days– kids pouring in and out, friends and strangers alike, cramming themselves into the tiny kitchen, filling the house until it seemed to hum with it. No one asked questions. No one needed to. It was just the way things were: if you came here, you stayed until you didn’t need to anymore.

The new girl finished her bowl, eyes darting toward the pot. Reva nudged it closer. “Go on, there’s more.”

“You sure?” she asked, voice soft like she’d been taught to always take less.

“Yeah. Dad made plenty.”

The girl hesitated, then slowly reached for the spoon, cheeks flushed. Reva felt a weird kind of pride watching her scoop more onto her plate, like she’d passed some unspoken test. This was what it was all about, wasn’t it? A big pot of food and a wide-open door.

“You know,” Raina’s voice broke through, “you should just come here every day after school. Aaron, too. You guys got nowhere else to be, right?”

Reva’s dad raised his eyebrows, glancing at her, but she shrugged. “What? It’s true,” Raina said, sassy as always. “Everyone knows you just show up here if you need a place to be.”

“Yeah,” Reva murmured, looking at the new girl again. “She’s right. Just show up.”

She knew Raina was only half-joking, but it was still true. There was always room. Always enough. Because sometimes that’s all it took to make someone feel real– to show them they could sit at your table and eat until they were full.

The girl looked up, a tiny, grateful smile creeping across her face. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Reva said, and meant it. “We’ll be here.”

When the laughter bubbled up again, warm and loud and spilling out the open door, Reva leaned back, letting it wash over her, imagining the whole street hearing the sound and knowing exactly what it meant: Come in.

prompt:retell a story/moment/memory from your own life in a way you don't usually look at it

prompt: choose a few specific images and focus almost solely on them in a piece of writing of any kind

prompt: find a news article, new or old, and write something based on it

prompt: think & write about a space you've never inhabited-- something you've watched from afarr (in awe, fear, envy, etc), but never engaged in

prompt: write about something monstrous. what does it mean for something to be a monster? is it a judgment of character, something inherited at birth/creation, or something else?

I found it for the first time last Wednesday, somewhere between the backlit glass of my phone screen and the gray hum of the train window. I couldn’t see its face– not at first. It was more like an afterimage– a heat ripple– hovering in the edges of my vision, the kind of thing you catch and lose before you know what you're seeing.

But it stayed, and then it was nearer– never moving, but suddenly there. Its shape was disjointed, as if someone had tried folding skin into some origami form and given up halfway through. The light slid off it wrong, pooling in places it shouldn’t– glinting like slick mercury.

No one else on the train noticed. I almost wanted to point it out– to someone, anyone– but I knew no one, and have never been the kind of person to talk to a stranger. My mouth was too busy becoming something else, anyway. There was a buzzing, now, too soft to hear but loud enough to make my teeth itch.

When the train screeched into the station, the thing folded itself neatly behind the flicker of the automatic doors. It didn’t leave, though– even if it felt like it did. It followed me out, crouching low in the concrete silence as my shoes clicked across the platform. Its body kept changing– collapsing, expanding, like the pauses in a heavy conversation. I thought back to my last heavy conversation; maybe it’s one with my girlfriend, after I drank in a way I shouldn’t.

At home, it waited behind the mirror– hiding in odd ways, like in the reflection of things that don’t have reflections. I could feel it, then, stretching out the space between my breaths. Its edges pulsed, sounding as if it was learning to inhale for the first time.

Some nights I hear it in the walls, humming along with the static, practicing the shape of my voice, folding itself deeper into the corners I can't see. At first, I thought it would stay there– in the half-light of the places where things never quite exist– but it found new ways to follow me.

In the bathroom, in the hallways, anywhere the light bounced in a way that shouldn't be possible, it made itself at home. It wasn't exactly in the mirrors anymore, but there was always a piece of it near the edge of my vision, crawling up from the corner of the frame. It was a shadow that forgot to stay flat. I began to see it more often. It stretched longer, curving and twisting around the angles of the rooms, trying to figure out how to wear the space like skin.

Eventually, I stopped looking in mirrors, but it didn’t matter, because then it moved into the glass– the screens.

It was subtle at first– a shimmer that comes and goes when your phone overheats or when a window distorts from pressure. You’d think it was your eyes adjusting to a trick of the light, but there was always something in the background– the pixels rearranging themselves into something close to a face but not quite. I never caught it– dissolving into the noise every time I went to look directly at it– but I could feel it learning, waiting for me to stop paying attention.

One night I woke up and there was humming again, but this time from my phone– just below the surface, vibrating along the circuits, threading through the electricity. The screen was dark, but the buzzing rattled beneath my pillow like an old dial-up connection that wouldn’t stop screaming. I turned it off– didn’t touch it for a week. My boss got real mad, and I just told him I was sick (“I might be out a while”).

But the thing doesn’t need technology. It just finds whatever’s closest. Once I unplugged, it started making itself known in other ways. In the gap between breaths– spaces between blinks. It would curl itself around the ends of moments, bending the air so subtly that you’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there.

I thought it might leave after a while, that if I stopped looking, stopped noticing, it would get bored and move on. But it doesn’t work like that. This thing didn’t get bored– just deeper, quieter. It started to really shape itself into me. Maybe the shape was always mine, and it just had to remind me.

I stopped trying to explain it to people. After the second or third time, you realize that no one hears it the way you do. They listen, nod, but their eyes glaze over, and you can see that they’ve already boxed it into something small– something that fits into their understanding of the world, something that can be solved with a good night’s sleep or a change of scenery. They don’t get it, because it’s not theirs to get.

One day it might be. I don’t know if it can ever fully belong to anyone, and maybe one day it won’t be mine any longer. It’s slippery like that– fluid. There are moments where I almost think it’s gone, that I can feel the air again without that static hitch underneath it. But then, I’ll hear it– a soft hum, a low flicker in the background of a song I’ve played a hundred times but sounds different, off-key in a way that makes my skin crawl.

It's growing bolder. I catch glimpses of it in places I thought were safe– in the lines of my bedspread, the folds of my laundry, the sizzle of oil in a pan. I can feel it tracing the outline of my thoughts, pulling at the edges, trying them on.

Last week, I woke up, and for a moment– just a moment– I thought I saw it. Not in my head, not as an afterimage, but fully formed, standing at the foot of my bed. A body made of everything I’ve forgotten– all the moments I narrowly missed, conversations that never got started. It didn’t quite have a face, but I knew it was looking at me– waiting. I blinked away the blurriness of sleep, and it was gone.

prompt: consider someone in your life that you have strong emotions for and think of some sensorial experiences (images) that you associate with them, then write from that!

prompt: reflect on a ritual, whether it's a personal habit, cultural tradition, or invented routine. what does your ritual signify? what happens when a ritual is interrupted or transformed? how does it evolve over time?

The world was too quiet, so I took another bath.

The moon watched in a motherly way, full like a plate. I could feel the way she swelled with pride as I pressed a loofah to my shoulder and dragged it down my arm.

She watched me with only some attention. Her focus drew to other places and back to me again, waxing and waning the way she herself does, and the way tides draw in and out.

I paid full attention to myself, rubbing soap into my face and neck and collarbone and all the rest of me. The water rose and fell as I shifted in the tub.

I felt my skin begin to twist and turn, rippling, and closed my eyes to let it happen. A watched pot never boils, after all.

prompt: think & write about a place you love and how it appears in your heart & life.

prompt: this is a bit similar to a prompt i've posted in the past, but i'd like you to write from a perspective you don't usually write from. if you usually write about yourself, write from the point of view from someone else. if you always write first person, try writing third person. if you tend to write a stream of conscious and focus on more internal things, then focus on external details.

prompt: write about the feeling of clothes on a body— the way it fits & feels, and what each material inspires.

prompt: explore how things break, branch, become fractals-- where does the importance in repetition or breaking away from it lie?

prompt: write something based off of another piece of writing, art, music, etc! maybe an ode to or a commentary on it– whatever feels right.

prompt: write about stones as keepers of stories and witnesses to history. what silent wisdom do things like stones have, with their enduring presence?

Somewhere between a sermon and a song,

Stones know the quiet echo of blood on the land. They were here when the first hands clenched, not in fists, but in prayer, when bodies bent low to kiss the dirt, when whispers wove through the cracks, secrets slipping between grains of sand.

They’ve watched empires rise, cities bloom, and then crumble, not with a roar, but with a sigh that only the earth hears. Stones cradle the weight of forgotten names, the breath of ancestors pressed into their veins.

They are the unmarked tombs, the silent witnesses, holding the stories that the wind can’t carry. Listen close, and you might hear the rhythm of a thousand heartbeats, a history too heavy for tongues to bear, but the stones, they carry it like a lullaby, soft, steady, unbroken.

What do you know of endurance, of time? They would ask if they could speak, but they know that the truth is often held, not in the telling, but in the staying.

prompt: think about the absence of something and how the shape it once filled & now leaves affects things. is it good? sad? bittersweet? write about it.

The living room is heavy with the glow of the single working bulb in the overhead light– the rest flickering softly every now and again. R strokes his thumb across the back of her hand, pressing it into the dining table just a little more than he meant to, and she just looks down. His hands are more calloused with every drive, and they feel less and less like the ones she knows.

“I’m sorry.” His breath hitches in his throat and he swallows, not knowing how to try again. “I know it’s not what you want.”

Alin doesn’t know where to start and just purses her lips– chest growing tighter, teeth grinding against each other, anxiety overflowing. “Yeah.”

“What can I do?”

She just sighs, and it’s so shaky she can’t even feign being mad. “Not leave? Not again. Not every time you’re asked to.” Her voice started to crack. “Just give me a little longer with you for once.”

It would be a lie for R to say he wished he could; he’s not someone who just does his job because he has to. He loves it, and he loves her, too, and it’s an overwhelming tray of dishes to balance. He thinks of working as a waiter, and misses it for a moment. There weren’t all these fights, then.

“You know I can’t, Al– I have to go. It’s not long, just 16 days this time.”

“Jesus, R, that’s 16 days and 16 nights, and it’s ‘not long’? Soon enough I'll be writing the next Scheherazade to fill the time.”

“Come on, now– take a second. Think about it. I know it feels like a long time, but you have work, too, and we can check in. It’s not like we won’t talk.”

She’s silent again, and he’s fucked it up severely. Nuggets of wisdom from a truck driver can’t do much but hurt for someone in love with one.

prompt: write about digital ghosts. explore the remnants of a person– a digital footprint, if you will– that lingers even after active online presence fades. what does it mean for us to have two selves– the real life, which is ever-changing, and the online, which will always be every version of you at once, keeping the old and new.

you are born again on a motherboard— pins, tapes, boxes like the warehouse you work in, just bringing you back to somewhere you don’t need/want to be. you opened this computer to write and now you’re in a green and gray world like zuckerberg probably wants, and it’s being trapped again.

the screen hums somewhere far above you, and little phosphors and LEDs seem to flicker– almost imperceptibly, if you weren’t also so small. this is where you hide every day, when your brain shifts into a different space at night, and suddenly you’re in REM, and you think you’re gone from the world, but you could never be gone.

not when you’re stored in something like this– so powerful, all knowing the second you open it. and here you are, again, and here you will be. your computer is littered with little gravestones: here lies your 2018 tumblr blog, still stored. here lies your instagram post from when you still loved her. here is the you that you were when no one was watching, or maybe everyone was watching, because everyone can watch.

you are five hundred little ghosts inside every machine you or anyone else has ever used. you are five hundred yous. every ‘you’ you could think to create will be here. just open up.

prompt: this one’s more open-ended; I just want you to think and write about jellyfish, because i love them and i’m feeling like hearing about what they mean to you! here’s a playlist that makes me happy and might inspire you.

prompt: think of a moment that’s both nostalgic and visceral. it can be old or new, but something that feels both vague and like you can still feel it in your skin, muscle, and bones. write about it however feels right.

 a friar with eyes open wide, chest heaving—
the night pressing down             its edge against his stomach,
a razor’s edge, old hair unearthed and joining the new:
the blood cleanly streaming and his body compressing
as he stares      his ceiling in a new light     like the stars,
unearthed from a city’s sky,        a whimper from his throat
and he can’t take the way his guts are spilling around his lungs,
like fat overflowing      his waistband hidden, eyes down
and ashamed—    so ashamed of a dream,     of loving,
wanting to feel nourished, even if that means overflowing
any kind of containment—      wondering if he can still be God’s
if he must       be his own, if he knows     how 

prompt: think about undercurrents as you write– movements and energies that flow beneath surfaces. what surfaces do they lay beneath? is it an undertone in skin or a song, a literal current, a political movement?

the fool

     sheets sweat around me, wrapping me in,
                           pushing them off– the weight of a man,
              heavy with ripped tendons & seams–
my body tugged toward the cutting board,
slicing peaches & nectarines, blade sliding against the flesh,
crushing– sweet juice spilling	          down the handle, staining wood.
    i press it to my mouth, grooves of my thumb against my lips,
            sweet sap filling my mouth– like how i thought, at 6,
                          hot oil	          must taste,
             betrayed by a loving image,
suddenly a cartoon seeing stars
              dancing around me, closing in,
eyes wide, little pop rocks daggers in my mouth that
            slough chunks off my	  hot-to-the touch cheeks,
like shoveling ice off a car              (just more unwanted stuff–
            “ who needs so much skin,             protection? ”)
and the stars fill my mind            again, pulling
me off to bed for sleep, melting into unchanged sheets,
              the cotton cutting me–        rotting my body–
and my cheeks            healing

prompt: look for patterns in chaotic & ‘random’ events, experiences, behaviors, etc. these could be in nature, in our own emotions & actions (or inactions), in the structure of a city, in a computer, in a body. do these patterns uncover an underlying order or meaning? are they coincidental?

prompt: write about brief encounters, fleeting moments, first impressions. what do these leave behind for us?

prompt: write about evolution and devolution. how do we unravel & re-ravel? think about what histories our bodies & communities & species & worlds are made of.

prompt: consider ‘trace elements’-- barely noticeable things and what they change. think butterfly effect! are their effects expected & small or disproportionate? is a ‘trace element’ an extra bit of DNA? is it some milk in a loaf of bread?

prompt: write about or use asymmetry in your writing. what is the intrigue in imbalance? maybe work with different-sized stanzas or long, long sentences followed by short ones, or think about how no two bodies are the same, nor two halves of the same body, or how the feeling of a painting shifts with where the objects sit.

author’s note: the second i decided to write this about my body, i knew it couldn’t be good– it just had to be a love letter. enjoy.

prompt: explore the softness & blurring of edges—dawn/dusk, the place between sleep and wakefulness, transitions from youthfulness to adulthood and adulthood to old age. what do those borders & changes feel like, look like, smell like?

prompt: write a piece that uses all or most of this pool of words– glisten, slow, starlight, fruit, molten, calm.

prompt: try to make your writing as silent as possible. i know it's a weird prompt-- don't take it too seriously. have fun. what does it mean for writing to be quiet?

prompt: explore the concept of time in your writing. play with the idea of how we perceive passing time [linear/cyclical/all at once/not at all] and make it weird and surreal, or maybe go more classic & write some fun time travel/time loop fiction. how does time shape us?

i scratch at a scab and make new scar– pull apart the deep purple, the hardened salt flats on my skin, the new blemish. i think of sliding down the concrete stairs on my knees– ripping them raw, blood trails, cells scattered, little bits of skin like pilling on a sweater. dark wrinkles spread across my knuckle where the scab was– where the burn was, where i disregarded myself [the world disregarded me]. every acne scar across my chin, cheek, shoulder blade– the boils that speckle dark corners of my skin and leave me with little slits and stretched skin. this skin is some map, some novel in need of a translator.

prompt: try writing in the second person. address your audience and sit with them as you tell your story. see how this direct connection affects how you write.

author’s note: i promise i'm okay-- this one isn't about me. sort of odd how we tend to assume poetry must always be autobiographical, honestly, but that's beside the point.

prompt: write a piece in which you blend two physical senses. maybe focus in on the taste or shape of words, or the feel of an old memory. imagine & sink into those sensations and see what comes up.

prompt: explore a life cycle in some kind of writing. for example, you could use metamorphosis, diapause/hibernation, paedogenesis [very weird], puberty, the salmon life cycle, the amphibian life cycle, or something else entirely! you don't have to be direct-- just start here and get inspired.

prompt: take time to explore different structures of whatever you like to write. for poetry, consider writing a pantoum, ghazal, or abecedarian (some of my favorites). for an essay or fiction, consider writing vignettes, something in epistolary form, a diptych/triptych piece, a frame story, or a circular narrative.

prompt: write about echoes, sound, and reverberation. what is an echo– just sound or something more? how can it reverberate through past, present, and future? can emotion be an echo in that way? what else can be?

prompt: fuck salvador dali for being evil. that said, write a piece inspired by two famous dali paintings, persistence of memory and the elephants [shown below]. consider exploring movement, slowness/speed, heat/cold, and warped sensations.

Grains of sand melt away, coming together like mango sticky rice under my feet. The sun is hot and I cannot stand to sleep, dreaming more waking nightmares than I ever have before.

Above, dead trees bend their spindly hairless bodies toward me, like maybe I am the brutal sun that could heal them at a lower dosage– like they are leaning in closer to listen, thinking maybe they’d understand me if they could just hear a bit clearer.

I imagine them hairier– flourishing– with a thicket covering their now-bare chests and limbs. The sun bears down on me, and the image melts away. I wonder if it is punishment for imagining under such harsh conditions. At a time like this, I should be preoccupied with surviving.

The heat seeps in through my pores and my sweat seeps out. The sky is so many colors it shouldn’t be, and I wonder what time it is. I wonder if it is a mirage, and how long it’ll be until I start seeing oases and grand palaces.

My eyes start to close, and I can taste water and grains of rice. I think it might be sand on my tongue.

prompt: write about a worldly place that is a threshold for you. this can mean anything-- maybe it's some place between end and beginning, forward and backward, past and present, here and there, friends and lovers, or something else entirely!

prompt: write about what ways writing plays a role in your life-- why do you like it? is it hard? what's your relationship with it? be as abstract or direct as you'd like.

i’ve been storytelling for as long as i can remember. i wrote my first picture book when i was 5, in montessori, and my second in the 2nd grade, and my third in freshman year of high school. i played pretend through elementary school like my life depended on it– something i even wrote an essay on [which i can hopefully share if it gets published in a mag i submitted to… fingers crossed!]. it’s something that’s always been a part of my life. i’ve always wanted to tell the stories i felt should be told.

it’s hard to write, though. it always has been for me– i’m quite the slow writer, and i need a lot of breathing room between pieces. i need to absorb a lot to write a little. actually writing something isn't hard, but getting myself to is. chronic illness has made it even harder. but it’s worth it. i love getting notice small, beautiful things and put them into words. i love getting to hate and really love this world-- to want to watch it grow and be better and adore the beautiful things i see in it already. i love putting that to words.

writing means a lot of different things to me now– much more than it used to. i feel my drive to write has always been more serious, but i used to actually write simply because it’s fun. that’s a beautiful reason to write, but it’s interesting to see how my conscious reasoning behind writing has changed.

i think it’s telling that i started this piece that’s supposed to be about my relationship to writing talking about storytelling. writing is just part of it for me. storytelling in any form is how we keep ourselves alive, no? it’s how we connect, how we learn, how we tell the stories of our people. it’s how we grow. it’s what teaches us our first morals and principles.

storytelling is quite spiritual, i feel. it connects you to so much you can’t quite put a finger on. lately, i’ve felt connected to my ancestors when i write. i can almost feel their hands on my shoulders and their soft, wrinkled hands pushing bread into my mouth. i think of the nahuatl people i once was– the way i’m more spanish than i am truly mexican, and the way i know a lot of my ancestors would hate me and the ones i love most would love me just as much. i think about reconnecting, and i know writing is reconnecting.

as much as i love that feeling, i write mainly for community– that’s why i created this club. i want to push myself and the people who read what i write to understand more and discover more and search for what is hard to search for. everyone grows when writing happens, and i love being a part of that. i love making and trading zines, and writing blog posts, and writing poetry that fights for what i feel it needs to, and writing essays [academic and personal] on what i want to share, and telling stories that are hard to hear in all this world’s noise, and writing on protest posters & postcards to representatives & walls that shouldn’t exist.

i don’t think i’ve motivated a ton of progress in our world because of writing or anything, but i know i’ve made small changes here and there, and that’s enough. i want to go into journalism, and keep writing creatively, too, and i want to make that bigger change, but i know that if nothing else, i’ve done something i love and changed my own heart. if nothing else, i want to keep doing that.