"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Posts tagged ‘prose poems’

Solstice Prompt <3 Memories of Lovers and the Body as Grace

20 June 2016

Here’s a solstice poem I wrote a few years ago, memory of a solstice back when I was a girl of eighteen, enchanted with a beautiful boy 🙂

This poem appears in my book If We Could Know Our Bones, from A-Minor Press ❤

____________________________________________________________

Remembering the Body as Grace

We all live in a house on fire. Tennessee Williams

1

I dream back the hot slow sky your body was above me, goldleafed and dappled in early sun, in those running heated days of baggy shorts, thin shoulder straps, loosed barefoot in the woods, where the world wore the soft warm pelts we tumbled in, skins multicolored scarfs we slid out of, slid into, each other. We were hungering home.

2

I wore some long breezy skirt, thinking Stevie Nicks would approve; in those days music made our maps, At a party to honor the March stars, I sat in your lap on Alan’s floor, after too much tequila, naming fish, aquarium after aquarium lining old apartment walls. Outside, a vernal moon split the day in two perfect halves, calling the first point of my Aries into startling alignment with your laugh.

3

Thirty-one suns have crossed the celestial equator since then, science and memory rearranging, the Earth’s elliptical orbit, bending, changing, precession, axis tugged in another direction. Spring even now is being reduced by one minute per year, singing as it goes. Naked to the native acre, bone-clear, the body knows what it knows.

4

Age has freed us from any need to hide, that sweet surrender of knowing celestial objects near the celestial equator are visible worldwide.

5

Assuming the body as love, my body remembers—you sleepy-eyed and unshaven, hair long, lit by light breaking into that space, where we tangled like sweet-sweating animals. What we didn’t know then, spring sliding home into summer, we do now, having worn these faces, lived in these skins, long enough to comprehend gravity as grace.

_________________________________________________

Make art about a solstice memory, about the body as grace.
lovers_silhouette-wallpaper-1280x800

Category:

2016 Prompts, animals, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Dreams, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Fathers

19 June 2016

“I buried my father/in the sky./Since then, the birds/clean and comb him every morning”~Li-Young Lee

Make art about fathers.

zzzzfatherandson2

 

 

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Call for Submissions: HeartWood

Poets, please submit.
Also seeking fiction and creative nonfiction.
Reading now for the October issue.
 

HeartWood

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Editing, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, litmags, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, publishing, Uncategorized, Writing

Tagged with:

The Birds of Grief

This week I keep going back to a poem I wrote a couple of years ago, about grief, about sheer physicality of grief and loss. About feeling helpless. About how loss, no matter what, belongs to all of us. 

________________________________________

 

I Want to Bring the Birds

inside, hold them in my hands, tuck them inside my shirt, claws and all, feel the sharp tic of each frightened beak, surround them with my fingers, cradle them against the cage of my ribs, whisper shh shh shh—until they each find and linger in their place: the titmice tatting nests into my hair, crested sparrows and juncos perched and singing from my feet, the jays who see me as so much meat, supplier of suet and otherwise foolish and useless, each take a shoulder, their alarm squawk sudden and hard as a couple of crows stand sentry on my back. The chickadees, those flying golf balls with their punk rock eyes and ebony mohawks, bossy and brazen, take my ears, letting me know just how they see this whole thing going, while the shy nuthatch hides, its cinnamon shadow disappearing under my shirt as it hops up my ribs and nuzzles in like a newborn near my heart. A pair of doves, and then another, their wings ash gray and spotted with apricot, nestle in on the soft give of my belly; I touch them with just the tips of my fingers, hoping, praying, they’ll teach me the tender songs only possible in the dark. One by one, they all settle in, on my limbs, my skin, feathering, resting, and maybe, so will I, settle for real, for the first time in years, as I hear and feel their heartbeats steady, slow, ease finally, into a companion rhythm with my own. Or mine to theirs? In my dreams, it doesn’t matter. In my dreams,we are the same.

___________________________________________________________

This poem is included in my collection The Night I Heard Everything from FutureCycle Press. 

birds of grief

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Editing, Gratitude, Love, poetry, publishing, Writing

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 What You Would Have Said

17 June 2016

“They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying.”~Neil Gaiman

Make art about what you wish you had said before they died. 

talking to the dying

 

 

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 What We Believe

16 June 2016

“I believe there is a song that is stranger than wind, that sips the scald from the telling…”~Karen Volkman

Make art about the first thing that comes to mind with the phrase I believe….

flowers-1680-1050-wallpaper

flowers-1680-1050-wallpaper

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 The Smallest Masterpiece

15 June 2016

We’ve had a sick kitty cat. Ulli, our twelve-year-old rescue, a tiny delicate graceful gray creature who, because of the trauma she experienced before we got her, even after all these years, still jumps at loud sounds and runs from strangers, who will panic herself into an asthma attack  in one minute, then turn and stalk a deer in the next. Ulli is definitely one of those cats who make you feel awed and grateful when she stops for that second to allow you the privilege of petting her, or when she musics the air around you with the low distant train rumble of a contented purr.

My oldest son, a large bearded Viking of a man, is completely devoted to this animal, and as age inevitably creeps into her bones, slowing and thwarting some of the natural processes, he becomes the one anxious, determined to give her the best care and most love he can. We both went to the vet to pick her up from a required hospitalization for twenty-four hours, and he loaded her little bitty crate into the car, saying, “It’s okay, Ulli. You’re all better now. No more tummy trouble. No more doctor. We’re headed back to Mimi’s for a little bit.” 

I laughed, at being Mimi to this grand-cat, and in relief that our Ulli is okay, and in gratitude that my own child is so relieved to have his beloved old lady cat back in good health. The blessings of family, y’all. That’s what it is today. 

“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Make art about animal family. 

IMG_4940

 

 

Category:

2016 Prompts, animals, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Family, fiction, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Family, and Heartbreak, and Fragility

 

Daily Prompt Catch-Up 

6/11/2016

Beautiful day with family today.

From “On Family Regathering Seen One Night Through a Window” by George Moor

All flows; the person has no permanence.
The children will grow up, the parents die.
For each precarious present the past tense
Is waiting; all is sort of a lie.
The clean cut fruit in dingy crystal bowls;
The fading chairs; the family sitting down.
For reassurance meet these traveling souls,
Each with an intimate sadness of his own.
Old habits calm. Old stories of old days….

Make art about family.

family

 

6/12/2016

Just don’t have words. Heartbroken.

orlando

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/13/2016

My son and I found this tiny nest yesterday, tumbled on the grass beneath the Guardian Oak. No babies, wounded or otherwise, in sight, just this miracle of weaving, bits of bark and straw and leaf and string. Inside the tiniest shards of shell left behind, thin and white as paper. I was struck at how delicate—and how strong—it is, kinda like Love.

Make art about the fragility, about the persistent strength, of Love.

nest

Category:

2016 Prompts, animals, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Hundreds of Prompts! Right Here! :-)

Finally got around to getting this website updated 🙂

Including all those Daily Prompts! Right here! 

Check em out and get your creativity flowing! 

Mary Carroll-Hackett Daily Prompts!   

01cf22f

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 "I'm nobody. Who are you?"

9 June 2016 

Having a bit of an identity crisis 🙂 Maybe not a crisis LOL 😀 but definitely a shift, some kind of transition, reinvention maybe. 

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”― Jeanette Winterson

Make art about changes in identity, about shifting views of the self. 

door face to face

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud