Around Then

I'm back in my classroom, sorting through last year's work and planning for this year.  One of the notebooks had the following writing I'd done with my students in Poetry & Fiction:

Around 2008 three Frenchmen tell me to get out of the country.  I need a dictionary to figure out what they said.

Around 2003 I use a silver, putty knife to scrape fossilized gum off the bottom of every desk, chair, and table in a high school.

Around 1988 Colin tries to bite me.  I scramble up a mattress that leans against the wall.

Around 1997 Vince throws a basketball at my face.  I don't know how to respond.  He punches me in the nose, twice.

Around 2008 the top of the toilet tank is off at a Halloween party.  I pull on the tube instead of the floater to flush, and water hits the ceiling.

Around 1998 I tried to cut in half a 3" block of American cheese, just as my friend reached up while stocking the prep station's fridge.  Blood sprayed on the fryolator and grill.

Prompt Fiction

I've nearly finished a fiction writing course at UNH, and it has reminded me to give time and care to my own writing - something I haven't done since I started work as a full-time teacher last August. Here's my response to one of the brief prompts from last week:

I can't see the moon. I want it, reflected off the still water, broken into ripples that roll from a swan - its body embraced by the water. I want that Rilke poem to play out here. But I have only mud on my boots, and the water only laps at them. No embrace. And the stillness stinks of rotten, raw earth. No grace here. Just depths that I can't see, but know: some slime haunts the bottom of the water; it will stay there until the lake dries. Even then, it will harden like a scab, covering the bed that once held such a poetic promise of beauty.


The prompt had two options, and I chose the first:
1) Describe a lake as seen by a murderer, directly after the murder, but don't mention the murder.
2) Describe a place as seen above by a bird, but don't mention the bird.

The punctuation near the end and the Rilke reference need work, among other things, but it was fun to focus on my own creative work instead of my students' writing. Now I need to get back to completing my short story.