not halcyon—human
(erasure of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1835 short story “Berenice”)
thus,
human violence,
In the lucid intervals
of calamity,
partook:
its disease revelled in the less important but more startling changes, the singular and most appalling distortion of ‘personal identity’
among the trellised shadows of living and breathing
not as a being of the earth,
as the abstraction of such a being-
not as a thing to admire, not as an object of love, but
of the mind
afternoon in the winter of the year,
—one of those unseasonably warm,
calm, and misty days
which are beautiful-beautiful.
by Alton K. Fallow
Alton K. Fallow is an poet and amateur rock skipper who lives in Dubuque Iowa, and yes, it really is that boring there.
On Writing Prompts
I really enjoy the prompts at Notebooking Daily, they’re open-ended, work for both poetry and fiction and by reminding you so frequently not to stare at the screen not typing, trying to find the perfect words, you end up with a completed draft immediately, and it’s often a much better draft than you’d think. Without trying to keep myself to a time limit I tend to get half-written pieces that never go anywhere.
This piece was sparked by the 2020 Writing Exercise Series #350: Erasing EAP “Berenice” 3 which was to write a piece using the six words: Run, Elbow, White, Because, Silver, Pour
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