IMPROMPTU #142: Samhain

“I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother’s mother.”

- Annie Finch, from “Samhain”

The veil between this world and the Otherworld is at its thinnest at this time of year. Write a story or poem or song in which your speaker/character interacts with an ancestor (or ancestors).

IMPROMPTU #138: Have You Ever Noticed

Have you ever noticed how private
a wet tree is
a curtain of razor blades
Love me because nothing happens.

— Leonard Cohen, from Parasites of Heaven

Write a poem or story that begins with “Have you ever noticed…”

Make it ten lines long.

Include an unlikely metaphor, this to say, use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities. (i.e. wet tree as a curtain of razor blades).

Use one example of synaesthesia (mixing the senses).

Include a stranger.

Include the colour purple.