Last week was one of those weeks when my writing rhythm was thrown off by travel and late nights in Raleigh for work and poetrySpark.  When I can’t think of anything to write or haven’t written in a while, prompts are a way to jumpstart the creative juices.  Luckily, one of my responsibilities for Living Poetry is sending out the weekly poetry prompt. Every Monday on the ride into work, I have to figure out what the prompt is going to be—which means focusing my energies on thinking about what topic might possibly inspire me to write.  Here are a few of the prompts I’ve used so far:

skin * breath * night *  fireworks * the smell of mint

Recently, I started using a visual prompt on the 3^rd Monday of the month. Last month, a photo in the UCLA Magazine inspired this poem:

Carbon Footprint

From the “Vegan Campus” article in UCLA Magazine: http://magazine.ucla.edu/features/the-vegan-campus/index1.html

I want to leave
something behind,
more than this poem,
this page, this pen,
a lineage beyond
what my fruitless
loins choose to bear.
In time, the mind purges
any memory too heavy
to carry. The soul
must be free to take
the next step without
a trace of regret.

Today, I sent out a photo from National Geographic. I’ll post the poem I come up with next week.