This blog is devoted to a select group of poets. We're starting with poets from the Ann Arbor area, but, hey, if you're from Detroit, Grand Rapids, Saginaw or the Upper Peninsula, then that is okay, too.
Our goal is to provide you with a prompt every day from which you are to garner inspiration and submit a poem. How to submit will be very easy. Just put your poem or short story in the comments section and hit post. You may not immediately see your post, but it is there under the "Comments" section. You may need to click on "Comments" to see your poem. It is there on another page.
You may need to have a Gmail account to post in the comments section. Most of you do have Gmail, but for those of you that don't it's extremely worthwhile to open up one now! That way you've got a chance to get your work out there in the world.
Today's poem or short story prompt is the word "trouble"
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ReplyDeleteTHREE SHORT LOVE STORIES
ReplyDelete- for someone but I'm not sure why, so I'm not going to put their name
Daniel James L---- was 17 when he shed his first layer of skin. He was sitting in the cafeteria at school, alone as usual, reading a 21-page piece of Harry Potter fan fiction he'd downloaded from the internet. It was a love story in which Harry and Ginny Weasley have a romantic candlelight dinner. He was lost in it, imagining himself as Harry Potter, looking into Ginny's eyes.
There was a fight brewing about a dozen feet away, two of the usual crowd swearing and threatening each other. He tried to keep his head down but they were getting closer, one of them pushing the other now, the other stumbling, then pushing back. The taller one bumped into the table and sent Daniel James L---- and his lunch sprawling across the floor. The pages flew everywhere and David James L---- scrambled to catch them before anyone could read them. Life was already hard enough as one of the only three Harry Potter fans in a class of 190 students, but it would be worse being known as "the guy who reads romance stories." He wasn't able to get all of the pages, though, and listened, humiliated, as one of the other kids read a page out loud.
Daniel James L---- shed his second layer of skin just a few months later when he learned that his favorite cousin had been killed in a boating accident. He lost the next one when his mother left the family for a new boyfriend and the next when his brother came out and his father stopped talking to him. He lost one more during the summer between junior and senior year to the second true love of his life. He'd lost four more layers by the time he started college. By his sophomore year, he had only one layer of skin left.
Of course, Daniel James L---- couldn't have known that. None of us knows exactly how many layers we were born with, how many layers we can lose before we are stripped completely naked. The process is painless and many of us don't even notice it happening. But, it leaves us as nothing but raw and exposed beings, trying to navigate as best we can with absolutely no defenses. Some refuse to go out in the world. Some build new armor, made of something only they can identify. Some turn to religion. Some turn away. Few accept it and embrace it as reality.
All of which leads us to yesterday. Daniel James L---- was sitting in a small, funky coffee shop in southeast Michigan, trying to focus on his homework. He was in trouble. His grades were slipping and his girlfriend was having "serious second thoughts about the relationship". He'd looked around for pieces he could use to reinforce what armor he had left but there was only paper and plastic and a few album covers he'd bought -- not for the music but because he liked the cover pictures. Sitting at the next table was a young girl and an older man. She was telling him about some recent trouble she'd had. Daniel James L---- tried not to listen, it pained him to listen to other people's troubles even thought he didn't know why. But this time, he couldn't stop. There was something very honest and fragile in her voice. It moved around the room, touching the photographs and washing over the paintings and bouncing off of the flyers announcing upcoming poetry readings and art shows. And it entered Daniel James L----'s ears. The sound found its way into his brain and then his mind and then his soul. From there, it was a short trip to that one part of his heart that he hadn't been able to protect.
He didn't feel the last layer being stripped away. He reached for his coffee. It was hot and he burned his fingers.
- Mike Fedel
April, 2013