Leaving the Reservation of the Mind Read “Leaving the Reservation of the Mind” Discuss Freewrite beginning with the following line: “O, Uncle Sherman! I’m in the _____ of my mind.” Let your words break open. Go where they go. Include the following words in your freewrite: clarinet, electron...

Deep Cave Writing Creative Nonfiction: Love’s Not Love “A cliché is thoughtless, whereas love is thoughtful. A cliché reproduces ideas originating in the culture, not in lived experience; it is antithetical to love because whereas love is alive, a cliché is dead. It’s an empty husk,” writes Sa...

As hollow as a gutted fish, a hole in the sand,a cistern cracked along the seam—There is no filling such emptiness. And yet—Stitch it shut. Pour and pour, if you wish. Wish and wish, but it’s wasted—Water carried to the garden in your cupped palms.Might as well seal an ember in a wax jar. Kindle fire on the crest of a wave.Unbloom a poppy, reshut its mouth, unred its lips—As if it hadn’t already sung,As if its voice hadn’t already set all summer singing.And the gall at its throat, the boil it’s prized for,Hadn’t been cut and bled of its white sleep.As if a child could be folded, resewn in its sac, and returned to its womb.

I traded a McDonald’s two-cheeseburger extra-value meal for a tattoo over a decade ago. A friend permanently inked my parents’ house key against my spine, in between my soft shoulder blades, as I hunched over a folding chair in a dining room with bad lighting. Afterward, in my old Corolla, I took us to the drive-through on a rare drizzly Los Angeles winter afternoon. A couple of years before that, I made my then-boyfriend swear he wouldn’t tell anyone I paid the tattoo shop’s minimum of $50 for a simple drawing that didn’t take longer than five minutes to sink into my skin. I was more embarrassed about having paid so much for the tattoo than about the tattoo itself. Fifteen years later, it’s now a faded, blurry, red line sketch of a two-inch-tall pitchfork. A tiny triangle makes the small point at the end of each of the three prongs. The pitchfork points upward, standing just a few inches above my butt crack.

A poem by Monica Sok.

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies / are not starving someplace, they are starving / somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. / But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. / Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not / be made so fine. — from “A Brief for the Defense”

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

A torch for traversing “the territory where no one possesses the truth… but where everyone has the right to be understood.”

A journey to the abyss between the real world and the ideal world, and a romp across our mightiest bridge between the two.

“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”

In praise of the manual-mental “loop-de-looping we call language.”

“Don’t start with a big idea. Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now.”

“Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.”

We’re all familiar with the ‘Five Year Plan’ right? Stalin n that first and foremost, but latterly, the oft-favoured tool of the earnest…

Photographer Muhammed Muheisen wants to introduce the world to the children who grow up fleeing war.

Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91~ The Paris Review, 2005 On the rare occasions when Jack Gilbert gives public readings—whether in New York, Pittsburgh, or San Francisco—it is not unusual for men and women in the audience to tell him how his poems have saved their lives. At these gatherings...

“There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love… Love is not something to do, but… something to …

Poets reflect on the poems they return to in difficult times.