What would you bring?

#whatwouldyoubring #poetry15

If you had to evacuate — from a fire, tornado, tsunami, or hurricane — what would you take with you?

This was on my mind this week, as there was a fire in a manhole nearby , prompting an evacuation! It was temporary, and no one was hurt. Nothing was lost. But this experience brought to mind the recent fires in LA, from January of last year. And evacuation as an event, disaster as a metaphor. As poets, we can write about the world and also use the world as an experience for something interior, as Richard Siken does in “Heat Map.” The speaker says of imaging of his brain, “It looks like a map of a city on fire.”

This prompt might lead you to meditating on objects: what life can you bring to a thing? Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” might inspire you. This prompt might lead you to write about the body using the language of disaster, as Siken does.

Prompt