From a bowl of fortunes

I’m not one to pay much attention to the message in a fortune cookie, unless, of course, it says something flattering about me. Still, even the unflattering ones might have uses.

Like poetry prompts.

At TweetSpeak Poetry, L.L. Barkat posted a poetry prompt this week – write poems from a bowl of fortunes. I didn’t have fortune cookies lying around, so instead I created a bowl of fortunes – with one or two words, and then pulled one, and then two, and then three.

So, here’s what came from “my new coffee cup:”

Baptism

Unwrapped from its swaddling

of brown paper, it sits rather

knowingly, a smile on its surface

shining blue and brown and green

and sand, the colors of its origin,

the colors of its impetus,

an impetus born of absence

that propelled it northward

from the hills. I baptized it today

with coffee.

The next fortune was “a noise:”

Loud noise

A noise outside, at night,

below the window, and

lights flash. I try to open

the blinds but the cord

comes apart in my hands.

The noise stops; the lights

still flash, their patterns

creating their own sound.

Then it got literary; the prompt was “Dickens:”

Dickens Reading

His voice rising and

falling, all eyes riveted

on the stage transformed

in imagination

to the death of Little Nell

or Nancy’s murder, reality

conjured by speech and

artistry into a vortex

of emotion, an offering

on the altar of words,

concluding with

physical collapse.

If you’d like to see more poems taken from a bowl of fortunes, or try some yourself, check out the original prompt at TweetSpeak Poetry and where links are being posted at the T.S. Poetry Press Facebook wall.