21

For today’s prompt, pick a direction on the compass, make it the title of your poem, and write that poem. North, South, West, and East are easy directions. Then, there’s Southwest, Northeast, and so on. Then, there are the directions that are completely invented.


East, then, I guess.


East then.
It was to be north.
So far north you couldn't believe.
I couldn't believe.
Why, even?

And then it was
straight into the dark, molten center of the earth
and I held my mother's hand there
in the Trauma ICU as we, miraculously,
kept living through
the night
but the girl
- Heather -
behind the curtain did not,
even though all her family was there,
certainly all of them, their bodies
making lumps in the curtain, their conversation
at three and at four thirty keeping us awake or alive.

And then, we are all alive,
okay, for a time,
okay, so
too late to go North.
I go east.
She now, therefore, is west.
We both, at this moment, still live.
And everyday I can consider--
do I paint my way back  to the center of the
earth or of to the center of the sky or
do I go west, or east,
north or south
or do I just
breathe
and hear the wind
and have no way of knowing
what direction it comes from?

Sometimes it seems evident
that I will die next.