“The hospital said you couldn’t go home, not until some number inside you became another number. The number came up on a machine, it had something to do with your blood. The blood was inside you, but it was something we weren’t supposed to touch. If we touched it, we would become you. You didn’t know why everyone wasn’t in the same place. Our families had turned into museums, a place we’d visit once a year. The year wouldn’t end, it kept getting further and further away. I didn’t have a way to get inside you, not after the test. The test lit a fire inside you, a flame in each of your eyes. Your eyes were broken headlights then, one bright, one dead. Death was never far from us those days. The days would chip away at them, days spent counting who was missing. The missing might have simply taken a bus to Florida, or they might have checked into rehab. They could be anywhere. That’s what we told ourselves.”

Friends,

The above is an example of chain sentences, where the last word of each sentence becomes the first word of the next, and so on (the example is from the book I’m working on these days). I was turned on to this exercise by Brenda Miller, in her essay titled “Cables, Chains, and Lariats: Form as Process,” which I found in the book Family Resemblances: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres (Marcela Sulak, Jacqueline Kolosov, eds).

It’s a very good anthology, full of ideas and play.

UPCOMING EVENTS

3 nov / Writeability / online workshop / worldwide (via zoom)

19 nov / Regatta Bar / Earfull / reading / Cambridge, MA

20 nov / Cathedral of Saint John the Divine / Poets’ Corner / reading / New York, NY