Prompt: Take a good look outside your window. Spend a minute or so jotting down all the nouns you see outside. Tree. Car. Bus. Dog. Then spend a minute or so writing down all the colors you see. Finally, think about taking place outside. Is the wind blowing? “Blow.” Is someone walking their dog? “Walk.” Spend a minute or so writing down these verbs. Now you’ve got a whole list of words from which to build a poem, mixing and matching as you go. 

There’s a wild lonely pitbull
And three battle spotted cats
At war under our violet porch
Over which spare shadowed pear trees
Promise to burst mantis, brighter than
Any grey gutted streetlamp

An ocean blue and half wrecked car
creeps around deep black potholes
And steaming portals, open
Between faded blood brick buildings where
Blinded windows expose automated dreams
Of a different era

And all the winter ghosts fill up again with life
Spreading the pink cheeks and belly laughter
of spring after a vortex
Brave bare arms and ashy black calves come out
We grieved a long season; now we are
Reaching for the massive sky