Creative Writing Assignment

Assignment: Take a poetry book. Open to any page, grab a line, write it down, and continue from there. Every time you get stuck, just rewrite the line and go from there.

After we flew across the country we got in bed, and let the

rubbing of limb-on-limb dislodge a cascade of our skin. Our skin fell

to the bedsheets (fresh because we always wash them before we go on a trip it’s so much better to come home to fresh sheets) and in the skin was the story of our trip: you tip waiters in foreign cities too much because you’re embarrassed that you don’t speak the language and I walk too fast and we got into a fight on the third afternoon but it turned out we just needed a nap and we didn’t take enough pictures but I sent postcards and all that is in our skin which we watch in wonder as flake upon flake fall and recreate the cities, museums, moments and restaurants we visited in perfect miniatures around us and our new skin is born together and that skin is called this moment now pink in its newness. You touch mine and I touch yours and we are old and new at once under each other’s fingers and surrounded by the miniature city of our past.

(I took the first line from Topography by Sharon Olds.)