Describe where you are now, using everything but visual description. Cater to those who respond not only to visuals, but to sounds, smells, sensations. I wrote this alongside some of my favorite warriors at our retreat at Leeloo Cabanas this past weekend. Enjoy!

Rumble, tumble, raspy and low. Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, faster, faster, slow. Sky soldiers beating, beating on the world below. With my eyes sewn closed, they all feel cold, sliding slyly down my surface like the slime that lines my nose. A faint scent of smoke fades to the flavor of tomato in my throat. 

This is a poem, I suppose, written in response to a prompt at our first ever writing retreat this past weekend. The prompt was to think of of one thing I came across during the day and describe it without using any adjectives (the use of color is allowed). I chose to write about an "iffiffy," which is what my father used to call the little white floating remnants of dandelions. I had just finished talking about him with a fellow warrior when, walking back to my bungalow, I was swept up in a  huge swarm of these iffifies that seemed to appear out of nowhere. I smiled and said hello to my old man, and I knew I had found my topic for the prompt. 

This was a short fiction piece resulting from a grab bag exercise. My 10 words were: grass, catch, globe, frost, lake, fashion, tight, ghost, hole, shore

Glorious was the morning that shone brightly before Aman's weakening eyes. From the very spot where he stood every morning at this time - a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other - he watched the blades of grass catch fire with icy hues of blue, frost settling on their thin, frail lines. Winter was upon his world again, and his lush green pastures were transforming, the fields having been plowed for the last time, left to rest under the dome of nature's snow globe. His chest compressed tightly on a lungful of smoke that escaped through his nose like a ghost, fading into cold morning air. 

Following Warrior Kiki's lead, the group decided to use colors as prompts for a shorter exercise in class. For my color, I chose blue. I was writing with a blue pen, so it felt fitting. When my pen ran out of ink halfway through, I picked up a black one. So I switched my color over to black. Here's what I came up with.

BLUE

I fell in. I didn't dive. And I couldn't tell if what surrounded me on that descent was a body of water or in fact just the blue of your eyes. Either way, I was sinking, the light of the sky fading to a darker hue. My skin grew darker too, due to lack of oxygen. I began to tumble, bouncing this way and that, off of things like limbs, until I came in slow-motion contact with the bottom. Bottom, rock, cotton, like candy. It doesn't matter which. It's all the same when your lungs are thirsting for a necessary breath. And broken, bruised, you know you're going to drown.