30 days of prompts: day 5

Happy Friday! Congratulations on making it through another week.

Here’s what I have for you today:

• The prompt

• Resources

• Quotations

• Tweets

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Day 5: Prompt

Write an epistolary poem.

That is, write a poem in the form of a letter. This can be to the self, to another person, or even to a Big Abstract Thing.

Kyrie is a book that does this really, really well—and here are some individual poems as examples:

• Letter from a Haunted Room, Lisa Sewell

• Letter to Brooks [Spring Garden], Major Jackson

• Dear Empire [these are your temples], Oliver de la Paz

• The Letter, Amy Lowell

• Dear Miss Emily, James Galvin

• Dear March—Come in—, Emily Dickinson

• notes, Danez Smith

• Electric Hymn, Ernest O. Ogunyemi

You could also write a letter to yourself:

• I Never Knew I Loved Dean Rader

• Someday I’ll Love Roger Reeves

• Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

• Letter to a Younger Self, Age 18, J. David

• In Which I No Longer See My Face as Full of Potential, Aris Kian

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Resources:

• 5 Paying Literary Magazines to Submit to in May 2022

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Quotations:

In the next world, I want to be something useful. / Like a staple gun. Or in love.

-Bradley Trumpfheller, “Speculative Realism”

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Tweets:

quasimodo predicted all this @CrappyFumes

Did you know that instead of saying some clunky ass weird shit like “uterus havers” u can just literally say “people”. People need abortions. All sorts of different ppl. We don’t need to do weird binaries to dichotomize who needs repro care - people need it, that’s nuff said!

Despy Boutris @itsdbouts

in light of my ………. Uhhhh …….. year-long emotional breakdown …… i would like everyone 2 know the happy news: i just wrote a poem for the first time in nine months

Despy Boutris @itsdbouts

also. i designed a shirt & all proceeds go straight to the National Network of Abortion Funds. shop here: bit.ly/3yaEZKD

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Have a good weekend—I’ll see you tomorrow with a new prompt.

&, as always, catch me here:

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Sending love—

-Despy Boutris