10's, Week 1

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• Being the only four people in the hockey arena not on the ice, cheering in the stands.
• James sitting on the edge of the futon in the dark living room, talking endlessly across the room to me about his adventures from the former night.
• An air hockey game under black light. The girl's white shirt glowing like the streaks of blonde in her short hair, a glow from her mouth as she smiles. Across the neon green table, the yellow puck races toward the boy in a black leather coat, smiling under his black baseball cap.
• My pristine black flats on the gritty black, wet concrete stairs of an Ann Arbor parking garage with a glimpse of yellow paint peering through.
• Driving behind a blue Oldsmobile with a handicap license plate, going five under the speed limit, a red Cobalt speeds up from behind me to pass the both of us.
• Two squirrels standing at attention on a fence line, staring me down as I walk past.
• My 11-year-old sister in her skinny jeans and Abercrombie t-shirt, sunken into the oversized couch pillows texting on her phone with the TV on.
• Chris' head tilted back 20 degrees, he stares cautiously at his face in the mirror as he runs the silver Remington electric shaver up and down his lower jaw line.
• A small ball of brown and white fur, curled up at the top of the spiral staircase peers down the steps with lonely green eyes.
• An unopened orange Pixie Stix inside a black empty mailbox.

10 "Treasures":

• "What's in a star? We are. All the elements of our body and of the planet were once in the belly of a star. We are stardust. 15,000,000,000 years ago we were a mass of hydrogen floating in space, turning slowly, dancing. We are universal, and after death we will help to form other stars and other galaxies. We come from the stars, and to them we shall return." --Ernesto Cardenal, Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems
• "A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation." --Jonathan Swift, A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet
• "Fragments represent the state of in between-ness, the source of all creative thought." --Lauren Albert, FragLit
• "The Romantic form of poetry is still in the process of becoming. Indeed, that is its true essence, that it is always in the process of becoming and can never be completed. It cannot be exhausted by any theory, and only a divinatory criticism would dare to want to characterize its ideal. Romantic poetry alone is infinite, just as it alone is free and recognizes as its first law that the poetic will submit itself to no other law. The Romantic kind of poetry is the only one which is more than a kind--it is poetry itself. For, in a certain sense, all poetry is or should be Romantic." --Friedrich Schlegel
• "I've always felt that space is a good fill; gaps can be very emotional." --Ringo Starr, Ringo Starr: The Drums Are Where the Soul Is [NPR Interview]
• "I don't want to be your friend, I just want to be your lover. No matter how it ends, now matter how it starts." --Thom Yorke [Radiohead], "House of Cards" lyrics
• "Come and open up your folding chair next to me. My feet are buried in the sand, and there's a breeze. There's a shadow, you can see my eyes. And the sea is just a wetter version of the sky." --Regina Spektor, "Folding Chair" lyrics
• "The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." --Albert Camus
• "Take care of the people, and God almighty will take care of himself." --Kurt Vonnegut
• "The greatest thing you will ever learn is to love and be loved in return." --from Moulin Rouge