Recently, I gave my students news headlines or phrases from news stories, and asked them to complete the story any way that made sense to them. One student, Alicia Fritz, began with a ridiculously amusing news story (the first sentence is in italics below) and wrote with great imagination and detail until she found the center…
A woman calls 9-1-1 to report that her television remote control is missing. She realized it when she reached her hand into the pocket of her plaid blue and orange recliner. The recliner smelled like smoke and old ashes. Her hands were stained a nicotine shade of yellow. The lost remote should not have bothered her; after all, she had lost many things in her life: a set of emerald earrings, a crucifix, a son lost in the war, a pair of beige slacks, and eventually a husband. But losing this remote meant something. It meant she’d have to walk across the brown linoleum floor and break her train of thought. It meant breaking into the world again, pushing aside the red velvet curtain to let in the light of spring, when she had forgotten the winter was over.
In the pink corridor on the way to her bathroom, she could get lost and for a moment forget where she was going, but the urgency reminded her. The remote should have been in the front pocket of her homemade polyester blouse with matching capri pants, or perhaps she had laid it down next to the piano. She runs her hand across the top level of blond wood. Her four wrinkled fingers brushed away the dust. She reminded herself that she may have placed it next to the stove while making her coffee in the morning. She could sit in that kitchen for hours – a string of endless cigarettes pooled in the bottom of a glass blue ashtray. Most days she slept in that chair – snoring away as her dentures slid down a little – or if she did not feel like it, she didn’t need to wear them at all.
She didn’t want to call 9-1-1 at first; she had seen too much. Things like this did not warrant an emergency, but today she believed the stranger’s voice was her son’s. He asked her if she as okay and what was her emergency. “I—I lost my remote…” but then her voice stopped and she was immobile. Her mind raced with memories. She could see him and remember how it felt to seem small beside him. Across the street, she could see the light on in her sister’s kitchen. Next to the lilac bush –ripening with buds, she was washing dishes – the foam climbing up her arms like ocean waves.
How else can you change your poem? Try writing from a different perspective. Change “I” to “she,” or (maybe) change “she” to “you.”
On tomorrow’s radio show, the music is tinged with classical, edged with rock-and-roll. But we’ll travel, too, into routes of bluegrass, and through tonal fields from Philip Glass and Evelyn Glennie.
