Microscopic Monsters

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

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🐦‍⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes.
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🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Parasites/Microscopic Monsters

The thing about microscopic monsters that’s so scary is by the time we know they’re there, they have already moved in and turned our body into a replication machine. We have no idea we’ve become a host until our poor cells are fighting back. And by then we feel too horrible to do much about it.

Parasites, viruses, bacteria, there’s a world of unseen monsters just waiting for a yummy human to wander by. They are horrible monsters that do a lot of damage, but under the microscope they are quite fascinating.

You might find some inspiration at the Virtual Microscopy museum.

As writers and artists we spend a lot of time looking at things more closely. We may not be looking through a microscope, but we are trying out different lenses. In The Poet’s Companion(Aal) by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux there is an entire chapter on appositives. Appositives are words or groups of words that sit next to another noun (noun phrase) renaming or explaining it.

In their example, they start with “My grandmother”
The first noun appositive is “My grandmother, Stella”
then they add a noun phrase appositive “My grandmother, Stella, a tiny woman with long white hair and the face of a Botticelli angel”

Addonizio and Laux say, “Appositives are a way to say more, to go further in the implications of your thought or the details of your memory or experience. They’re a way of digging in, a process of discovery at the level of syntax (sentence structure).”

OctPoWriMo

In poetry, an entire poem can be a series of appositives trying to get to the microscopic detail that will finally make something clear. Try some appositives as microscopic lenses.

Example Poem:  “Fear” by Khalil Gibran from YourDailyPoem 

Fear

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

~Khalil Gibran

Prompt: Write a poem about something that becomes part of something else, like a river becomes part of the ocean, or a parasite becomes part of its host.

Possible form: A contrapunctal poem

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twelve Image

Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.

Halloween Photography Challenge

Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can as we explore our Deepest Fears in anticipation of Halloween.

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Music to get us moving: