Experience Writing

Too Big To Fail

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses)
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography
🐦‍⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes.
🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.

Digital artwork featuring the text 'Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears' in orange and white, with a green abstract face illustration, set against a black background. The lower text reads 'DAY 27 GIANTS'.

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Giants

Did that giant rock in the forest just move? It may be a troll. That cave may hide an ogre. The sequoia may disguise a giant. Fear can cause us to make mountains out of molehills. If it happens a lot, we may be catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion where we believe the worst will happen in every situation. It turns our goblins into ogres.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a psychological intervention that emphasizes psychological flexibility, FEAR is an acronym, representing the mental blocks that create gaps between our values and our actions, that stands for:

F: Fusion of thought – the automatic thoughts we take to be true
E: Evaluation of experience – negative judgements and labels we place on the experience
A: Avoidance of experience – the steps we take to avoid these experiences
R: Reason-giving for behavior – rationalization for our avoidance behaviors

One exercise that ACT uses to face our FEAR is the ABCD Exercise to uncover our automatic thoughts and dispute them.

Exercise: Create a grid of four squares:

Activating Event:

Consequences: Feeling or Behavior

Beliefs:

Dispute:

In the A square write the fear event. In the B square write all of the automatic thoughts that came up around that event. In the C square write the reactive feelings and behaviors because of the fear event. In the D square write what you would have rather thought, felt, and done.

OctPoWriMo

One thing I love about poetry is the way poems can manipulate time. A poem can represent the real time it takes to read it, or an entire lifetime. It can encapsulate the past, present and future, or one fleeting second.

Example Poem: “Days” by Philip Larkin from Collected Poems(Aal)

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live
They come, they wake us
Time and time over
They are to be happy in
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

~Philip Larkin

How does this poem use and explore time?

Prompt: Write a brief, condensed poem that asks two related questions. End by describing something unexpected that will happen when one of the questions is answered.

Possible form: Nonet – A nine line poem that starts with nine syllables down to one.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-seven 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.

If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.

Music to get us moving:

Deadly Mischief

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-six Gremlins>Response Post

🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges
🐦‍⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.

Gremlins in My Laptop by Maria L. Berg 2025

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Gremlins and Goblins

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 26 of Writober: They Muck Things Up

OctPoWriMo

Christmas is Coming

Gremlins are imminent
It’s always after midnight
Find a sharp instrument

Even when vigilant
The cookie sheet ignites
Gremlins are imminent

Each sharp-toothed incident
Shifts width and height
Find a sharp instrument

The Christmas tree’s sibilant
Don’t choke in the lights
Gremlins are imminent

They tinker in engines
Without any insight
Find a sharp instrument

When carolers are dissonant
ignore and sit tight
Gremlins are imminent
Stab, stab sharp instrument

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

The Answer to Everything

The closer Dr. Thorn came to finishing his life’s work, an equation to express his unified theory, the more he believed in gremlins. Yes, his office had come to resemble the aftermath of a tornado touching down, one does collect so many books and papers and other evidence when defining the entire universe, but he had a system that had always worked for him. Recently, this system had been fighting back: pages disappearing when he dared to rest his eyes, people shifting in the wall painting when he glanced away, sections of his equation crossed out or erased if he left the room. He swore he caught rustling, hissing, and scratchy laughing if only for a second when he returned to his huge round table that acted as his desk. It had once been a place of intelligent debate and lofty ideals, now every inch a mound of papers and books. Everyone had drifted away to more lucrative immediate persuits, leaving him alone to explore the most important question. Well, alone with these gremlins.

Though they had managed to slow him down, they couldn’t stop him. Today was the day. He heard the sibilant snickering, but he knew he had done it. He held his finger over the Enter button on his keyboard imagining some sort of fanfare, some recognition of the weight of this moment, then pushed it, and watched his beautiful equation pour out across the screen. Line after line after line of his decades of research and creative thought coded into this tiny on/off machine, controlling everything and everyone with zeros and ones.

Dr. Thorn’s head felt light, pulse racing, hairs on end. Here it comes, he thought. Any second now. The culmination of all of this. He started imagining the room empty again with the table empty, surrounded by his peers come to discuss his amazing theory.

The cursor flashed over a single number. His answer to everything: zero. The room filled with cackling. The gremlins were delighted with the answer, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

Halloween Photography Challenge

For today’s photos I cut a paper filter of a gremlin. It was fun to see my little monster multiply, and I did not get him wet.

They Muck Things Up

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Deadly Mischief

Bad things happen. It can’t be avoided. But sometimes the little mishaps come in more than threes and it feels like the world is out to get you. What do your mischief makers look like? Brownies, fairies, goblins, gremlins? Or do you just believe it’s bad luck?

As writers it’s our job to create fascinating, complex, well-rounded characters that our readers can relate to, and then make their lives miserable. And once they think it can’t get any worse, we raise the stakes and bring them to the edge of death. It’s in that precarious moment of facing their ultimate fear where change happens. In this way we’re like gremlins: we start out just being pesky, blocking our characters from getting what they want, but then we escalate our mischief until we are vicious and deadly.

You might find some inspiration at The Gremlins Museum.

OctPoWriMo

When writing a poem, we think a lot about ordering our ideas. When thinking about fears we may order them from things we only think are a little scary to our deepest fears, or fears we think are personal to universal fears. But in poetry, jarring juxtaposition can grab a reader’s attention. Juxtaposition is placing two things next to each other to compare and contrast for an interesting effect. We may follow what we consider to be a small fear with a huge fear, then a personal fear with a universal fear. We might put a monster we don’t believe in next to the monster that lives under our bed.

Example Poem: “Fear” by Ciaran Carson from Poets.org

Fear

I fear the vast dimensions of eternity.
I fear the gap between the platform and the train.
I fear the onset of a murderous campaign.
I fear the palpitations caused by too much tea.

I fear the drawn pistol of a rapparee.
I fear the books will not survive the acid rain.
I fear the ruler and the blackboard and the cane.
I fear the Jabberwock, whatever it might be.

I fear the bad decisions of a referee.
I fear the only recourse is to plead insane.
I fear the implications of a lawyer’s fee.

I fear the gremlins that have colonized my brain.
I fear to read the small print of the guarantee.
And what else do I fear? Let me begin again.

~Ciaran Carson

How does this poem use juxtaposition for effect?

Prompt: List your fears that have come up this month. Then list all the little things that have gone wrong lately and how they led to change in behavior. Did any of those slight differences lead to good conclusions? In your poem mix your deepest fears with the daily goblins and gremlins that come up in daily life.

Possible form: Villanelle

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-six Image

Halloween Photography Challenge

If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.

Music to get us moving:

The Many Faces of Jack

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-five Jack-o-Lanterns>Response Post

Jack-o-Lanterns Glowing Bright by Maria L. Berg 2025

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Jack-o-Lanterns

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 25 of Writober: Making Faces

OctPoWriMo

The Many Faces of Jack

Jack can be a woman
her face long, gaunt
as the house she guards
or plump and smiling
inviting the younguns
to the candy bowl
full of mini-toothpastes
or boxes of raisins
Not demons, but lamps
daring to grin into the night
flickering flames licking
at their fibrous cavities
aging them like progeria

Not all Jacks are women
I have seen gorged orange
men so full of themselves
that their seeds take half
the night to remove
yet so thin-skinned
that the slightest
attempt to peel back
the rind reveals a hole
Not tricksters, but wisps
distracting, pulling attention
with their glow, bluer than flame
a battery in plastic
with a false flicker

But some Jacks are more
than one pumpkin
perhaps eating their young
or shaved and carved
into elaborate scenes
some become clones
through books of patterns
Not monsters, but lanterns
Keeping the frights at bay
or gleefully lighting the way?

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Nuisance Calls

We had been getting nuisance complaints from this one small neighborhood for weeks. People’s jack-o-lanterns going missing from their porches, someone filling the street with chalk drawings including the message THERE’S STILL TIME, power outages, power surges, loud noises in the night that didn’t appear to be coming from any of the houses. We didn’t have the man power to keep going out there. There were real, violent threats that we needed to respond to. But then, on Halloween, the complaints just stopped.

Concerned calls began around sunset from mothers and fathers that had taken their children out trick-or-treating. They reported that all the lights were out and no one was home. There wasn’t a single house giving out candy. The eerie chalk warning covered the street, and there wasn’t a single jack-o-lantern, not a single decoration, but the cars were still in the driveways. Leaving on Halloween and not giving out candy was not a crime, and we had real drunken disorderlies, assaults, and poisonings to deal with, along with cemetery trespass, and a bit of grave robbing.

Two days later, after the rest of town had taken down their decorations, the missing persons reports began. The whole neighborhood, they never came back. It was if they disappeared from the face of the earth with no sign at all of where they had gone. If the chalk drawing wasn’t just a kid playing, there had been some warning, but time ran out.

Halloween Photography Challenge

I thought this exploration of the many faces of Jack (o-lanterns) fit well with the murmuration series that came up yesterday, so I cut a cluster of tiny Jack-o-lanterns and took it into the mirrorworld with some new orange lights I picked up for this season.

Many Faces of Jack by Maria L. Berg 2025

Making Faces

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Jack-o-Lanterns

One of my favorite things to do for Halloween is carve Jack-o-lanterns. There are two types of Jack-o-lantern faces: the traditional, triangle-eyed happy smiling Jack-o-lantern, and the scary monster pumpkinhead. I really love turning a harmless gourd into a scary monster that glows in the dark. As I turn my pumpkin, looking for the best side for its face, it reveals its monster within.

While studying fear this year, I found there are also two approaches to facing our fears. One, the one we’ve heard since we were kids, is that we have to be brave, conquer our fears, and not be afraid. The other approach is to accept fear as part of our lives, befriend it, and use it to our advantage.

In Fear_(Aal) by Thich Nhat Hanh he says, “We may think that if we ignore our fears, they’ll go away. But if we bury worries and anxieties in our consciousness, they continue to affect us and bring us more sorrow.” But human nature is to move toward pleasure and away from pain, and fear, for most people, is an unpleasant experience. In The Art of Fear_(Aal), Kristen Ulmer says, “Suffering = Discomfort x Resistance.” And the part of that equation we have some control over is resistance. She says that instead of avoiding fear, we need to honor it, to treat it the way we want to be treated. Listen to fear and try to learn what it is there to teach us.

The initial physical fight, flight, or freeze response only lasts a few minutes, so if we don’t resist it, but breathe into it while facing it with wonder and asking it questions, we may learn to respect its usefulness in real dangerous situations, and minimize its adverse effects in situations of imagined danger.

As writers, making friends with our fear response can help us write more deeply. If we can honor our fear response and not avoid it, we will be more likely to sit with memories of formative moments in our lives that were frightening at the time. Fear is part of life. It will always cause discomfort, but how we respond to the physical discomfort is something we can practice.

One thing we can do before we sit down to write is make ourselves feel physically safe with somatic shaking:

OctPoWriMo

Like jack-o-lanterns poems can have many faces. A poet can write about one topic in a hundred different ways in a hundred different poems, or express many different points of view in one poem. Something that terrifies me may not scare someone else at all. They may not even believe it exists. Within each fear, each monster, we are each represented in different ways.

Example Poem: “Ghosts” by Anne Sexton from Poems Dead and Undead_(Aal)

Ghosts

Some ghosts are women,
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.
Not witches, but ghosts
who come, moving their useless arms
like forsaken servants.

Not all ghosts are women,
I have seen others;
fat, white-bellied men,
wearing their genitals like old rags.
Not devils, but ghosts.
This one thumps barefoot, lurching
above my bed.

But that isn’t all.
Some ghosts are children.
Not angels, but ghosts;
curling like pink tea cups
on any pillow, or kicking,
showing their innocent bottoms, wailing
for Lucifer.

~Anne Sexton

How do the similes and negations in this poem make the ghosts more real and more frightening?

Prompt: Write a poem about diversity within one type of monster. Use specific physical details along with similes. Use repetition. Use negation.

Possible form: A series of Lanturnes—a five line verse with the syllabic pattern: one, two three, four, one

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-five Image

Halloween Photography Challenge

If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.

Music to get us moving:

Word Power

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-four Spells>Response Post

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Spells

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 24 of Writober: Predicting a Return for Revenge

OctPoWriMo

To Get Rid of a Man

Nine needles, nine needles broken in threes
Three times write names, the names of each

Write one name backward for love to reverse
placed on the paper needle pieces disperse

Five black candles, four red, and three green
Hang one black candle upside-down on a string

drip wax from a doorway onto these things
collect dung from a black and white dog in the street

When the candles have burned down to stubs
whoever you curse will bark and run

Collect everything in a paper sack
Toss in the river, he’ll never come back.

Note: This poem was inspired by “superstitions” in Appendix A of Gumbo Ya-Ya_(Aal) published in 1945 by the Louisiana State Library Commission. This spell is my own concoction: Don’t try it at home 💀🎃.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

The Face in the Tower

Beshda left quietly before her dad woke up. He had been over-protective since her mom disappeared. When she told him about finding the abandoned carnival in the woods he had turned pale, his hands shook, and he yelled at her as if she had done something wrong. He forbade her to ever go there. If he had only told her why: that all the good left in her mother had gone into Beshda when she was born; that he had to do the unspeakable to keep his daughter and all the innocents safe. But he wouldn’t give her a reason.

She had the old leather-bound book she had found in the hidden compartment of her mother’s bookcase tucked in her backpack along with several candles. The mist gathered as it always did around the base of the screaming tower. The silently screaming face with its teeth and wide eyes was so realistic it could have been a woman cursed to only observe the world from the side of that tower forever. The paint on the pointed roof was fading, and when the light hit the tower, it was easy to see it was carved and painted, but Beshda chose to believe it was a beautiful witch who had been trapped there, and she planned to free her.

The book was full of colorful drawings, and there, near the end was a picture of the carnival before it was abandoned, and the tower without a face on it. She sat down in front of the giant screaming face and set her candles on the ground. The words on the page didn’t make any sense to her, but she lit her candles and did her best to read them. The first time through, when she came to the end, nothing happened. She looked around and it looked like the mist was clearing. She tried again, using a long a instead of short, and other changes in pronunciation.

This time as she approached the end, the sun broke through the clouds and she felt a light moving from deep inside, the warm light exited through her mouth, eyes, and ears. She felt herself rising off the ground. A beautiful woman smiled up at her from far below. She couldn’t move. Then the woman tilted back her head and cackled the most evil laugh, turned her back, and walked away.

Halloween Photography Challenge

The way spells are repetitions of both ingredients and incantations got me thinking about the murmuration series I did last year, so for today’s photos I cut very small shapes to represent a cluster of spell ingredients, then attempted to express how they build power through repetition.

Predicting a Return for Revenge

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Spells

One thing story witches show us again and again is that words have power. Saying the right words in the right conditions if they’re from the right book, can do just about anything, including raising the dead, or demons from hell.

In my experience as a musician, I often heard the opposite. My bandmates were quick to tell me, “No one listens to the lyrics” or “the words don’t matter.” But when it comes to an evil earworm ( a song stuck in my head for days), it’s not just some pretty melody swimming around, it’s a dang chorus, as in words, stuck on repeat.

When people say “Actions speak louder than words.” They aren’t saying that words don’t have power; they’re saying that people are hypocrites, and liars. This is also expressed in almost the opposite saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Spells come in many forms in stories: commonly they are in an ancient language like Sumerian, or something closer, but not in common use like Latin. Or they are in rhyming couplets or quatrains like the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth_(Aal), “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble.”

As writers we can put our readers under a spell by bringing them into a scene, letting them fill in the blanks, and not telling them how to feel.

Bring reader into a scene: Use surprising sensory details and unique descriptions. Layer at least three different senses, so the reader sees, hears, and smells what’s happening or tastes, feels textures, and hears the situation.

Let the reader fill in the blanks: Only show the world through your main character’s perceptions. Our moods, biases, histories, and education, along with many other things, filter how we experience the world. Describe the character’s perceptions through these filters, don’t tell the reader what these filters are. Give the reader just enough sensory detail then let the reader figure it out for themselves.

Don’t tell them how to feel: The quickest way to break a spell is to tell someone they’re under a spell. A writer wants to evoke an emotion, that emotion might be different in every reader, so don’t tell them how to feel.

OctPoWriMo

Each poem could be seen as a spell: words put together with the intent to have control over another human being: to make them think, to make them feel, to make them read the poem again.

Think of all the ways that your poem might put your reader under your spell:

onomatopoeia
rhyme
rhythm
repetition
nonsense words
alliteration
assonance and consonance
euphony and cacophony

Example Poem: “The Apparition” by John Donne from Poems Dead and Undead_(Aal)

The Apparition

When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead
And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou sstir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleep will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.

~John Donne

Prompt: Write a poem to keep your reader spellbound. Match the sound of your words to your meaning as you predict what you will do if you come back for revenge.

Possible form: Rhyming couplets in trochaic tetrameter (each line has four feet of DUM dah—8 syllables with stresses on 1, 3, 5, and 7) after the witches of Macbeth. You may also try using occasional Catalexis —which is the omission of the final syllable at the end of the line—to mix things up.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-four Image

Halloween Photography Challenge

If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.

Music to get us moving:

Stitched Together

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-three Dismemberment>Response Post

From Pieces and Parts by Maria L. Berg 2025

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Dismemberment and Frankenstein’s Monster

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 23 of Writober: From Pieces and Parts

OctPoWriMo

It’s Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, so head on over and link up one poem you’ve written, or just enjoy reading and commenting on the other poets’ poems.

Animation Framework

Make the being of gigantic stature—
Something so scaring
and unearthly in his ugliness
greater than his nature will allow.

Prepare a frame for the reception
of bestowing animation:

long locks of ragged hair
disgrace marked brows
contortions too horrible
for human eyes
a ghastly grin
wrinkled lips
voice suffocated

one vast hand extended
his hated hands before my eyes
intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins
to whose knees I clung
over feet chilled by the cold damp.

How dangerous
is the acquirement of knowledge:
A multitude of reverses
lay the foundations
of future success.

*Note: this poem was created from words and phrases found within Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Janie’s Neck Ruff

Janie always believed she was born in the wrong time and place. Turn of the century England would have fit her perfectly: fog, rain, shadowy alleys. And people wore gloves, all the time. Everyone. No one would notice a missing finger when their dead loved one wore gloves in the casket.

It was a time of discovery. Grave robbing was a career choice. Those doctors needed bodies. What a great excuse for desecrating burial sites: for science! And if some live ones became bodies, it would have been so easy to say Jack was busy Ripping. Such a great time to be a collector.

Growing up in her parents’ funeral home in small town America, Janie had grown up with dead bodies in the basement. She quickly realized that anyone she saw on the street would eventually end up on the slab. She liked to people watch, imagining how each of them would die, how much work her mother would have to do to make them “look natural,” which of their fingers she would put in her necklace and where. Sometimes she would see a finger that was so perfect for the next space to fill that she clenched her teeth and grabbed her scalpel in its sheath in her pocket. But the perfect necklace took patience, and in this town, every finger would come to her eventually. At this point her necklace wrapped around several times and looked more like a neck ruff of the seventeenth century, so maybe that was when she should have been born.

Halloween Photography Challenge

For today’s photographs I tried my hand at sewing up a monster from pieces and parts. I cut a head shape out of paper, tore it up, sewed it back together with thick thread and sewed that back into the head shape, then used the whole mess as a filter in the Mirrorworld.

Or the Modern Prometheus by Maria L. Berg 2025

From Pieces and Parts

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Dismemberment

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein_(Aal) came out of the same challenge and party that the first Vampire story came out of. What a horrifying group of friends 👻. She tells the story of how a doctor created a body from pieces and parts of corpses and reanimated it with lightning. This story dredges up all of our universal fears: extinction (fear of death), mutilation (dismemberment), loss of autonomy (the monster is controlled by circumstances outside his control), separation (the monster is rejected), Ego-death (the monster experiences profound self-disapproval).

By hitting on all of the universal fears, Mary Shelley’s story may be speaking to the collective unconscious. The term collective unconscious was coined by Carl Jung and is the idea that the deepest part of our unconscious mind is inherited in our genes and does not come from personal experience. Jung believed this collective unconscious explains instinct (our sixth sense) and similar themes in mythologies around the world. I highly recommend taking a look at the book he edited, Man and His Symbols_(Aal).

As writers, we can create short-cuts to understanding using these universal connections. Symbology can help us quickly convey mood and theme and bring our readers to deeper meanings in our writing.

OctPoWriMo

There are many types of poems that “frankenstein” other texts. Blackout (or erasure) poetry and cut-up poems find poems by choosing words and phrases within prose. The Cento, combines lines from several other poems, making sure to reference each poem and poet at the end. The golden shovel takes a line of a poem and uses each word as the end word of each line in the new poem. Can you think of others?

Example Poem: “Pineola” by Sy Hoahwah from Poetry Foundation

Pineola

Severed finger of a convicted murderer uncurls like a waking pet.
Demonic compass points toward the most dangerous direction to get home.

Its long yellow fingernail can pick any lock.

On the fishhook, the finger resembles a long, fat mealworm.
Most times, it’s lodged in the throats of my enemies
or hiding among the tampons of cops’ wives.

It avoids gold rings, bad luck.

When wearing this rot relic on a chain,
sunlight smells like stale curtains in a worn-out hearse.
Rain never hits my clothes.

Rooms seem hotter.
Radios turn on by themselves, always to the same Lucinda Williams song.

Use any mirror as a doorway, I come out into the same sweaty
bedroom from a previous life. I forget who is wearing whom.

I pierce the fingertip to draw up a will.

I dip the finger in water. I point it toward the sun. I flick it to make it rain.

Hanging on the wall,
I sleep under this bird, booger-picker, dream catcher,
missing piece of an inverted crucifix, rotting pencil.

It sleeps over me like an accusative God.

Around midnight, I wake up, the finger is typing in the next room.
What is it composing at this time of night?

Letters to a parole board,
love letters to the rest of the hand,
midnight sermons,
ransom notes pertaining to me,
memoirs about life, hanging from my neck …

~ Sy Hoahwah

Prompt: Use one of the “frankenstein”-ing poetry forms to write a poem about a dismembered body part.

Possible form: Blackout poetry, cut-up poetry, cento, or golden shovel

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-three Image

Halloween Photography Challenge

If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.

Music to get us moving:

Under Wraps

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-two Mummies>Response Post

Looking Into the Sarcophagus by Maria L. Berg 2025

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Mummies and Death Rituals

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 22 of Writober: They Were So Well Preserved

OctPoWriMo

Death Rites

Death isn’t rolling over and resting an arm
on a chest that lifts and lowers
beats and hums with warmth
or flickering eyelids, sticky with dried sleep
half-smiling lips stringing drool to a pillow
stale breath on a hairy tongue
the urge to pee forcing feet to the floor
in a rush, tooth brushing, coffee making
hunger, cravings, breakfast choices:
cooking or not. Circling around each other.
Trying not to get in the other’s way.

Death isn’t the ticking of time, the daily rush
yet is applying make-up and arranging hair.
Death isn’t rushing to the car to sit in traffic
yet is locking the door and leaving home behind.
It is not the soft kiss and “See you tonight”
yet is the reminders, all the little reminders.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Preservation

Mark had been getting up in the night ever since we found it. At first, I thought he was having nightmares, and getting up to clear his head. But now I was worried it was becoming a ritual, a habit of avoidant behavior. I wanted to know for sure before I talked to him about my concerns, so tonight, I slipped on my robe and followed him. He floated downstairs as if in a trance. Went out the front door and by the time I followed him out, he had a shovel and was standing in the yard.

I took a seat on the stoop. He didn’t move. Just stood there staring past the trees along the dirt road as if he expected someone to arrive. It felt so strange watching him like this, but he had to be doing something every night, didn’t he? At least it was a comfortably warm night.

When we found it, we had been digging along the side of the house because I wanted to plant some roses. Suddenly, Mark started coughing uncontrollably. He said a bunch of dust exploded into his face. I looked in the hole he had been digging and saw a hand.

I screamed, “Mark, there’s someone down there.”

He finally stopped coughing and sneezing, and dug out a perfectly preserved body of a man. It was so well preserved it looked like we might have buried it the night before, and the police were pretty sure we had at first. But tests showed the body had been there for over two hundred years. They still had no idea who he was, how he got there, or why he wasn’t decomposing.

Mark finally turned back toward the house. He had a glow of youth about him. The whites of his eyes were so bright they looked like they were glowing. It must have been the moonlight. By the time he climbed the front steps, the shovel was gone. Where was he stashing it, and why?

He didn’t acknowledge me, went into the house and shut the door as if I wasn’t even there. I was more curious than I had been before I followed him out here.

Back in the bedroom he was under the covers breathing deeply and evenly. I slid in beside him. He was so cold.

Halloween Photography Challenge

Today I was thinking about what makes mummies scary, and I thought they want to rule, enslave, take over. And how would they do that? They would have an army of mummies, or they would turn us all into mummies.

OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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OctPoWriMo

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Halloween Photography Challenge

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