Today’s NaPoWriMo.net prompt is exactly the kind I love, because it got out of my usual poetic paths. Inspired by poet Betsy Sholl, the prompt asks you to write a poem in which you first recall someone you used to know closely but are no longer in touch with, then a job you used to have but no longer do, and then a piece of art that you saw once and that has stuck with you over time. Finally, close the poem with an unanswerable question.

What I wrote is still a work in progress, but I will share these lines:

Have you ever seen Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me? The scar across the right big toe?

The strange and intricate renderings of life and death? A maze of tendrils and shoots,

invading — the bathwater and perhaps her skin? Sometimes you feel like this to me —