[Note: Last week, at the World Science Fiction/Fantasy Convention (WorldCon) in Seattle, Rebecca Demarest hosted a boisterous session in the poetry track. This was a Speculative Poetry Deathmatch featuring a series of prompts/challenges, with genres and key phrases supplied by the audience. Five panelists and three randomly selected audience members competed in pairs through several elimination rounds, judged by volume of audience acclamation. I arrived a couple minutes late and did not put my name in, but like the rest of the audience I responded to the prompts with my own little poems, which I’m presenting here.]
1. Prompt: 4 lines/4 minutes; magical realism; energy drink
Your favorite energy drink:
Citrus bubbles full of fairies in the basketball court.
Wait for tomorrow, the children say:
No more free throws for you!
2. Prompt: 5 lines/5 minutes; cyberpunk; hairless cats
Virtual punk cats,
Bald since last week’s security upgrade
Leave null lines of code
For hacking their litterbox.
Naughty kitties will have to learn Ghost Fortran on their own!
3. Prompt: 7 lines/7 minutes; space opera; pickles
Cucumber pickle-shaped star cruisers
Span the stars, colonizing all worlds as they go.
Three hundred years later chip-shaped saucers
Start a light-years-spanning rebellion
Over fast food franchises:
Chicken wings or hamburgers?
Drowning 10,000 worlds in mustard and catsup dipping sauce.
No comments:
Post a Comment