My attendance at The Cantab has been more sporadic, and I find myself not keeping track of the prompts as well as I should be. I've been looking through notebooks, doc files, all over the place to see if I've recorded the prompts somewhere, but a couple of them appear to be lost forever.

But I found other things.

So, go through your notebooks, if you're one of those analog people, your word processing files, your texts, and find a scrap of something you wrote that you intended to be longer.

Don't bother trying to remember what Previous You was going to do with that scrap, take it and make something entirely new.

​According to the official Boston Poetry Slam, this week's prompt was: "Imagine you are gloriously happy in the future. Write a poem to invent a way to time travel to your expected existence."

I don't remember writing or giving that prompt, but I'm pretty sure I was the person who gave the prompt this week. I had a pretty good week, and was fairly happy. So if the prompt about finding a time traveling path to your happiness doesn't speak to you, maybe you can figure out what happened this week that made me happy but made me forget giving the prompt, and explain that to me.

Or you can try and explain time travel, if you're that level of smart. 

Confession: When we were eleven, one of my friends bought a hamster, put it in a shoebox, poked holes in it, and hid it in his closet. If you've ever had a hamster, you probably realize that hamsters can chew through cardboard, and fairly quickly, so while he was at school, the first day after buying the hamster, it escaped, his mom found it, and they returned it to the store, and he was grounded.

Confession: I knew about the hamster before his mother told my mother the hilarious story of her idiot son's not so secret pet. I imagined the problem was the cardboard box, so I bought a small terrarium, filled it with ripped up newspaper (I was a paperboy, so it was Very Easy to come by), and bought a gerbil which I kept in my closet, secure that it would not escape. And it didn't. And I had it for four days before my own mother heard it scampering around its tiny cage while I was at a friend's.

Have you ever had a secret pet? Or did one of your friends? Where did you or they come up with the idea? How were you found out (you were definitely found out)? What happened to the pet after the discovery?

I have never met anyone who loves their job So Much that they can't think of a single part of it they dislike. Vanna White spent most of the 80s and 90s grumbling under her breath every time she had to turn over the vowels* because she loved the contestants, and hates that they were spending money they hadn't even officially won yet, on easily sussed letters.

She also hated it when, for the final puzzle, contestants blew their letters on rstlne, and so she approached the producers about giving those letters to the contestants automatically, and letting them try some of the more dangerous ones. Thus, she reclaimed the parts of her job that made her uncomfortable.

What part of your job do you like the least? How can you reclaim it so that it becomes something you can, if not love, tolerate?






* - Nothing I've said about Vanna White in this prompt has been true. It is All Lies.

every day someone finds what they need/in someone else 

​--Kaveh Akbar