From Gwen Roginsky via the 3030 Prompt Blog:

Write a persona poem from the perspective of a child of the Greek gods. Not Hercules or Calliope but an unknown child, with no preexisting backstory, living in today’s world, who just happened to be borne of the gods.

Bonus points for not in any way alluding to labors of Hercules, rock pushing, escaping Hades or any other things that happened to other godbastards.

Your almost never humble Cantab staff took the week off for Christmas, which, technically means No Prompt For You (which might be a gift in itself). However, Simone has been occasionally cataloging The Mackenzie Family Prompts. One of our regulars (and occasionally her sister) gets up and reads a poem based on a prompt given by a member of her family. The prompt for December was Guilty Pleasures.

Mine is stealing other people's prompts while sitting in a bathtub of champagne and eating diamond encrusted, cucumber flavored chocolate.

As we wind up to the approaching year, there is always the temptation to make a list of things we promise to never do again, or to start doing in moderation, places we swear we'll go, habits we promise to give up, exes whose mail we promise not to open unless it's an emergency or a really pretty looking envelope. But what are some resolutions that you've previously failed to keep that ended up working out for you in the long run?

During the summer after my freshman year in high school, my grandfather decided that I should go to his old boarding school. He enticed me up to Maine with him on his boat for a weekend, and on the way back "surprised me" by dragging me to his 50th year reunion, while scheduling me a tour of the campus and meetings with a bunch of faculty.

As it turned out, I liked the school, and ended up enrolling almost immediately. It all happened so fast that I didn't tell anyone that I was going. So when I came back for my first vacation, I heard all sorts of rumors about how I'd been sent to drug rehab in Arizona, how I'd drowned rescuing a kid at the summer camp I attended, how I went off to join the preisthood, and one particularly jerky ex-friend (who also plagiarized one of my early poems) claimed he'd beaten me up so badly that I was in the hospital. He wasn't too thrilled to learn that I had just hit the stride of my growth spurt during that time.

Where will you be when the rumor surfaces that you've disappeared? Will you be vacationing on a tropical island? Hiking The Appalachian Trail? Canoeing down The Nile for a pro-alligator charity? Hunting unicorns in Lake Placid?