24/7, Divination 13

I am participating in Folded Word's writing month event, called "24/7," during August. Participants spend the first 24 days of the month writing short works, then spend the final week in revisions. The second part of this entry gives more details.

I'm not required to give a central theme to the entries, but I chose the theme "Divinations" and am using a pair of dice to generate prompts (values shown below). My prompt for August 13 is to write divination-themed short poetry that uses birth.

Today I'm following a double-prompt. The second prompt comes from Jessi Graustein at Folded Word, who invited participants to write two pieces in the same short form, first "about a machine you hate," then "about a machine you love."

My short poem form is the Korean Sijo, to which I was introduced several years ago in a workshop given by Larry Gross at a meeting of the Florida State Poets Association. He defines the form here.

Surveillance: A Sijo Sequence

Lensed eyes on traffic lights, in dusty store corners, follow me,
make me a blip on a grainy screen, object in motion.
I duck into the wild, where weeds grow and techno prying ends.

I reach into my bag; my camera magnifies my sight,
makes me intimate with a damselfly laying her eggs --
so close-up I feel a kinship, these moments I have captured.


Atlantic Bluet Damselfly (Enallagma doubledayi), photographed in June 2006. Click here to see one laying her eggs.

Key to dice values:

Blue Die
1 (CE logo). Twitter poetry (140 characters or fewer)
2. Twitter fiction (140 characters or fewer)
3. short poetry (8 lines or fewer)
4. prose poems (under 100 words)
5. micro fiction (40-100 words)
6. flash fiction (101-500 words)

Purple Die
1 (CE logo). Birth
2. Water
3. Air
4. Earth
5. Fire
6. Death

My Random House College Dictionary, Revised Edition, defines "divination" as 1. the attempt to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge by occult or supernatural means; 2. augury; prophecy; 3. perception by intuition; instinctive foresight. One meaning of "occult" is "hidden." That gives me a broad range of interpretation.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other Journeys Promote Your Page Too










Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.)
Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite
Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny
Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines
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Go to Manybooks.net to access Covenant, Appetite, Destiny, and Bloodlines in even more formats!

Participant, Operation E-Book Drop. (Logo credit: K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman.)

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