24/7, Divination 5

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 5 is to write a divination-themed prose poem that uses birth.

Alchemist Reborn (99 words)

He has no spells, no miracles, only measuring, mixing, scratching his findings on vellum. One day he will be born to type them onto a screen; later he'll encode them in his bones; later still he will plant them in his DNA. But this he already knows: everything is hard; everything is soft. Everything is earth and air, water and fire, order and chaos. Only the proportions change. Lead and gold, water and wine are one. He gathers his coats, snuffs his candles, ponders the malleability of wax. His future regards him through quantum flux in particle accelerator dreams.


"Rock Paper Scissors, Redux," a photo collage I did in December 2006.

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
Free downloads at the Deviations website and on Smashwords.

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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