Read Sally Fisher's poem "Where I Come From." Consider where you 'Come From' and write a prose poem (a paragraph) using words that reflect who you are.
grandma from the Mountains, papa from the Swamp - appalachia and okefenokee white poverties, both their mamas gave up, stopped talking. imagine 11 kids and no indoor plumbing, no options. to heck with this! i oughta give em credit for all they'done but selfish, all i see is me - how it woulda been had it not been this - what if i was a child of a civil war soldier (deserter after he got bayoneted in the head and took for dead - he walked home) and had nothing for me but marriage and babies and 'parently hereditary chemical depression. already! how far back, ya think? and when did the anxiety get worked in? did it start when granny's italy-to-mississippi immigrated dad, a barber, got given the wrong heart pills by the pharmacist, a drunk, and it killed him? or did it come by way of a ranger's watch tower, granddaddy alone in the woods in the high humid air of old natchez trace, spyin for a sign of fire? if they learnt it, did i get it? or was it in us all along? they say how you were in yr gramma - how yr mama's fetus grew its eggs, the only ones to last a lifetime, and one of em was you - so what did grandma learn me then in 1955, not 2 years since the drunk doctor miscarried her child during labor? i tell it like the drunks are all Those'uns, but truth be told, we got em too. and when and how does that start, and when and how does that end? misuse of alcohol, depression, GAD, PTSD, OCD, ADD, all those damn abbrevs. as far as i can see, the only way it ends is me. rest easy y'all, i set you free!
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