January On Medium

This month's new short fiction has been rolling around in my head since the summer. It was part of a writing prompt we did at the Weekend Workshop I attended at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, which went a little something like this:

Saturn, planet of melancholy
A great place for
Trends of contemporary living
Titan spins in its orbit
Magnificent
Like a blooming hosta
Wilting
Moving out
To feel dampness
Carrying with ease
Images of loved ones
In empy vessels
On Titan, we
find
dwindling bison
rainbow trout
wedged in the narrow pass
So frightened
At first, to be so far from the sun
Reaching through the firs
Reveals
Itself, like carved stone
While Saturn, planet of melancholy
spins like a 
silken dress
Above

(There's a few notes in the margins:

WRITERS GO TO SATURN

northern feel

great thick trees
climbing thru the
nitrogen)

And there's a reference to Billy Collins- Poet- forgetfullness-aimless love. No idea what that means. But this page of scribbled chicken scratch and a piss poor attempt at poetry- which is totally not my thing, by the way- eventually rattled around my brain enough and produced this:

Illumination On Titan

I haven't really take a good look at it yet, but I like to think that this one is a distance cousin to That's Venus, Baby which I wrote last year. I've been reading what I came up with last year and I'm actually surprised at how decent some of these pieces are. I've got three more on deck, so maybe when all is said and done I can start putting some of these out there to places and see if I can get one published.

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