This week's prompt is a photo taken by Aimee Mullins at the Angelika Film Center in New York.
Each Imaginative Storm writer offered one line from the ten-minute pieces they wrote during our Saturday Morning Imaginative Storm Writing Group. It's always free; if you'd like to join, email nave@imaginativestorm.com for your invitation. The title “Gravity Exhaled Today” comes from the first line spoken by Genevia Hendry
Gravity exhaled today, sight unseen,
until the sky fell down around her
and frolicked on ladders of light.
Balance: as I get older, I'm becoming
more unsteady and fearful of falling.
I blink my long-lashed eye and the fluttering
breeze will send you down, down,
down, not up to the light. Hey, can we
all sleep over between Saint Augustine
and Fort Lauderdale? Self-made gods
committing deicide. Ladders to the light
and austere glaciers carving highways
up to the highest ridges. I misstepped
the ladder rung and down I fell. Splat.
The brief upside-downness of fleeting
awareness. Play peekaboo with the world
always moving forward confident in oneself,
one eye in the present, one eye in the future.
I put on her eye shades and headed out
to no man's land of the golden eye, clear-eyed
and with her spiritual sight. The hawk reluctantly
brought up the rear. The sudden choir of coyotes.
Is it saying, I see you as if through ladders to the light,
marching toward clarity? Don't trip. My all-seeing
eyes see nothing beyond what they see. Cyclops.
Monster. Angel. Eye of the storm of life.
That man touching me, I'm just a commercial,
but what for? I am the light, the clarity,
the truth and wisdom, the source-and so are you.
I see on the ground what is buried, what is dead,
more than I discern, new images. The eyeshadow
and the mascara. Such lonely work being the eye
in the sky overlooking a runaway creation.
I do believe there's been some slippage. Balance,
the hardship this landscape is strong enough
to handle a little of you, maybe cracked teeth
and goodbyes today. I really don't like work
on a ladder. Catch in my throat, terror tangled
with tenderness. His costly expression of lost desire.
Adrift, lashed with delicate feather-like hairs
meant to catch dust or gain shade. Anyone want
to buy some? I've made my personal dragon
into a postcard. I've kept heart and stars alive.
A man approaches his cracked desire, needing
a bit of super glue. You have some in your pocket,
don't you?
ORDER OF SPEAKERS
Genevia Hendry, Lyn Rothman, Diana Leszczyński, Elaine Heveron, Lou Faber, Jocelyn Wasson, Kathleen Wilson, Katerina Tana, Melisa’s Malm, Arlene Shapiro, Maria Wasson, Eve Stern, Marilena Stephens, Kelsey Walters, Sade B, Dina N, Jane Goldberg, Julie Grass, Helga Avila, Regina Ress, Zebith Thalden, Ann Cole, Martin Dilger, Allegra Huston, James Navé, AR Burns, Cyndi Miller, Linda Smith, Terry Varner.