July Prompt

 7.2022

The following poem is written in my father’s voice about one of my mother’s projects to shame him into stopping drinking.

Future Entrepreneurs of America

She’s at it again – saving me from myself.

The army she’s enlisted are my kids.

She’s offered them a prize to prove a point.

A nickel for each bottle they can ferret out

and bring her, the best ones half full—

so she can have the fun of pouring

spirits down the kitchen drain.

They choose to think this doesn’t hurt,

that I’m beyond humiliation – or else

I’d surely stop.

I hope they never get to be

a nickle’s toss from hell.

1. Choose any painful memory from childhood and do a free-write from the point of view of another person in the story.  

2. Experiment with dialogue.  Turn your story into a poem where the two spouses each give their point of view.

3. Imagine that person had an emotional “bottom.” Write about the bottom with the compassion you would extend if that were your bottom. 

Connection to Recovery: By writing in my father’s voice, I allow him to voice his fears, which creates empathy. In the poem, he is aware that he can’t stop drinking.  This reminds me that his alcoholism was not a moral failing, as we believed at the time.  It reminds me that alcoholism is a disease.