Welcome to Prosery Monday, my friends, where we will attempt to write a piece of prose fiction (144-words or less) using a given line of poetry! I’m Dora from PilgrimDreams.com and the poet from whose work I’ve chosen is Amy Woolard, a legal aid attorney who also works on civil rights policy and legislation in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In April 2020 Woolard debuted her first poetry collection, Neck of the Woods, and her poems have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Ploughshares, The Guardian, The Rumpus, Boston Review, Poetry, Slate, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

I recently encountered her poetry in The New Yorker and was at once reminded of the visceral energy of Sylvia Plath’s work. I found Woolard’s poetry to be supple and compelling, a fresh and singular voice in Southern regional poetry. You can read more of this relatively new poet and the experiences that continue to shape her poetry in this interview in the Southern Review of Books: “’Neck of the Woods’ Examines Grief, Social Change, the Power of Shared Experience.” Other than in The New Yorker, you can also find her poetry in The Adroit Journal as well as “If By You You Mean Me” in The Paris Review (Fall 2019).

From her poem, “Laura Palmer Graduates” based on director David Lynch’s surrealistic Twin Peaks, I’ve chosen this line for you to use creatively in your fictional composition:

What does it matter
That the stars we see are already dead.

Your challenge? Write a piece of prose (not poetry) of no more than 144 words that includes the above given line. You may change it with breaks or punctuation, without altering the order of the words.

When you have written your prose, publish it on your blog with a link to this dVerse post. Then insert the link to your post in Mr Linky below. Finally, please do check out the other stories and leave a comment. Enjoy!