Poetry Fishbowl Open!

Pavement
Traffic Lights
A fire engine werewolf (as opposed to the usual dalmatian)

An on-line acquaintance/friend of mine, ladysprite, (of many years duration), put herself through vet school to learn a vocation she loves. She is quite talented in many other areas, one of which is writing little snippets about her job.

Of course, her interests being what they are, she sometimes puts a bit of a spin on those stories and I have saved them in my memories.

I would love to present her with a poem that honors her less-well-known vocation as a veternarian to The Fae and the problems of healing magical creatures who live in the city.

Oh, what a brilliant idea!

Suburban, or sub-urban, fantasy (either the burbs, which are much neglected except in built-the-burb-on-the-graveyard, or subterranean(*) urban fantasy)

(*) which wants to be sub-terrarium, which makes me think of the locker creatures in Men in Black II, and a universe in the bottom of a terrarium.

The results of the divinations in Tumble the Nuts

My favorite sort of urban shaman uses painted designs, on skin and as graffiti.

Urban werewolves, yes, technodawgz.

High-rise fantasy, not just down-on-the-street grit but up-in-the-corporate-office magic: what if the fortune-500 CEO is a shaman?


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Pittsburgh. This city was so full of stone churches stained black by soot (we almost died, too, but that was the con).

Atlanta, where the hobos all had NYC accents.

Rochester, my hometown, haunted by the ghost of George Eastman, who founded Kodak and invented disposable cameras, where Billy the Kid and Susan B. Anthony are buried one hill away from each other (Fredrick Douglass gets front-row seating by the main street) http://www.fomh.org/ It's a rust-belt city where they say you can develop film in our river and the WPA-era library literally sits atop said river.

The streets, and I'm babbling, because I miss my hometown, are laid out on old cowpaths. If you look at an old map of the city, you could easily believe that it's laid on occult symbols, the way they say DC was.

And, of course, the Erie Canal http://www.eriecanal.org/ runs through it, and, a few miles away, the old locks (from the original route) are still visible, little stone arches over fetid puddles of water.

What about a poem based around the merging of the following two concepts:

"People who live in glass houses (or cities) shouldn't throw stones...."

That infamous "Glass Ceiling" that women run into in the workplace when they try to advance their careers past a certain level.

If evolution works on them, what happens to humans when the fae develop an immunity to cold iron?

Occasionally there are news stories about wild animals (bears, in my region) wandering into the city. What if they're not just plain old ordinary hungry bears (etc.), but advance scouts?

The Detroit feral buildings and/or farmland reclamation in the city.

There aren't very many shoe-repair / cobbler's shops left. Are the ones that remain owned and staffed by humans -- or something else?

You've written about the monsters losing their home to foreclosure, and a follow-on about them finding a new place (if I recall correctly). How are they settling in?

Something post-apocalyptic, where the fae and related creatures have come out to help the displaced humans and related creatures.

Wandering sod and how it affects urban travel.

Sinkholes, and what if they're not just a result of limestone and water and poor civil engineering?

Come to think of it, what about UNcivil engineering, the kind that seems to destroy neighborhoods and make life in the city less pleasant. Are the engineers perhaps disgruntled fae?

I'm afraid I don't have any prompts for this month's theme, being run over by beginning-of-semester preparations at my college. If that changes, I'll let you know...but I wanted to poke my head in at the very least and send the good vibes your way! I'll also hop over to Twitter in a few minutes and promote the Fishbowl as I usually do. :)

Things left behind. :)

Ooh! Ooh! What would a city built for the fae and the weres look like?

Cities inside cities, faerie doors (again)

Fae as "differently abeled."