lightsonparkave

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A MONTH AND A HALF TO SUBMIT WORKS FOR ROUND 59!

Don't forget that rounds are two months long, so you have a lot of time to send something in.

Last month was National Poetry Month so for Round 59, all the prompts are poems:

"Getting Into Bed on a December Night" - Ellen Bass

"When You Go" - Edwin Morgan

"Everything We Do" - Peter Meinke

"Some life experiences that may apply to you" - Lev St. Valentine

"An Old Song" - Tomaž Šalamun

"An Observation" - May Sarton

"This Heaven of Mud" - Jeremy Radin

"So Much Happiness" - Naomi Shihab Nye

"I Wish in the City of Your Heart" - Robley Wilson

"Wound" - Larry Levis

Round 59 will end on June 30, 11:59 PM ET (what time is that for me?).

As always, you’re free to jump in whenever you’d like during the round, a wide variety of work types is accepted, and there are no minimum work requirements. Unfinished works and works for other fandom events are allowed. You can find more information about Lights on Park Ave and the participation guidelines here.

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Wound // Larry Levis

I’ve loved you like a man loves an old wound picked up in a razor fight on a street nobody remembers. Look at him: even in the dark he touches it gently.

(from Wrecking Crew, 1972)

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So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records . . . Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.

by Naomi Shihab Nye (source)

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ALT

Slow Dance with Sasquatch, Jeremy Radin

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« True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root, Must let their hands grow knotted as they move With a rough sensitivity about Under the earth, between the rock and shoot, Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit. And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred, She who could heal the wounded plant or friend With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love; I minded once to see her beauty gnarled, But now her truth is given me to live, As I learn for myself we must be hard To move among the tender with an open hand, And to stay sensitive up to the end Pay with some toughness for a gentle world. »

— May Sarton, "An Observation"

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Tomaž Šalamun

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Some life experiences that may apply to you, Lev St. Valentine

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Everything We Do

by Peter Meinke

Everything we do is for our first loves whom we have lost irrevocably who have married insurance salesmen and moved to Topeka and never think of us at all. We fly planes & design buildings and write poems that all say Sally I love you I’ll never love anyone else Why didn’t you know I was going to be a poet? The walks to school, the kisses in the snow gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age: our legs are young again, our voices strong and happy, we’re not afraid. We don’t know enough to be afraid. And now we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope that some day she may fly in our plane enter our building read our poem And that night, deep in her dream, Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka, with the salesman lying beside her, will cry out our unfamiliar name.

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when you go by Edwin Morgan

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getting into bed on a December night by Ellen Bass

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Here are all the Round 58 works!

If you missed out on participating, remember that you can always submit something for a round that already ended. You can find out more information about that in the guidelines.

You can see all of the prompts for Round 58 here. In addition to looking at this master list, you can search for works by rounds, creators, work types, ratings, and universes on this page and peruse the Lights on Park Ave AO3 collection.

Round 59 has now begun and will run until June 30. It was National Poetry Month last month, so all the prompts are poems this round and can be found here.

FIC

MCU

Ficlet about Steve not knowing if he can save the world, but it tries to save him through Tony - @nostalgicatsea Some days, Steve thinks there's no saving this world. Cold, harsh, more destructive than he ever imagined possible, it was speeding at a relentless pace towards obliteration, alarm bells ringing for imminent suffering, imminent mass extinction, every other day. The end was near. The end was here.

Ficlet about AoU Steve wishing he could stop time and redo things as he and Tony part ways - @nostalgicatsea It's not fair to say that he thought it would last forever when he had one foot out the door the whole time. It's just...he thought there would be more time. It feels like they ended when they were just beginning.

Ficlet about Steve seeing a familiar photograph as he leaves Tony's lake house - @nostalgicatsea They decline to stay. They had dropped in without notice, and it would be bad manners to impose further. Maybe not to Tony, who seemed to want them to stay, genuinely, but to his family.

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Last month was National Poetry Month so for Round 59, all the prompts are poems:

"Getting Into Bed on a December Night" - Ellen Bass

"When You Go" - Edwin Morgan

"Everything We Do" - Peter Meinke

"Some life experiences that may apply to you" - Lev St. Valentine

"An Old Song" - Tomaž Šalamun

"An Observation" - May Sarton

"This Heaven of Mud" - Jeremy Radin

"So Much Happiness" - Naomi Shihab Nye

"I Wish in the City of Your Heart" - Robley Wilson

"Wound" - Larry Levis

Round 59 will end on June 30, 11:59 PM ET (what time is that for me?).

As always, you’re free to jump in whenever you’d like during the round, a wide variety of work types is accepted, and there are no minimum work requirements. Unfinished works and works for other fandom events are allowed. You can find more information about Lights on Park Ave and the participation guidelines here.

[lightsonparkave]

Wound // Larry Levis

I’ve loved you like a man loves an old wound picked up in a razor fight on a street nobody remembers. Look at him: even in the dark he touches it gently.

(from Wrecking Crew, 1972)

[lightsonparkave]

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So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records . . . Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.

by Naomi Shihab Nye (source)

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Full poem:

THIS HEAVEN OF MUD

Lord, bless this inelegant sadness. Bless the sorrow that has smuggled me into its dingy cabin. Bless the plates of food it leaves out for me. Bless the quiet baths it draws for me. Bless the beds and the space inside them. Lord, bless the empty rooms. All these empty rooms. Bless the panic that shakes me like a bone in its jaws. Bless the fear, the crush of gut anvils. The worry, snow-packed in my wishing well throat. Bless the temper, Lord. Grinding traffic, fist through windshield, head through sunroof, boot through dashboard, my mother's chest. Bless the smoke-spine girls I hunt for you in the eyes of. Bless the lust for their salt, their lemons. Bless their fingernails lodged in the walls of my aorta. Bless the ones who climbed safely away from my obsession. Bless the mistakes, your finest achievement. Holy: the lost wallet. Forgotten stovetop. Longing's insistence that I'm ready to love. All your creaking lock bust music, opening my blood. Bless my greasy blood, Lord, dump-trucked through my veins. My clay-thick, garbage-sick blood, Lord, bless it. Bless my muscles, soft as prom queen thigh satin. Bless my skeleton, swaddled in fat. This heavy ruin, bloated sarcophagus, bacon-wrapped funeral body, Lord, bless it half to death and bless it again. Bless the black daffodils my skin is sewn around. Heaving toward sunlight, bloating my flesh. All this shriveled beauty, Lord. Bless the kitchen knives that salmon upwards from my lungs, slicing up these prayers before they reach the back of my tongue. Lord, bless my tongue and the songs buried in it, this holy howling bedroom gospel. Chewing grief into a mouthful of accordions. Bless the accordions, Lord, bury me in accordions. That my last gasp may be one note in a harmony of hinges, a chord plucked by the great, swelling beast of heaven, a note in a song that will sound like a life, that will fill the mouth with chocolate, Lord, bless the chocolate. Bless the chocolate. Bless this necessary sadness, this miraculous sadness, this gigantic absence, this heaven of mud, stampeding like music down into the empty spots. Bless the empty spots. Bless the empty. The uncoveted, unbent, unlusted, unhoped, unwild. Bless the depression farmers, suicide gardeners, lonesome priests of the church of the Lord of Rooms, Lord, bless me. Bless me with your tusks, your claws, your fangs, your jaws, tear me apart, Lord, bless me with the tearing – I am ready for the tearing, I am ready for the tearing, the tearing the tearing, bless me with the tearing, Lord, scatter me through the field until I sink into the dirt. Until trees begin to grow from me. Until rivers begin to begin from me. Until I am nothing but a disaster of seeds glowing in the bellies of crows.

ALT

Slow Dance with Sasquatch, Jeremy Radin