Today during a seminar at my Antioch MFA program–Novels and Memoirs in Verse for Young Readers, with Gayle Brandeis–we were given the writing prompt: “When Was the Last Time You Felt Free.” I wrote this:
A Time I Felt Free
We shut ourselves in the TV room
with the big screen and two
buckets of popcorn.
My little brother and me and
five other kids from the adoption group.
We don’t have to talk about
adoption
or our
feelings.
Or dreams that come to us at night.
Let’s watch Fantastic Beasts, Black Panther, or Oceans 10.
Anything but LION,
where the boy goes back to India twenty-five years later
to find his mother.
The first one.
The one he lost.
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