[1]

Describe the sound when a penny drops
into a wishing-well. Consider the relevance
of the following factors: acoustics, knowledge
of wells, odds of fulfillment, presence of stars.
To be written from the coin’s point of view.

[2]

Imagine gravity traded as a commodity.
From a bird’s perspective, make a case
for public ownership, apportioned by weight.
Set on an uninhabited island.

[3]

Explain the attraction of the moon.
In no more than thirty-two lines, suggest
a new name for the number zero.
Combine the responses in a 12-line pantoum.

[4]

Establish a seamless association between
the following: an executioner’s birthday party,
fractal geometry, attention deficit disorder.
Result must be tacitly non-judgmental,
and be suitable for a sixth-grade audience.

[5]

Bonus question – substantiate your findings.  

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Alex Grant's chapbook, Chains & Mirrors, (Main Street Rag) was awarded the 2006 Randall Jarrell Prize and the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award (best book by a North Carolina poet in the previous year). He was the 2004 winner of WMSU's Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, won first prize in the 2006 Kakalak Carolina Poets Anthology contest, and was a 2006 semi-finalist for Tupelo Press's Dorset Prize. He was nominated for Meridian's Best New Poets anthology in 2005, 2006 and 2007. His work has recently appeared or is upcoming in The Nation, Connecticut Review, North American Review, Arts & Letters, and Nimrod. He works for a not-for-profit healthcare organization, whose address you can read by the moon, and divides his personal time between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, where he lives with his wife, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess.
 

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First Published in Phi Kappa Phi Forum  

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autumn 2007 | kaleidowhirl
books and chapbooks from authors in this issue