From a Very Cool Writing Prompt

A while back, poetry colleague Patrick S. described the following dream:

"I dreamed I was at NPS and someone had set up a bunch of whiteboards in an effort to show that poetry wasn't as important as poets pretend it is. The whiteboards were covered with names of things that were worth caring about to one degree or another, with different colored markers for different kinds of thing. I remember poetry was one color; I don't think the other colors were specifically identified in the dream.

At one point on one of the whiteboards, two non-poetry items, one of which was the Holocaust, had curly lines connecting them to one poetry item. That item was 'myths of fish as hands'."

I was one of several tagged by Patrick in the hopes that people would take it up as a writing prompt. Unknowingly cheating a bit by taking the "s" off of "myths," I wrote the following.

Update: The final version of "The Myth of Fish as Hands" can be seen in the inaugural issue of the Cape Cod Poetry Review.  You can order it here.