Ethel

Street Address

City, State, Zip

Phone Number

Ethel

Ethel

cover scan.jpg — Wild Apples: a flash memoir collection with writing prompts

by
Joanna Penn Cooper
Joanna Penn Cooper is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who is the author of *The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis* (Brooklyn Arts Press), *What Is a Domicile* (Noctuary Press), and *Crown* (Ravenna Press). She is also the author of the chapbook *When We Were Fearsome* from Ethel. Joanna has taught writing and literature at several colleges, and she currently teaches courses for the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, Meredith College, and her own company, Muse Writing & Creative Support. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature, as well as *South Dakota Review, Zócalo Public Square, Open Letters Monthly, Poetry International*, and other journals. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

from Wild Apples

Andy

Before I have to put my cat to sleep, I dream that I wheel him outside for some sun. He is a teenage boy with a degenerative disease, and his stomach is hurting, so I rub it for him. But we are enjoying the day, the sun and the grass and how we belong to each other but are separate, too. Tom Waits comes into the yard to do some landscaping. He is wearing his hat and suspenders, his undershirt and old suit pants. I say, “Hello, Tom Waits.” Then Andy says, “Hello, Tom Waits.” His voice comes out in a slightly strangled way because he is a boy with a degenerative disease and also a cat. He is making a joke about how he can talk now and about how funny it all is. Then we laugh, and I’m thinking about how funny Andy has always been. We sit in the sun like ambassadors, like kids at a Kool-Aid stand.

Prompt:

Write a dream vignette. Provide a bit of context about what is outside the dream, but mostly stay in it. Recreate the dream world, placing us there.