So. At afternoon tea yesterday, Fiona Wood and Gabrielle Wang said that to write good stuff you have to start playing with words again. Without worrying about the sense of them and without thinking too much about what comes out. Gabrielle told me that she opens a book, finds a word, and writes about that word.

I opened Karen Russell’s Swamplandia and found the word Airboat. Without editing, thinking about my characters, this is what came out.

***

I take off in your airboat

See sky out windows

And strange things passing

Not birds

They’re in the drop below

For now I know more than they do

About shunting wind and weaving sky

On my level are other people in airboats

Throwing things out their windows

Notes that say look at the sun making stories from dust

Look below. People aren’t people from here

They’re nothing

They’re too small to even be nothing

I throw a note

About how clouds look different at cloud level

I see small movements in the fog of them

Veins that look more like roads than water

A passing note says they don’t think it’s going to rain

But the nothing people on the ground are waiting for fat wallops

That I know, note or not, boat or none, are going to fall.