In Therapy, the Patient Is Asked To Define: Polaroid

 
Polaroid (poh-la-roid) n. quickly developing image forever seared in memory.

 

Use it in a sentence:

 

Dressed as Charlie Chaplin for a junior high party, I reached into the pocket of the coat I borrowed from my father and pulled out three Polaroids of a naked woman lying on my mother’s bed.

 

Write a poem using each letter of the word as the first letter of each line:

 

Polaroid
 
 
Posed naked
 
on my mother’s bed
 
lies a woman—she’s
 
as open as my mouth is
 
right now.
 
Oh, daddy—tell me how
 
I am supposed to
 
dance tonight.
 
 
 

Avery Moselle Guess received a 2015 NEA Fellowship for Poetry. She’s a PhD student at USD and assistant editor for poetry at South Dakota Review. Recent publications include poems in Thrush, Rogue Agent, Glass, Rust + Moth, and Deaf Poets Society and creative non-fiction in Entropy and The Manifest-Station. Her chapbook, The Patient Admits, is forthcoming from dancing girl press in summer 2017, and her first full-length collection of poetry will be published in April 2019 by Black Lawrence Press.