WOW community’s words on pictures

Our January 2025 free writing group included prompts in pictures: different works of art to choose from and write about. The group took this prompt and ran joyously with it, sharing astoundingly great, creative works. We loved this writing group, led by writer Robin Gaines and her visual artist daughter, Egan Franks Holzhausen.

Enjoy these lovely writings from the WOW community!

Skyfall 

by Emily Shearer

When trees and love fell from the sky

I grabbed at what I had nearby:

a rose, my boots, marshmallow pie

and framed it in to plaster to my wall.

When all I scribbled over was shame,

I stabbed at a feeling too tiny to name.

The words a blur, nowhere to aim.

Where, then, could I hang it all?

Voyeur

by Amy Egbert 

Silas stands in the street by his house, straw hat on his head, hands in the pockets of his blue jacket. He’s been eyeing that woman with the shiny black Prius for weeks, the loose way her black dress falls from her waist, barely covering her thighs. She’s barefoot most days, whether she’s washing that car or plucking weeds from her garden. He takes that mane of messy blonde hair personally. She has no shame, he thinks. Sometimes his son, JT, ten years old, stands with him. JT assumes his father's watchfulness. He isn’t sure why his father stares and stares at that nice Miss Sarah, who once picked him up off the street after he had wrecked his bike. She had helped him straighten the wheel before she walked him home. JT reddens as he remembers he had faked a limp, so it would take longer to get there. He liked the feel of Miss Sarah’s cool hand on his arm as she helped him steady the bike. There is something about the way his father looks at her that feels like eels sliding around his belly. He doesn’t like the way his father rocks back and forth on his heels, like he might do something. JT wishes he could go barefoot too, but his father would tan his hide for being so stupid. 

Sarah feels Silas’s eyes roam over her whenever she leaves the house. He’s always there, and the energy coming off him is like the oily smell in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant. It’s a broiling hot summer in San Diego. Shoes feel like sweaty encumbrances. She likes to run barefoot on the soft grassy perimeters of her neighbors' yards, and prefers to go braless under her tank tops and loose gauzy dresses. It’s almost too hot to drag a hose over to her flower beds, but the plants need water. She glances at her new black Prius, thinking she’ll give it a wash in the evening when it’s cooler. That weird guy Silas is dressed as if it’s autumn in long pants and a blue jacket, his hands always in his pockets, his black eyes always staring like hard black pebbles. His little boy, JT, has taken to standing with him, in a nearly identical jacket and jeans, a ball cap over his shaggy brown hair. In the three months since she’s lived in the neighborhood, she’s never seen the boy’s mother. She nearly asked JT about her that time she helped him right his bike, but there was something closed and shut down in the boy’s face. Sarah is a criminal-law student at Cal Western School of Law and she laughs at her suspicions. She imagines that every fresh crop of interns at the hospital develops the very symptoms they are studying, and wonders if the same applies to students studying criminal behavior. Is it possible to intuit evil?

Untitled

by Erin Fitzgerald

deep in the down dark places thrums my mysterious power, my body giving rise to 
multitudes of miracles. my breaths they rise and fall and i sit in between. my heart as it lifts up to sun, to morning, to courage, my spine roots down, drawing feet to earth, strength to bones, transmitters to nerve endings. i sit in between. as my flesh falls i become more invisible, a superpower, i'm told. now i can flash my putrid innards outward, beauties and horrors to be discovered and ignored. these bones as they weary, and this body as it surrenders to gravity, my mind sharpens, heart wisens. i sit in between. in the in between spaces i am neither mother nor doctor, not healer or friend. there is no short temper, no back pain, no inner monster, no daughter. in the in between spaces there is no last year, yesterday, five-year bucket list. only here. this breath. then that. i'd like to inhabit the in between spaces. breathe my essence into my bones. spine strong, heart soft.

Cherry Blossom Season

by Tiffany Dugan

The air is crisp, expectant. 

I pull my sweater around me. Imagine it’s a hug. 

Buds have woken 

and bleed the sky a shade of rose. 

My hands find homes.

Buried finger-tips in warm dark caves – my armpits. 

I shiver 

one, long ripple of cold blue air down my spine.

It’s no longer winter. 

Snow remains yesterday’s memory, 

changed by hours, 

soon to be among memories I’ve forgotten. 

Seasons seem countable now. 

No longer unimaginably long grade-school summers. 

I notice, now, 

yellow stains and pricks of green, 

this new turn of spring.

The Past, the Future

by Nikki Kallio

I could tell you stories, I could, and you wouldn’t believe me, because no one listens to an old woman. It’s because you don’t want to believe it will happen to you, that you’ll get old like me. Everybody wants to live forever but they don’t think about what it means, that they’ll have swollen ankles and things will sag. But if you look at the truth you will see the beauty in it. It’s why I paint—to show you what’s real. The window is open, so to speak. Why do you look away? Don’t you see my time in the sun, the places I’ve walked? Do you know I used to run? You can’t imagine, I know. You can’t see me for the whole; you only see the passage of time, not my existence in it. I remember when we could sit in the sun, when people did it just to put more color in their skin. I remember what it was like to run in the aftermath of the rain. That was when I was only beginning to understand then that women would never escape judgment. I saw how men looked at me, how they taught their sons to look at me. I never was pretty enough or quiet enough or compliant enough or interested enough. They watched when I ran past their houses as they watered their lawn, boxed in by sodden boundaries. I saw the way they disapproved. I ran barefoot sometimes, and just in the clothes I was wearing—I’d run just because it felt good. It was a way to relieve stress, when things were getting difficult, after the vineyard began to fail. Isn’t that funny? In a sad way. The vines grew dry and brittle just as we all could’ve used one more glass of wine. I paint the things I see now, and I paint to help people remember what it was like, before. I paint the gardens and the flowers and running. That’s the thing about being old, we remember.

Magic Wand

by Nancy Coleman

Wanda is older than she ever imagined she'd be. She sees herself sloughing and slipping downward, cheeks heavy with memory, belly loose with loss, and breasts mere flaps of gentle ridicule. Perhaps, she says to her presumptuous niece, the one who would tell her anything just to get her, or really anyone, into a portrait. Perhaps, this was not the best idea. I mean, I want to be honest, I want to be Real, always have wanted this kind of ... what? Authenticity? But surely the world doesn't need my body in particular on its walls! I mean really, dear.

Sophie, never one to wait for the end of someone else's thought, insists that somehow there's beauty in this portrait of helplessness and gravity. We'll see how you feel about that when you get a few more years on you, Wanda tries to say but finds the words as heavy as everything else that's happening to her body.

So. As she's sat for this odd portrait, in which she's pretending to be the artist she once hoped she'd become were it not for children and the PTA and the patriarchy—a word that, while new to her, feels remarkably irritating—and were it not for the way a beautiful woman was in her day least likely to be allowed to live the life she wanted, as she's sat in this overstuffed chair in the overheated room in Sophie's yuppie New York apartment, she's had some time to think. In her mind, she's not so old really. She can still imagine breasts that stand up proudly, nipples that demand attention, a body flying like a flag, a celebration in high heels and silk. She can still imagine ravishing and being ravished.

Because unlike Sophie who finds olderness somewhat romantic, its darkness bearing a mystery close to death and therefore to wisdom, Wanda knows, beyond any imagining, what is real: That she is all the ages she's ever been and that she can reclaim none of them.

Wanda stares at the back of the canvas across that small room, gaze blurred by cataracts and the wrong glasses, and sees another portrait, one in which she stands in a sunlit meadow peering down into a deep well, at the bottom of which she sees an old woman, a woman frightened, a woman helpless, a woman in decline. Wanda knows everything about this woman, although she is not entirely her. She sees and knows, but her own feeling is primarily of bemused compassion. So this, she thinks, this is how it goes, all the way to the end. It matters not how I think or feel about it, but I may as well carry on. 

Naked as I came. For as long as I both shall live.

Oh, and this magic wand? This paintbrush in my hands? It's so I don't miss a thing.