November 26, 2024

A writing challenge I gave myself: No verbs!

sum total

Two slices of store-brand multigrain bread. Three squares of butter. 
Seventeen syllables in Lauren’s haiku about a small whale. Thirty 
lengths of the Y pool after ninety minutes of mahjong. The four-mile
drive home. The light at 2:45 in the afternoon, this far north. An hour 
in the dryer for a heavy load. Instructions for tonight’s dinner: 375 degrees 
for 22 minutes. A 30-second commercial break. Grape gum, flavorless
after a dozen mastications. Ten pens in the variety pack. Twelve-hundred
inches of tape in the jumbo roll, equal to thirty-three-and-one-third yards.
My mother’s recent voicemail: two minutes and fifty-one seconds. 
The gravel still in my knee after forty-two years.