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lightsonparkave.bsky.social
Lights on Park Ave
@lightsonparkave.bsky.social
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Monthly Steve/Tony fanworks challenge. All universes & ratings & most fanwork types welcome. A new round starts on the first day every month & ends on the last
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lightsonparkave.bsky.social
Prompt 5/18: A line from The Sea by John Banville about the uncanny being something known returning in a different form

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"…the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become revenant…" — John Banville, The Sea
October 14, 2025 at 12:12 AM
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Prompt 1/18: A quote about everyone housing a multitude of lifetimes and identities within themselves from Roman Year by André Aciman

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So which is your lifetime these days? Her definition of another lifetime was erratic and quixotic. She taught me to see that we didn’t have one lifetime, or only one identity; and not only two, but three, four, five simultaneous ones, some you can’t wait to jettison, others you’re jettisoned from, some you can’t make up your mind about, some growing obsolete, some that should have lasted far longer but never did, and the darkest of all, those you’re still waiting for but already know won’t come. We house all these lifetimes like Russian matryoshka dolls, each nested in the others. Flora understood this, as did my father. Both, after all, were born elsewhere and had fled their own birthplace but could still heed the echo of one lifetime resounding in those that followed. “So which is your lifetime these days?” — André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 22, 2024)
October 7, 2025 at 10:13 PM
lightsonparkave.bsky.social
Prompt 18/24: "Bluegrass Rhapsody" - Cecilia Woloch

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“This is the green we grew up in: humid blue of the blur of our adolescence; weedy dark. These are the roads we drove into the country with whomever had sweet, cheap wine. This is the sky of watery silk under which we wrecked our hearts, cried out; the song of gnat and firefly and wasp and dove and frog. Here is the place I chose exile from, sharp-hearted, sure of some other world. And still, how it takes me back. How you grip the wheel and laugh, don’t say Remember. Don’t say anything.” — Bluegrass Rhapsody by Cecilia Woloch
August 27, 2025 at 1:35 AM
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Prompt 14/24: "September is Summer, Too, or It's Never Too Late to Be Uncomfortable" - Ogden Nash

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August 20, 2025 at 1:43 AM
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Prompt 7/24: An excerpt about the protagonist's hyperawareness of everything around him on a walk from Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

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“He walks towards the edge of the field, his tread slow and heavy. He can feel the wooden handle of the scythe rub against his palm, the sweat that is trickling down his back and soaking the waistband of his trousers, he can smell the hot stones, the ripe wheat, the reek of the stables. He perceives with a new acuity the existence of each thing in itself, each detail that makes up the reality of this moment, and yet also their clandestine connection, their meshing into an indissoluble great whole: the white disc of the sun and the pulse of blood in his eardrums, the caw of a crow, the sound of his clogs on the dry ground […]” Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Animalia (trans. Frank Wynne)
July 24, 2025 at 10:23 PM
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Prompt 4/24: An excerpt about a woman everyone is irresistibly attracted to from Perfume by Patrick Süskind

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“She was one of those languid women, made of dark honey, smooth and sweet, and terribly sticky, who take control of a room with a syrupy gesture, a toss of the hair, a single slow whiplash of the eyes- and all the while remain as still as the centre of a hurricane, apparently unaware of the force of gravity by which they irresistibly attract themselves the yearnings and the souls of both men and women.” — Patrick Süskind, Perfume
July 15, 2025 at 10:47 PM
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Prompt 1/24: "Sex Education" - Linda Pastan

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SEX EDUCATION When a bee enters the plant's electric field, a small electric charge develops... — Eartheasy blog I remember what happened the day we met. Electricity, they call it, a spark like the one that went from God's finger to Adam's in the Sistine Chapel. I always thought it was a metaphor, but now I read that bees are led to pollen by a flower's electric force field, not just by seductive reds and purples. I remember how you looked at me, how I looked back. And spreading through my limbs a sweetness, like honey.
July 10, 2025 at 12:09 AM
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Prompt 10/10: "Wound" - Larry Levis

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Wound // Larry Levis I’ve loved you like a man loves an old wound picked up in a razor fight on a street nobody remembers. Look at him: even in the dark he touches it gently. (from Wrecking Crew, 1972)
June 29, 2025 at 1:05 AM
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Prompt 9/10: "I Wish in the City of Your Heart" - Robley Wilson

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Robley Wilson I WISH IN THE CITY OF YOUR HEART | 165 I wish in the city of your heart you would let me be the street where you walk when you are most yourself. I imagine the houses: It has been raining, but the rain is done and the children kept home have begun opening their doors.
June 28, 2025 at 12:29 AM
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Prompt 8/10: "So Much Happiness" - Naomi Shihab Nye

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So Much Happiness It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records . . . Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known. by Naomi Shihab Nye (source)
June 26, 2025 at 10:25 PM
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Prompt 7/10: "This Heaven of Mud" - Jeremy Radin

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THIS HEAVEN OF MUD Lord, bless this inelegant sadness. Bless the sorrow that has smuggled me into its dingy cabin. Bless the plates of food it leaves out for me. Bless the quiet baths it draws for me. Bless the beds and the space inside them. Lord, bless the empty rooms. All these empty rooms. Bless the panic that shakes me like a bone in its jaws. Bless the fear, the crush of gut anvils. The worry, snow-packed in my wishing well throat. Bless the temper, Lord. Grinding traffic, fist through windshield, head through sunroof, boot through dashboard, my mother's chest. Bless the smoke-spine girls I hunt for you in the eyes of. Bless the lust for their salt, their lemons. Bless their fingernails lodged in the walls of my aorta. Bless the ones who climbed safely away from my obsession. Bless the mistakes, your finest achievement. Holy: the lost wallet. Forgotten stovetop. Longing's insistence that I'm ready to love. All your creaking lock bust music, opening my blood. Bless my greasy blood, Lord, dump-trucked through my veins. My clay-thick, garbage-sick blood, Lord, bless it. Bless my muscles, soft as prom queen thigh satin. Bless my skeleton, swaddled in fat. This heavy ruin, bloated sarcophagus, bacon-wrapped funeral body, Lord, bless it half to death and bless it again. Bless the black daffodils my skin is sewn around. Heaving toward sunlight, bloating my flesh. All this shriveled beauty, Lord. Bless the kitchen knives that salmon upwards from my lungs, slicing up these prayers before they reach the back of my tongue. Lord, bless my tongue and the songs buried in it, this holy howling bedroom gospel. Chewing grief into a mouthful of accordions. Bless the accordions, Lord, bury me in accordions. That my last gasp may be one note in a harmony of hinges, a chord plucked by the great, swelling beast of heaven, a note in a song that will sound like a life, that will fill the mouth with chocolate, Lord, bless the chocolate. Bless the chocolate. Bless this necessary sadness, this miraculous sadness, this gigantic absence, this heaven of mud, stampeding like music down into the empty spots. Bless the empty spots. Bless the empty. The uncoveted, unbent, unlusted, unhoped, unwild. Bless the depression farmers, suicide gardeners, lonesome priests of the church of the Lord of Rooms, Lord, bless me. Bless me with your tusks, your claws, your fangs, your jaws, tear me apart, Lord, bless me with the tearing – I am ready for the tearing, I am ready for the tearing, the tearing the tearing, bless me with the tearing, Lord, scatter me through the field until I sink into the dirt. Until trees begin to grow from me. Until rivers begin to begin from me. Until I am nothing but a disaster of seeds glowing in the bellies of crows.
June 26, 2025 at 12:31 AM
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Prompt 6/10: "An Observation" - May Sarton

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« True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root, Must let their hands grow knotted as they move With a rough sensitivity about Under the earth, between the rock and shoot, Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit. And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred, She who could heal the wounded plant or friend With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love; I minded once to see her beauty gnarled, But now her truth is given me to live, As I learn for myself we must be hard To move among the tender with an open hand, And to stay sensitive up to the end Pay with some toughness for a gentle world. » — May Sarton, "An Observation"
June 26, 2025 at 12:27 AM
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Prompt 5/10: "An Old Song" - Tomaž Šalamun

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AN OLD SONG If only I may have, at death, a friend's hand laid upon my forehead.
June 22, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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Prompt 4/10: "Some life experiences that may apply to you" - Lev St. Valentine

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June 19, 2025 at 11:55 PM
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Prompt 3/10: "Everything We Do" - Peter Meinke

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Everything We Do by Peter Meinke Everything we do is for our first loves whom we have lost irrevocably who have married insurance salesmen and moved to Topeka and never think of us at all. We fly planes & design buildings and write poems that all say Sally I love you I’ll never love anyone else Why didn’t you know I was going to be a poet? The walks to school, the kisses in the snow gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age: our legs are young again, our voices strong and happy, we’re not afraid. We don’t know enough to be afraid. And now we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope that some day she may fly in our plane enter our building read our poem And that night, deep in her dream, Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka, with the salesman lying beside her, will cry out our unfamiliar name.
June 18, 2025 at 12:14 AM
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Prompt 2/10: "When You Go" - Edwin Morgan

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When you go, if you go, And I should want to die, there's nothing I'd be saved by more than the time you fell asleep in my arms in a trust so gentle I let the darkening room drink up the evening, till rest, or the new rain lightly roused you awake. I asked if you heard the rain in your dream and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.
June 17, 2025 at 12:41 AM
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Prompt 1/10: "Getting Into Bed on a December Night" - Ellen Bass

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Ellen Bass - GETTING INTO BED ON A DECEMBER NIGHT When I slip beneath the quilt and fold into her warmth, I think we are like the pages of a love letter written thirty years ago that some aging god still reads each day and then tucks back into its envelope.
June 16, 2025 at 1:43 AM
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Prompt 12/19: A quote about wanting to hold onto the moment of existence from Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

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“Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time.” — Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
April 18, 2025 at 1:47 AM
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Prompt 9/19: A quote from Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery about the best days being the ones that bring small, simple pleasures

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“After all,” Anne had said to Marilla once, “I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.” - Anne of Avonlea 1909 by L. M. Montgomery
April 14, 2025 at 10:11 PM
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Prompt 6/19: A quote about taking it slow if it were possible to redo things from Fi: A Memoir of My Son by Alexandra Fuller

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If I could do it all over, I’d do it all again but slower—much slower. — Alexandra Fuller, Fi: A Memoir of My Son (Grove Press, April 9, 2024)
April 13, 2025 at 1:25 AM
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Prompt 1/19: "This Spring" - James A. Pearson

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This Spring How can I love this spring when it's pulling me through my life faster than any time before it? When five separate dooms are promised this decade and here I am, just trying to watch a bumblebee cling to its first purple flower. I cannot save this world. But look how it's trying, once again, to save me. by James A. Pearson
April 4, 2025 at 2:17 AM
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Prompt 20/21: A quote from Reply 1997 about how serious your feelings are at the age of 18 even if they're dismissed as silly

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“At the age of 18, we think we can love anyone … and worry too much about little things. Eighteen. Adults say at this age, we laugh at the simplest things. But at that time, we were serious. Harder and more intense than most adults.” — Shi Won (Reply 1997)
February 24, 2025 at 11:30 PM
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Prompt 17/21: "First Memory" - Louise Glück

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First Memory by Louise Glück Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was— for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.
February 19, 2025 at 11:23 PM
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Prompt 14/21: An excerpt from "Lucifer, Full of Light" by Cecilia Woloch about seeing the good in the wreckage of someone and being unable to doom them

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“And if I should pick out the good in you – each shard of broken light, like glass from the wreck of such beauty, and look at that – or one golden afternoon when you hovered above me in rapture, oh half god – how would I bear to lift my hands, how would I bear to close my eyes and let you fall, and love be damned?” — Cecilia Woloch, from “Lucifer, Full of Light,” Carpathia
February 16, 2025 at 11:11 PM
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Prompt 7/21: A quote about how the past is always changing as you grow as a person from The House by the Sea by May Sarton

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Because I am thinking so much about the past these days I have come to see that the past is always changing, is never static, never "placed" forever like a book on a shelf. As we grow and change, we understanding things and the people who have influenced us in new ways. May Sarton, The House by the Sea
February 13, 2025 at 11:06 PM