Today I came across a poem by an old friend, JoLee Passerini, in the Crab Orchard Review. Back when I knew her, almost twenty years ago at the University of Alabama, she was JoLee Gibbons. We worked on the Marrs Field Journal together. That was when we all were getting our first tastes of literary possibility; it’s always nice to open a literary journal and come across the name of one of my friends from the undergraduate years in Tuscaloosa. Here’s the first stanza from her poem, “Eating Locusts”:

Grommet, socket, sprocket, marriage–
lugnuts, lugwrench, stopwatch, truckstop,
egret, lake air, picnic, yessir.

It just so happens that lugnut is one of my favorite words in the English language.

The Exercise:
Write a three-line stanza comprised of single words.