Last night’s Slicer Meet-Up was a great way to meet three slicers I’ve never met on camera before – Cheryl, Chris, and Lori – and “see” Lainie again! Even through I read their blogs and feel I know a few things about them, it’s such a deeper experience when you can hear voices and see eyes. Thank you, Lainie, for setting this up, and a heartfelt Cheers to friends I know a little better now!
This month, I’m celebrating living poets by writing a Cento poem from a chosen collection of their work. I’m proud to say that the poet today is from my own home state.
Look closely at the photos of the books by Chelsea Rathburn below, and you will notice that there are color tabs marking many of the pages. When this current Poet Laureate of Georgia came to visit our local coffee shop during National Poetry Month two years ago, I tabbed the pages that I requested she share during her reading. You can read more about Chelsea Rathburn here.
Ol’ Possum Playing Poker, Drinking Bourbon, and Smoking Cigars In His Old Age
I picture him still sitting in some cafe
women in rustling skirts, old men with walkers
And that big curved room with the water lilies.
Hateful? He had a mean streak, maybe
thin tail pointing toward us, face turned away.
Lines for this poem were taken from, in this order: The Talker; Eclogue with Paris and Prayer; Eclogue with a Line from a Postcard; Eclogue with Street Theatre; Small Deaths.
We are nearly halfway through the Slice of Life Challenge 2026, and I can’t believe how quickly we are moving! I’m enjoying all the things I’m learning from bloggers all around the world and connecting with them through the power of words.
I’ve sent both my daughters a copy of Make Believe: poems for hoping again by Victoria Hutchins. It’s one of those poetry collections that right from the first page, you’re nodding in agreement with full head movement even if you’re in a room all alone. You have full conversations with Victoria, as if she were your best friend or even your sister. After you read each poem, it’s your turn to reply, and you do – – imagining she is right there at the table with a cup of coffee, wearing pajamas and eating a Mason jar of overnight oats while you chat the morning away with her in your head.
Victoria Hutchins rose to poetic fame on Instagram and TikTok. You can listen to an interview with her and read more about her here. Hutchins offers hope and encouragement in dark days through each poem.
Listen
At first, I didn’t recognize her.
Almost everyone is a stranger until you zoom in or pan out.
The life of it has hollow eyes.
That’s the thing about imaginary friends.
That’s by design.
Listen closely and maybe you’ll realize – it isn’t your voice.
Taken from these poems, in this order: god on Main Street; panda aspen grove; is the party dead already?; god as imaginary friend; blindside; whose hate did you swallow?
She calls herself Mary Oliver’s Drunk Cousin. Lyndsay Rush is the living poet I’m celebrating today during the 2026 Slice of Life Challenge. You can read all the posts each day at www.twowritingteachers.org as writers blog throughout March and post their links on the community site. If I had a colleague at the water cooler flattening her hand to admire her nail polish and declaring that she was so damn sure she would never read a poem she liked, this is the book I’d hand her before retreating around the corner and peering over the top of the cubicle at her in her chair devouring these poems and proving herself wrong.
Lyndsay Rush, author of A Bit Much, got her start as an Instagram poet. Click her name to read the interview that gives more information about Lyndsay. I’ve used her collection to create a Cento poem by writing several of her existing lines into a new arrangement.
The Dark Doorway
You heard it here first:
Otters hold hands while they sleep
If you’re feeling weird lately
stand in the dark doorway of
The Gospel I was raised on
for the nonbelievers
and drive off into the sunset
Lines in this Cento are taken from these poems, in this order: Maybe Crocs are Okay; Loving Each Otter; Help; Someone to Eat Chips With; His Body is Bread and So is Mine; Beware of Lost Boys; A Spell for Success
This is the tenth day of the 2026 Slice of Life Challenge, and we are 1/3 of the way through the month of March’s daily blogging challenge. I’m celebrating some of my favorite living poets this month by sharing a Cento poem I’ve created from one of their poetry collections. I was introduced to Clint Smith through a Book Love Summer Reading Club I participated in through Penny Kittle’s group several years ago when we all read Counting Descent. I hung on every.single.line and marveled in the raw truths of exposed feelings. With poetry this rich and moving, the way it made my soul quiver with such ability to see things more clearly, I could not understand why everyone wasn’t rushing to devour more poetry and make it a main course of their reading diets. I understood why all the holiest books of this world are all in verse. I love the way Clint Smith uses lower case letters in titles and lines, and how he takes a perspective of what was said by many voices to a black boy. He writes prose poetry beautifully, too. Here is a poet who will take a reader of other genres and make them a reader who craves more poetry.
You can read about Clint Smith here. He won the 2014 National Slam Championship, and if I were picking a poet to have lunch with, I’d want my table with Clint Smith.
Invisible
You are invisible until
long after the song has stopped
until there’s nothing left inside
those stained glass shadows
maybe the poem is a cry for help
Taken from: Ode to the only black kid in the class; When Maze and Franie Beverly Come on in my House; what the fire hydrant said to the black boy; what the cathedral said to the black boy; Queries of Unrest.
The first ten poets, in order from bottom to top
A sneak peek of the poets I’m reading the next ten days
Welcome to Day 9 of the Slice of Life Challenge! I’m spending my month slicing about the living poets whose collections I enjoy reading – and using one of their collections to write Cento poetry, composed of existing lines reworked to form a new poem. Today, I’m sharing a Cento taken from the lines of poems in Maggie Smith’s collection entitled Goldenrod.
Maggie Smith appears in an interview here as a graduate of OSU.
Becoming
I am becoming my mother here
crossing a field, wading.
If you feel yourself receding, receding,
whatever your name is, you are with your own kind.
When are we most ourselves, and when the least?
My Cento poem features lines taken from these poems, in this order: Slipper, Threshold, Poem Beginning with a Retweet; Goldenrod; Ohio Cento.
This month during the Slice of Life Challenge, I’m featuring some of my favorite poetry books by living poets and writing Cento poetry each day using the existing lines from poems in each collection to form a new poem. Miranda Cowley Heller rose to writing fame as author of The Paper Palace, a novel selected by Reese Witherspoon for her book club. Turns out, she’s an amazing poet as well!
You can read more about Miranda Cowley Heller here and here .
Family Secrets
Inside the case were all the photos
Alone at the kitchen table, I still
dig myself out of the sink
and my children cry blood tears for me.
From poems in this order: Salvage; The Taste of Pennies; Half-Life; and The Earth is Flat
A sneak peek of the first ten days of living poets I’m celebrating this month
We are at Day 6 – – almost a week into the Slice of Life Challenge for 2026, which runs all of March. This month, I’m celebrating a different living poet each day by using their collections to create a Cento poem; I take existing lines and weave them into a new “original” poem by mixing them in new ways. I first learned of Marcela Sulak through The Stafford Challenge last year, and today I’m using The Fault to create a Cento poem.
During the month of March, as part of the Slice of Life Challenge and the Stafford Challenge, I’m writing Cento poems all month by taking the lines of poetry from living poets and weaving them into a new poem. Today, I’m celebrating Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet who served as our 19th US Poet Laureate and Mississippi Poet Laureate.
You can read more about Natasha Trethewey at her website and in an interview here and here.
What Happened Next
In 1959, my mother is boarding a train
From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down
The lines of my young father’s face deepen
what’s left is footage: the hours before
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
Taken from: The Southern Crescent; Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi; Southern Gothic; Providence; Pastoral.
I’ve also used her poetry in the past to inspire other forms, such as Golden Shovels, which use a line vertically to become the beginning or ending words of the lines in the poem. You can see an example of a Golden Shovel here. One of the things I love most about the version of Native Guard that I have is that it came with a CD of Natasha Trethewey reading the poems. And yes, my RAV4 is a 2018, old enough to still have ………..(drumroll please)………a CD player!
A Sneak Peek of the first ten days of the living poets I’m celebrating this month
It’s Day 5 of the Slice of Life Challenge at Twowritingteachers.org, and as I move through the month of March celebrating living poets, I think back to the summer that Penny Kittle invited readers to engage with You are No Longer in Trouble during the Book Love Summer Reading Club. I was mesmerized by the prose poems that Nicole Stellon O’Donnell wrote as she told of her life growing up a Principal’s kid and later becoming a teacher herself. This book is a treasure, and one in which I believe we can all see ourselves at some point of our lives. For me, it’s the poem Marriage, about second graders getting married in “a rash of weddings” at recess with flowers pressed into aluminum foil bouquets. Sheer treasure!
I’ve used this collection to write a Cento by taking lines of her existing poetry and rearranging them into a new poem.
Tips for Not Sagging
Even the waitress at the post-funeral reception noticed
nothing about me sags.
Bag sagging between her hands,
it’s in the steps, in the motion of go, in the bent knees, the swing of an arm.
Never forget that.
Taken from these poems, in this order: Excuses for the Pilgrimage; A Teacher Playing a Movie Star Playing a Teacher; At Least Name What it Is; No One Takes Attendance at Commencement; What Not to Say to Your Students at the Juvenile Detention Center.
This month’s first ten days of Living Poets: A Sneak Peek of what is to come
It’s the 4th day of the 19th Annual Slice of Life Challenge at Two Writing Teachers’ website, and I love starting my day with posts shared by writers across the globe who offer a glimpse into their daily lives. This month, I’m featuring a living poet each day and creating a Cento poem from the poems in their collections. You can read more about Cento poetry here. Today, I’m featuring Sandra Cisneros as an author I have long admired for her short stories. She’s also a poet! You can read more about Sandra Cisneros at her website. Here writing themes offer a glimpse of her cultural heritage. Im using Woman Without Shame to inspire a cento.
I’m adding an additional step-by-step photo process to my post today, since a couple of readers reached out wanting to know more about my process for writing Cento poems – and teaching students to write them. I’ll share in photos why even the most reluctant writer in your class might catch a case of poetry fever – without ever lifting a pencil.
Start with a favorite poetry book – or a stack of them.. Today, I used this one.
Next, gather some blank tongue depressors and a variety of Sharpie markers.
At this point, it’s not too late to turn back. This kind of poetry is highly contagious, and once it settles into your soul, you can’t escape.
But now that you have come this far, begin choosing favorite or random lines of poetry and writing the line on one side of the tongue depressor and the title of the poem and the poet’s name on the other.
Once you have a bank of lines, arrange them and rearrange them until you find the sweet spot of the poem the way you like it. Moving the sticks around, you’ll see how just one move changes everything – like a game of chess. But once you have it, you’ll know. At that point, add a title. In the illustration above, I titled mine “Security Deposit.”
Take a photo of the lines, and then – – very important – – flip them in order from top to bottom so that the poet is credited and the line order is preserved by poem title. Take a photo of the back, too, emphasizing to students that this credits the original poet.
If you don’t have tongue depressors, you can use strips of paper or cardstock. Or just write it out, like this:
Security Deposit
It takes growing older
To prove love is ever
wanting in
For Rent.
My Cento is taken from lines in these poems, in this order: Back Then or Even Now; Te A-; Note, La Casa Mag de lena, Lamy, New Mex; Sky Without a Hat.
Once the contagion has set in, you’ll soon have baskets and baskets of poetry lines. You may even decide to put magnets on the backs of them so students can use cookie sheets or magnetic boards as pop-up poetry stations. You might even find that you create collections to organize by theme of units or poets of a particular era. The possibilities are endless. Don’t be surprised if students themselves start checking out poetry books and asking to add lines to the bank of sticks. You may want to keep a healthy stock of supplies – because this will grow and grow and grow until you have a Poetry Wonderland of lines growing like kudzu vines!
Students will beg you to let them write poetry, and you can create a community Padlet for them to upload their poems by scanning a QR code to upload pictures of their poems in sticks.
They will do this because they are now poets who can’t wait to share their creations.
A sneak peek of the poets featured the first ten days of March
Common Threads 