Metaphortography Writing Prompt: TENDERNESS

Visual inspiration + mental exercise to start your writing week

Photograph by Aimee Liu

Metaphortography Prompts are visual and verbal writing prompts for inspiration and reflection. This is the Monday section of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore. Our Wednesday section is Writer In The World, a curated collection of essays on the writing life by acclaimed MFA faculty and alumni. Well Published videos and other MFA Core essays on the craft and business of creative writing will drop each Saturday. Receive some or all of these newsletters by subscribing now:

TENDERNESS

Touch, all skin and sensation, sublime attention, like light spilling, tracing, igniting our most deeply hidden secrets. With you, there was always that dueling pull of care and caution, so easily mistaken for reluctance, those sweet yet maddening hesitations, palms poised as if to strike but stilled to the verge of anguish before gliding to their destinations, finding purchase in the nape of a neck or the fold of a knee, the softer valleys and runged ladders of our mutual landscape. So familiar, those gentle motions, like the silk of water streaming between thirsty lips—eloquent, necessary, fleeting. What do they mean? Can they be trusted? Do I detect danger in this beautiful seduction? Such fierce attraction to the doomed enterprise of becoming one.

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TENDERNESS: a tender quality or condition

a: gentleness and affection

b: the quality of being succulent and easily chewed

c: sensitivity to touch or palpation

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Here is your writing prompt:

Try a Little Tenderness