How It Works

1. Read the poem 

2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

4. Use the selection of prompts below

5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

The Elevens

Years ago, at a free consultation, I declined
treatment for my own; likewise, the squint

whiskers at each eye's outer edge. Now,
with all my elevens multiplied and tallied,

I don't need a mirror to know I can't eat,
fuck, or long-range plan like I used to,

my hair thin, parentheses around a mouth
that could be my mother's: Unbecoming,

the mouth says, less wounding than before,
arriving at a distance from the nearness of

a burgeoning personal necropolis. Unbecoming.
Do we use the word anymore? Meaning,

then, the one thing. Now, to my ear, two,
and filled with potential greater than all

its synonyms. The unbecoming, the becoming,
the in-betweens: they lean out of windows

curious as children, they take in the air
the sun and all its damage, a view

of something, anything other than themselves.

—Kathy Fagans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Fagan

If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

The next Read-Around is 7/16/26 at
5:00 PM PDT — 8:00 PM EDT

My Thoughts

Years go by. And most every day we are prone to look in the mirror. Things change, sometimes subtly by tiny joys and tragedies etching us over time, and sometimes immediately and dramatically, in injury or disease. Perhaps you too have been jarred by a picture of yourself back when you had a full head of hair and a forehead smooth as porcelain. Perhaps you too have written off the wrinkles as love letters from life, even though something in you doesn't buy it. Maybe the truth is that you earned your stripes through the delights of love and laughter and the sweat and tears and griefs that still take a bite out of you. Go ahead and humor yourself: Those aren’t crows feet branching beside the eyes from endless squinting,, they are maps to hidden treasures. The creases on the forehead aren’t worry lines, they mark a lifetime of wide eyed wonder. The elevens between the brows come not from frowns, but from consistently exercising the power to focus one-to-one. Who can really say what habits of heart and mind and neuromuscular tension form our world-worn faces. We may see craters on the moon and canals on mars and extrapolate a story, but we do not know the actual impacting objects or flowing forces we assume made the mark. Kathy Fagan’s poem, The Elevens, explores the confrontation with ourselves when we see our aging face as a sign of our “unbecoming,” both in the unflattering loss of youth and beauty, but also in the sense of undoing, of freeing ourselves from what we once were and letting go the need to become what others need us to be. Or maybe even more important, urging us to drop our face altogether and see the world, not as we are, but as it is.

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write a poem about your face and how it has aged.

2. Fagan starts her poem about how she passed on skin treatment when younger. What have you done to preserve your youthful looks?

3. Journal or write a poem about what you once could do that you know now you cannot do as easily or as well as you could when you were younger.

4. In what way has the years etched your face? Journal our write a poem about particular wrinkles, age spots, sun damages, etc. and what they mean to you or express about your life. In what way does your face express how you “face” the world?

5. Fagan contrasts the words becoming and unbecoming and adds the in-betweens as if it might be an ongoing process in our lives. What stage are you in: Becoming? Unbecoming? or In-Between?

6. Fagan plays with the two meanings of unbecoming: 1. as unattractive or unsightly; and 2. as a process of change by which you unbecome what you were before. Use this idea as your prompt.

7. As usual, write about whatever else inspires you form the poem or from life.