Ana C.H. Silva

WRITING PROMPT

What’s the first thing you remember eating as a child?

Food name = Title

Use as many of the 7 senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, smell, thoughts, and emotions) as possible to describe that moment.

Example:

Spearmint

The first thing is the unexpected taste. A city child, grown mostly indoors, that day I was alone outside, reaching for a green leaf sticking through our neighbor’s chicken wire fence. While on my stomach, I smelled the sweet bright scent – instinctively foraged it. Mashing the green flavor between my milk teeth, I remembered the leaves on the Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum package. So, there was a real plant called Spearmint, and it was growing out of the dirt of our lonely garden. I didn’t have my own pack of gum yet, but I had these thick leaves, offering me their green, sharp flavor, again and again. –Ana C.H. Silva

Ana C. H. Silva lives in East Harlem, NYC and West Shokan, NY. Her poems are in Podium, Rogue Agent, Mom Egg Review, the nth position, Snow Monkey, Chronogram, StepAway Magazine, Anemone Sidecar, Between the Lines, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Shantih Journal. Ana created “Olive Couplets,” an Olive, NY community-based poetry work, and “Lines in the Woods,” an outdoor, interactive poetry installation at the CHHS in Rosendale, NY. Ana writes Gallery and poetry articles for MER. Ana won the inaugural Rachel Wetzsteon Memorial Poetry Prize at the 92nd St. Y Unterberg Poetry Center. Her two poetry chapbooks are entitled One Cupped Hand Above the Other and While Mercury Fish.