For the delight of guests at the Literary Voices fundraising dinner this past May, the UW Libraries organizers asked Ms. Ahmed to bring her manual typewriter, small pieces of colored paper, and her creative wits. She sat at a table with a sign: heart-crafted poems. I walked up to her, and she asked me to give her a prompt so she could hand-craft a poem for me.
Since royal purple is the color of both the University of Washington and Northwestern University, that was my prompt:
purple this liquid amethyst less ungainly than eggplant fought with more candor than lavender can muster the hue of a sunset occurring only once in a blue moon the petals of the bleeding heart exposed to the open air afrose fatima ahmed seattle, wa 5/3/17 www.afrosefatimaahmed.com
Ben Slivka 