Bienvenidos! Welcome to el Lavadero de la inspiración. This is our first lesson on our poetry journey across time and place. We will begin with pláticas, conversations, and stanzas, little suitcases where we can fold and keep our words. Since this lesson is our starting point, we must begin where we feel most at home—our lavadero—with our day-to-day language and our real-life experiences. Begin by writing down five things that your remember from the conversations—things that make you remember a time gone by, maybe your family, another town, another country, or maybe just the day before yesterday. Now, take each word and place it alone on a line. These five lines with one word on each line make up the suitcase, the stanza!

When I wrote Calling the Doves, I started by remembering my childhood. I used palabras del lavadero: words that told the stories that my mother and father told me, the way I remembered them speaking. Words almost anyone could read and understand. This is what I mean by using pláticas, conversations, day-to-day language.

On page 8 of Calling the Doves, you can see that I am telling the story of how my mother loved to cook outside under the morning sunlight. You'll see that the words are simple; I chose words like papas con huevos. And you'll also find that there are three stanzas in the page—three little suitcases packed with a group of words per line. Let's look at the second stanza. It is made out of four lines:

1. A frying pan. A griddle to cook the tortillas
2. And a jar of forks and knives -
3. These were the necessary ingredients.
4. And of course, wood for the fire.

The third stanza has only two lines. In each line, I make comparisons between two things:

1. The sky was my blue spoon,
2. The wavy clay of the land was my plate.

For this first exercise, all you have to do is create a stanza, a little suitcase with five lines. Each line has one or two words that you gathered from your plática at the washboard. For example, if I was at the Lavadero, I would choose these words and put them all in a suitcase, a stanza with five lines!

Blusas
Pantalones
Manos fuertes
Madre
Tierra café

Once you have your stanza suitcase, expand and stretch each line in your stanza with comparisons using like/como and of/de. So, if one of your lines was river, you would say "River like a trenza of dreams /Rio como una trenza de suenos.'" These comparisons help your poems grow.

Ready? Oh, I forgot to tell you: As you step into the camion don't forget to pick up your Mochila de Poder Poetico.