submission for next year's prompts:

Use the NY Times Connections as a writing prompt! Take all 16 or one line of the words generated in there (before it's been solved) and use them in a poem or short story.

they have taken her.

hope.

she is trapped in the great big house made of new money & keys

that open nothing anymore. it is named america.

you can hear her,

i'll use your name. sweet nothings spill

from well-meaning mouths & shatter on concrete radiating summer sun

right back at you, perfect -- dainty -- shiny with dewdrops. they told me