Archive
Three short pieces
Mingling
Mingling. The savvy of words, the sail, the shine. Soulsolid, brainlit, fingerplucked, earbent. And that’s before clothes! Talk to me.
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Warmth of the Body
Something to notice – the warmth of your body imparted to objects you were touching, but no longer touch: your bedclothes, your underwear, your necklace of stones.
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The Furry Inquisitive Snout
I understand that writing is a furry inquisitive snout, poking itself into small and cluttered places, searching for choice bits of trash, unusual secrets, maybe a fragment of sky blue egg fallen from the nest. A furry inquisitive snout, a naked prehensile tail.
by Catherine Ednie of louder
On Grief
Think here of orange peel and cloves, boiled
against winter in November kitchens,
or the flutter square of a tea bag, or ellipsis
of deer scat, punctuation of a spooked animal.
Try to think–but a thought, cinder-
block certain, eludes in grief. Ideas
dissipate like twilight. Life is like a gut
punch, thought the breath
you cannot draw. Life like the vertigo
in the afterblur of a camera flash,
magnesium dreams ghost the cornea,
the pupil, crackle the optic nerve,
things long gone now insistent
half-images, always there
when you close your eyes
to wish them back.
Asleep
I am dreaming climbing slowly up the stairs in the house where I grew up. I stand on the landing. All its doors are closed. I open my bedroom door. The glow of the gasfire, and my hearthrug like a shaggy dog’s coat. On hands and knees I go and bury my face in its tickly softness. In the bed a human form – the top of a child’s head, her sleep-swept hair just visible on the pillow. I know that it is me. And that I mustn’t wake her. I creep, stealthy as a parent on Christmas night, to the door.
by Polly Blackley
Ecdysis
On fire
under the rocks,
writhing out of a
sheath of skin
that smothers;
a vacated cocoon,
crumpled, translucent.
A papery mass, stretched
with the battle to contain
and etched in jagged lines
and tears and rips
with the sinewy
leaving.
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Technorati Profile/ technorati tags: the release of an exoskeleton, shedding, pouring yourself into a tiny garment in a moment of desperate contraction that constricts as you expand, nature, poetry, traceries of our past, dance of sloughing, scratchings on stone, creativity, snakes, the shell that suffocates, an iron lung grown too tight, molting, writing.
by Brenda Clews of Rubies in Crystal
Petey’s
The fog is lifting over the salt marsh behind Petey’s. The waitress sets down my carton of fish chowder along with a plastic spoon and two bags of oyster crackers. Blonde hair piled on her head and wearing a bright pink hoodie, she smiles and the lines around her eyes say lived-in and ‘welcome.’
She turns to the couple at the next table and they chat about someone they all know. Locals. The summer crowds are long gone. I empty the tiny paper square of pepper onto my chowder, wondering if my parents came here often.
by Leslee of Third House Journal
Afterwards
Lifting my face from
out of my hands
I see that the world
as it was is still there.
But I see too
that my hands
have opened like
two leaves and that
my old sunflower face
is turned towards light.
by Dick Jones of Patteran Pages
Acolyte
They kept an owl on a tether at the temple of Athena at Corinth. I used to go visit him every day after rounding up a dead rat or two. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: people who would never think of giving alms to a beggar would gladly hand over whatever their cats had caught, and the priestess at the temple always gave me something for the rats. “Your breakfast, sire!” I’d murmur with a bow. The owl would open a single eye, dim as a lantern in the blazing afternoon.
by Diogenes
qarrtsiluni 