July 2012
66 posts
6 tags
Death and all (or ethanol, if you like)
Without you, I am a husk of self and covering myself in silk won’t help nor tasseling up to a bright, blue sky. Kettle corn medley ballad slow and unending eat your fill of my misery and you’ll sleep sound tonight.
9 tags
Book of Judith
This is no book of happy endings. All unresolved cliffhangers and bitter diatribes. Jonathan Swift has nothing on me and as one generation passes, one generation rises. Always unsteady, they run headlong to death and everything after. Here I stand, daughter of the king of the world, speechless, head in my hands. His head in my hands. There are only so many mountain songs, only so many honeyed...
5 tags
6 tags
Centrifugal Force
She rattled on, my dear son soothsayer, matchmaker, multiple personality disorder, like having a give-and-take conversation with a generous young man wearing boat shoes (his compliments, a compliment to his mother) while the strumpet at your ear chokes on small talk and Ave Maria.
“Anyone who loves in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their...”
– Paulo Coelho (via middlenameconfused)
7 tags
The Lamentation
Oh, make us whole soothe our sentimental souls I don’t care how soon or for whom the bell tolls— take me home.
6 tags
Asunder
Rest assured in your resting green leaves be your blessing met a man in the forest clad black and poor dressing gather sins in a basket lined with milkweed and thistles purple aster has bloomed thin in overgrown hedges too high to climb over, too low in your spirits, drank wine without dinner and spit at the master now running from lawmen the highway is calling his gnarled hands twisted with...
6 tags
sweet summer, don't be clever
Thunder struck and again, things were different. We peeled oranges in a citrus spray of sunshine and talked about what mattered most. Here was a day for the ages, and feathers might have brushed the iron weights from my soul. Sudden, vestal silence followed, the porch swing calm and hardly creaking under pressure from us both.
7 tags
Mika Lorien - Scene 1
In the black tower, Mika Lorien closed her eyes.
Silence. Like a calm before a storm, before the sky turns grey as cinders, before the clouds break and pour their wrath upon a dusty and parched earth. Her unlined hands and delicate fingers too, customarily moving, over a bit of cloth, over a piece of fruit, over lines on a page, stilled. But then she heard it, deep in her head, growing louder...
5 tags
Restless Girl Syndrome
Sometimes I sit on the stairs braids falling loose at the sides of my face like Pippi Longstocking or Pocahontas on a good day, thinking maybe it’s time for a change.
7 tags
Flash - Stereotyping →
One of my flash fiction pieces has been included in the April 2012 edition of Flash: The International Short Short Story Magazine, published by the University of Chester. See above link for more information.
5 tags
Sleep This Away
In poorly designed seasons I stand in smoldering fields, petulantly, as tongues of fire fall from the sky and lick an overly parched and hideous landscape.
I sew daisy petals on dogwood branches, fold back the black edges of a fast approaching horizon, to expose clean white-speckled pigeons perched in high blue rafters.
8 tags
Tempestuous
Brave new world with nothing in it, lotus flowers wilt and die screw your savage lust, Miranda do it while the moon is high and no one sees but fool and father, conjures up his thunderstorm with tree sprite lady, virgin fairest sings and winks but will not lie.
6 tags
Green Apples
Oh how rotten this fruit, wet on the vine molded from rain that fell in the night crush out its blood and drink it as wine, drunk on the taste of love unrefined. He sends me no roses, he sings me no verse a shudder in summer to offer no rest runs through the crowd like Pygmalion’s curse but grinning, I’d drink it again.
5 tags
“WHEN the game began between them for a jest,
He played king and she played...”
– Algernon Charles Swinburne “Stage Love”
7 tags
Glorious Revelations
The Lord said to my lord a penny for your thoughts, he said and wandered up the riverbed dry and droughted, fish all dead an old man bent and white of head dug in the mire, picked out a stone a white and weathered piece of bone dropped in his pocket, took it home said this is what we mend.
6 tags
Existential Bullshit
Await a wake in grace steal all sadness from your face if only for another’s sake— sky might fall and earth might quake but tears won’t help at all.
5 tags
Clean Sheets
…bastards. Many hands make light work and this time I’ll peel the rind— citrus spray in a couple cup-fulls of sunshine dew drops off my brow like blood from a festered wound cried out when the bag of flour exploded. Rage dissolved like oil in water when we took out the kitchen knives and went hunting.
5 tags
Melancholia
Broken men and women make poor companions and there’s no fixing this. We are done, you and I. All eternity seems to shudder at the thought, thinking I jump ship too soon. The infested waters beckon beneath. I want to be devoured, I want— these damn memories to wilt, pulled out by the roots and left drying in the sun. Maybe then, this page, hitherto stained in my life’s blood...
10 tags
May It Be - Preview
“So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. And there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the Lord heeded the voice of a man.” –Joshua 10:13-14
The plea of a woman, however…
R.M.S. Titanic
April 12, 1912
Chapter One
I had such a headache. And the unmitigated midday sunlight streaming viciously...
6 tags
Crayon Box
Open and say I was awestruck by his insensitivity to light, drew a lipstick red rainbow that sexed up the sky. Cerulean blues had me sad for a while white salt and pink blush left stains on my dress— ink splattered and wax melted in a hot summer mess.
5 tags
Thirst
This ground, this parched and dusty grass burnt yellow and thin bowed down by humid air that takes breath like an old man through lips dry and cracking sick in his bed hand to his head and covered in cotton sheets, clammy.
6 tags
Songbirds
Somebody tell me just what? says the sky and the robins are red-breasted on the 4th of July talking smack like a hen house osprey plain but sharp-eyed cries a swallow to a sparrow fight this headwind or we die.
7 tags
May It Be →
Price change by publisher. Meaning the book is on sale for $1.99! Check it out.
6 tags
Entropy on the Road Side
Bursting forth from mortar, white crumbling soda bread and pound cake, long, green-thumbed fingers, ivy hangs on like cholera and a smoker’s cough.
7 tags
7 tags
La Joyous Garde
Nobody makes me cry and give it up—pennies, baby compared to what I’ll give to you, leave with you when it’s done and it will be done I’m no one man woman, son I got a fire burning through a hole— a whole stack of newspapers went up in flames in about two minutes, I blame a middle class childhood and too much time to think, to drink while I’m trying to...
5 tags
Girls Night (Try Not to Break Anything)
Pretty little maids all in a row throw a winter garden party and the brides-to-be wear white displaying fist-sized rocks beneath blinding spotlights which is a poor choice given the scenery and the ladies-in-waiting try not to cry, when pressed they say (this is nearly universal) that they’d rather die if they must return to cold little pallets and another hand of solitaire but...
6 tags
Genesis 1: Take 2
He moved his spirit o’er the face of the water meaning he brought the whiskey with him.
5 tags
Damp and Heavy
Many hands on deck
scrubbing the snow
white flanks of a long
buried battalion in
the prickly ash, knelt with
one knee bent on moss
dew-soaked straight through.
5 tags
Accuracy in Historical Fiction
is such a bitch.
Change in my Pocket
misstessmer:
Give it up give it all up and settle in for a long, wet summer a jack-in-the-box finish, an apple turnover.
