I love Bambi when a hunter shoots Bambi’s mother I hide under the seat until the movie ends My mother holds me whispers she’ll never leave I don’t know that love is my mother I only know her perfume her red lips her cigarettes are my home I am in love with Ricky Nelson’s white teeth Dion’s Bronx accent Chubby Checker’s twist Ponderosa’s Little Joe my mother calls me Boy Crazy When the Beatles come they conquer my American heart I shut my mother out finger-love the Fab Four in my princess bed A boy from the city moves into…
Author: Mom Egg Review
I Don’t Care that I’m silhouetted by fire or gold is the color of my back- drop. When a man drops in on me like a drink at the bar—only exotic with pomegranate juice or cassava or the acrid tears of his estranged wife— I want to wipe myself clear to a new portico where lights are not dripping salt sculptures of some forgotten metropolis It takes no time to know me: only nights dense as ground walnuts rubbed together with sugar and cloves I thought I would have written but the passion’s not there, only the pleasure like we’re…
Face Card: Queen of Shadows Retrat de la meve germana, 1923/1926 Dalí I think you tried a classic portrait first pale face, calm eyes, curved brows & hair blushed lips and cheeks then said fuck this and flipped the canvas up- side down to paint your sister’s ghost staring wild eyed past a cobwebbed cloak, her former visage swinging crown-down like a belted trophy thickened fingers stroke the comely displaced chin—unopposed the Queen of Shadows plays her trump Mary Craig’s recent publications include an essay in Quarterly West. She received the 2014 Writers at Work Fellowship in Literary Nonfiction. An…
Matthew Sharpe I recently spent about two years writing a lot of very short stories. I started by writing them accidentally and enjoyed it so much that I switched to writing them on purpose. I developed a few guidelines for myself: try to complete a draft in one sitting; don’t worry about not having a single idea in your head when you sit down to write, and also don’t worry about not knowing what will happen in the sentence after the one you’re writing, or even at the end of the sentence you’re writing; aim for the bottom…
Review by Barbara Harroun – Susan Rukeyser’s debut novel Not On Fire Only Dying turns its perceptive gaze on those we so often want to ignore, or bestow our fragmented attention upon only when they make their way into the evening news report. The novel begins with just such a story. Lola, a woman with a history of mental health and addiction issues, claims her newborn baby was kidnapped while she drank alone at a dive bar. The only evidence of an infant is the empty baby stroller on the sidewalk. No one has seen the baby, whom Lola claims…
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This sentence, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway (although the link to him is said to be unsubstantiated) has been called ”a six word novel” or an extreme example of flash fiction. Your choice of prompts today: 1.Devise your own one-sentence story; or 2. Take “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” as the first sentence of your flash fiction of any length.
Freeing your Strangers We have trapped strangers in the backgrounds of our photographs. Perhaps we are the elderly couple taking a selfie in a derelict bandstand who catch by accident a large and red-faced woman jogging through the park behind. Or maybe we are the new father taking photos of his wife and baby son by the canal who inadvertently frames in the image’s upper right-hand corner a man who holds a naked doll by its plastic hand. Search through your photographs and write the story of a trapped stranger. Set that stranger free. Bunny Goodjohn’s latest novel, THE BEGINNING THINGS,…
“A prompt I was given once that spawned one of the most intense stories I’ve ever written is one where you limit a story to exactly 200 words, but you’re only allowed to use 50 different words within those 200. It’s challenging, but it can make for some amazingly creative uses of language. You’re allowed to change verb tenses within those 50 words, and pluralizing a word counts still as one word, but other than that, it’s 50 words and that’s it. So it’s a great exercise in how to effectively use repetition.” Ilana Masad Editor, The Other Stories ilanamasad.com…
Jennifer Jean Choose a card from the Tarot deck and write a story inspired by the card–feel free to look up the meaning of the card. Do not mention the title of the card, or Tarot, in your story. Jennifer Jean is a poet and the Poetry Editor of MER.www.fishwifetales.com
“Mash Stories www.mashstories.com, has a good system, where they take three words, and then require the participants of each contest to use those three words, exactly as they are, in a story that is 500 words or fewer (and in your case that could be 250 words or fewer). You can ask for random words and then pull them out of a hat or something similar before posting them, or use a random word generator (here’s one: http://www.textfixer.com/tools/random-words.php).” Ilana Masad ilanamasad.com | slightlyignorant.com |slightlyignorant.tumblr.com | @ilanaslightly So, based on Ilana’s suggestions here are… Word suggestions from #febflash— CATAPULT, FUNGIBLE, STRIKE Ilana Masad is…