Your wine-deep Eyes wound In the dark The gift of abandon on your lips: Open roses to my thirst Exultant petals *** I spilled the wine The stain spreading Over my prince’s white scarf A sign the rains of distance Had come between us City lights on your aging skin No longer dark promise Of your solar throat Throbbing around me In the Metro tunnel I encircled your waist Found your mouth, teeth closed gates We take different exits Your gaze blazes through my raincoat I resist the urge to turn We each retreat To another language To the land…
Author: Mom Egg Review
When she began to report on the world outside (first grade), strange pages came home. I saw everything all over again—the hunybee, the bootiful air, and the erthworm primitive without his “a.” Now she keeps a stethoscope in her car. In the emergency room, the paddock, the pasture, and on the exam table—paws, panting, skitterings, and wings, black hooves, and orb-like eyes— she listens to all sizes of beats and murmurs with that rapt listening of one who is tuned into a dark-chambered muscle. Afterwards, her fingers fly over the keys to say what was inside. She says that every…
Garissa University College – Kenya, April 2nd, 2015 Roused from sleep, she stands naked, voice locked in her tongue. Around her, her sisters, gripped in the chains of their eyes locked on the masked figures the long, dull barrels of their rifles. The one who approaches her – she can smell the sulfur on his hands his body’s sweat and dust – asks, What is the name of the Prophet’s first wife? Before the gunpowder explodes before the world goes black how slowly the bullet moves desiring her heat, seeking the death spot on her forehead. Elizabeth Lara…
Let’s gently unstick yours frozen to a popsicle (no more blood, please!) you insisted on a winter’s morn in front of the Smithsonian. Let’s use the Ouija board to talk to ghosts in the attic eave where we were once small enough to fit. Let’s “accidentally” squirt ketchup on Granddaddy when he snaps us to “be still.” Let’s read the dirty parts of Dad’s library books under the covers before our epic blanket tug of war. Let’s be the judge and jury when mom tells law cases for bedtime stories. Let’s scream Grandaddy’s favorite word “chichibofumbee” on San Francisco trolleys…
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…
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.