Prose Poetry / Flash Fiction

Robot #18 (meal plan)

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

The robot attempts to prepare a romantic dinner. He folds napkins like a Russian chess player: confident, stony-faced, and precise. But the courses are somewhat of an internet cliché. The salad is first. Then a bisque. Then a roast chicken. Then German chocolate cake (the German threw him off for a bit, but he then realized it was just part of the name). It is worthy of any juvenile first attempt at romantic meal planning. But where is the personality, robot? Where is the danger?

De Profundis

James Reidel

A fresh mole tunnel has disturbed the grass. So the earth opens its veins to the sky and where the freemasons would think to pour forth, with their legions, their little martial poses and airs as red as the redcoats I would arrange around my bed swords high and muskets trained only to be smote with my pillow still wet with my face and tears. Time out!

I have a garden hoe now. I have a trap that I could see duct-taped to a broomstick and so brandish the double trident of some final and human dare. But the countermining along the north wall and the children’s bedrooms, which we like to think of as empty “guest rooms,” where all the radiators are closed to save on the heat, has surfaced into the pine bark bed and felled my forest of Echinacea, their stalks leaning this way and that, the purple pompoms and golden eyes that would delight my day like so many false buttons running up and down a birthday clown’s smock.

So I just walk around the house in a mope and tug at the curtains, the chinks in their material, the way I might have wanted that old clown to twist for me yet another deer, another dachshund, or my favorite, the little balloon sword. I named it Cling-clang and burst in front of the other children and parents, squeezing the blade up from the bottom, and on purpose.

So I am miserable in your eyes that travel from this page to the next, feather mites on the blackbird’s wing, who watch like gods flying, looking for some new and blacker forest.

The Child River (with Monkey Burn)

James Reidel

A walking stick, which taps the green footbridge, testing the first few boards, following a few bars of the brown notation all through the woods—the worried lunch bag paper of dead beech leaves, which hang on through the winter, and they provide the only rustle, the only greenery, so to speak, or where the color peeled off the picture, such that whatever is seen here is not painted with good linseed oil that lasts, or on cloth with a tight weave, more at kraft paper and half-dry finger paints, which are so thick and strong at first, that would resist and sometimes resist more than a little. There was some evidence for this, in the way her slim wrist gave across from me at the art table, as though from nowhere, as though her hand had been taken by a ghost that bled in those few colors. And suddenly I realize I have been twisting the wood rail of the bridge in two different directions, while thinking the water would be the blue, the banks the green, the stick trees the brown, and the gray dots for the stones or stations you must climb upstream, to where a swale meets it, a meadow of mostly wild strawberry. The earth still sparkles wet here, wherever prints fill with what will be a river eventually, the undertow, which nurses here, sucking on the deer’s hooves, the devil’s cattle.

Sunflowers

Carol Dorf

On the way to the grave, you wish for a mother. The Egyptians had Hathor with her deep-set eyes and high cheekbones. My mother keeps having problems reaching her mother on the phone, no matter how frequently we go over the dates. She wants someone to drive her there for a visit. Her father visited the cemetery on the day he died to say Kaddish for his parents. She doesn’t ask for that. When I told my teenager I feared dementia, she asked, “Do you want me to euthanize you?” Thank God rain is predicted, a promise to end the year’s drought. I told her, “No.”

Sunflowers in the vase, one with a red center.

CPR

Carol Dorf

The way one can bring another back to life—counting breaths and chest compressions—this fails more than it succeeds, leaving witnesses in a room full of hieroglyphs to decipher. At certain times we become so attuned to connotations, it is hard to understand the person across the table. A life of gestures distilled into a few sentences.

If the walls of the room filled with outlines of birds, no one would remark on their colors or even the turn of a wing.

Nowheresville

Howie Good

1
An elderly man croons “It’s Raining Today,” a prophecy from a religion that never was. Nine out of 10 American children turn into geometric shapes. It became common after appliances misbehaved with deadly results. In a drab city, the sale and purchase of emotions are strictly regulated, but not everyone follows the rules. A gangster has himself gilded in gold. Flowers rise up against their oppressors. I make a fairly successful attempt to recreate a LSD trip, beginning with a blow to the face.

2
This is what I see when I get home, monstrous miserable flesh, a mumbling blue cow, the first sentence of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” I try to work on myself but am constantly interrupted by cigar-smoking angels who have had too much coffee. They argue over the necessity of burning the museums, shoot pink waves of light from their fingertips. It’s impossible to silence them. Self-doubt pokes through my normal façade. The small hours are the worst. I take the fact that the cow has run off to the woods surprisingly hard.

Indictments

Kierstin Bridger

You hang the candy cane on the lamp. Lick what melts. Now you’ve ruined the bulb, poisoned your room with burnt sugar smoke. You’ve blamed your brother for dumping all the easy-bake cake mix in cocoa heaps on the floor, for fingers squeezed between hinges on your wooden door, and for stolen cherry bombs under the bed. Three out of four fit a pattern. Years later you think of your dollhouse plates that went missing, don’t remember him smashing the Shaker dining table, or if the rugs were painted on the floor. You only recall having the house, the smell of splintered balsam and glue, that it was tornadoed somehow, blown-away.

Lily’s Room

nyoka

Lily’s head led her into a white room where the carpet lurched into a lotion so hot her nipples melted, cooled, then slid right off. Hours before, at the tanning salon, she sat in a gold-knobbed chair and coolly questioned other girls about the parts of her skin she will never control: tiny inexplicable bead-drops of brown dripping down onto her shoulders from outer space, little light bulb-gods hexing up a deep, itching pink. In the end, she tells them it all peels away. The white room, pregnant with steam and sweat, is curated by Lily’s very own mind but coroners of an older, more arcane stoma of science gave it life. No matter is safe, no atom guarantees it will stay. Once her nipples fell, she cupped two warm black eggs gently in her hands because what breaks ceases to mystify her. As fast as Lily’s mind can swim within itself, dimension yields and the walls are throbbing chests of cornered felines, maybe the mealy innards of a mantis-hued gourd. Once, it was her own body poured, uninspected, and then split four ways.

There was a time when the white room could not exist. There was a time when Lily had a green lion for a father but her mother would not marry him. From the last fragment of their alchemy, Lily ignited, cauterizing each channel of his heart until he became flesh and bone. Her mother’s molecules were curdling long before. Inside them, wet, dark Lily grew. Though it is said to be impossible, she remembers the first white room she ever entered. She cannot remember exactly where she was three afternoons ago but some sort of modern science occurred. If she held the thought long enough she might recall, in its place, the first time she set conditions to create life. Following that, she might revisit how it felt when the bloom finally unsealed itself. She caught sight of it on her way out, in the sun, one floret too bright to call coincidence. In her white room, it yellows gracefully.

Taxidermy

Landon Godfrey

Glass-domed on a mantle, a rose-headed, pert-beaked finger puppet finch plans the epitaph for its invisible tombstone: The forest ghettoes trees.

Up On a High Shelf, the Living and the Dead

Len Kuntz

All her wigs are lined up by hue, each nestled atop a torso-less mannequin, just heads, and of course a sight like that can frighten anybody, especially a kid as young as me, yet I find a footstool from her closet to get a closer look where they sit like glass-eyed zombies, freaky, ghostly, these facsimiles of women who are not my mother. I recognize nothing but the tinny odor of her hairspray, remembering how that was always the last application after her shower and wardrobing, accessorizing, checking makeup in the mirror. I am strong but I admit to missing her, to needing the warm wind of my mother’s breath down my neck as she napped. That time seems not so long ago, like night which was up and then gone, a curtain drawn then opened. So now I do the damndest thing. I close my eyes and rifle my fingers across the plastic cheeks of each mannequin. I picture skin and a face, pretty. I touch there but not the hair, the wigs which are styled perfectly.

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