The following poem comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #83 – a “wordle” that looks like this.

SEANCE

I’d like to burn intentions into a powder stump,
apply a pinky’s worth atop my tongue

for later when loitering souls stop in
to talk about the aftertaste of wasted meat and bones.

It’s too late to caution Thomas not to take
that river plunge, to yell, “Hold tight to the rope,”
instead of “Jump.”

“Grab the fallen log,” instead of, “Go with the flow.”

“Fight as if your life will end,” rather than

“Surrender, let go.

Come tell me what it’s like when you’re there.”

The following poem comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #82 – an ode to homunculus, or “little man”. I blame myself for this prompt. As it stands, the poem is definitely a work in progress – and to think the original draft had to do with a man losing his toe in a lawn mowing incident.

LITTLE MAN OF HEART

What if this song never ends? If we stay long past
the DJ breaking his tables, the rest of the dancers
gone home, the lights turned out, the sky’s lights
done the same? Even the moon – full tonight –
clouded away so everything we know goes black?

I have my eyes closed in this moment. I don’t know
if these what ifs are true. The music still goes.
There are clod steps on the parquet floor.
A breeze through a window says there’s light left,
as if daytime breezes differ from those of night.

Between us, where no space slips through skin to skin,
there are at least three heartbeats – yours, mine,
and some other. I can’t say what it is. A thing borne
from our centers, borne of music and light that will
walk us home when we wake.

-

WORKS OF ART is an exercise in serial flash fiction, as part of Declaration Editing’s Super-Short Summer Serial Challenge (S4C). Part three, Doors of Perception, is below.

“Doors of Perception”

Fig lit his cigarette off of Syl’s. She rested her hand on his for a second and looked away.

“You must hate working alone,” she said. She nodded toward Shorty’s. Fig looked behind him. They were standing in front of the restaurant’s glass doors. He shifted his focus from inside the restaurant to their reflections and the reflections of everyone else in line to get into The Din. What if reflections weren’t just reflections? What if they were parallel lives that could move and breathe and decide on a new course without the body in this life acting? He almost said this out loud. He could have said it and it wouldn’t have mattered, probably would have been par for whatever course Syl had mapped out for him in her head. It was part of his specific archetype. Fig knew of at least three late-night janitor archetypes: the bloated loser – Ernie, who worked Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The blue-collar family guy – Ray, who worked Mondays and Thursdays. And the burnout English major with too many theories. Fig.

Fig didn’t know where the archetypes came from, only that they existed. Everyone fit into one or another. He stared at his archetype in the window. It nodded at another archetype – the pent-up late 30s woman. He thought about how her hand had lingered on his a minute ago. Had it really done so? Or was it just something her archetype would do? Either way, he figured she could use five-minutes of grudge sex in one of restaurant’s booths, which was something his archetype would think but never act on.

“It gets lonely, doesn’t it?” she asked. He half-waited for their reflections to disappear together, literally walk into another panel, reflect something else out into another world until that reflection went off and did something new. That way we are all in concert creating new realities.

He turned back to face Syl. She held a sad sort of tiredness under her eyes. She blew a stream of smoke into the moist air a second after her reflection did the same.

“It’s not bad,” Fig said. His reflection said something more clever than that. Fig couldn’t figure what it was. He just knew.

Syl checked her phone, then looked for Blo. He’d worked his way ahead in the line, was near the door talking with four or five younger women.

“Stop in later,” Fig said. He looked down as soon as he said it, swept a wet scrap of paper into his pan.

“Huh?”

“Knock on the window on your way out.”

“For what?”

“Night cap?”

She looked over his shoulder into the glass.

“We’ll see.”

–

WORKS OF ART is an exercise in serial flash fiction, as part of Declaration Editing’s Super-Short Summer Serial Challenge (S4C). Part two, Water, Lily’s Morning, is below.

“Water, Lily’s Morning”

The campus clock gonged midnight. Lily liked to think of getting off work as the start of a new day rather than the end of an old one, and so took a deep breath of what she called first morning.

She walked the side street that ran north of Pen. A number of vendors were still open, despite the drizzle, and people waited around for food. Two bodies staggered toward her – Syl, the evening hostess at Shorty’s, and Blo, a line cook. They were both married and didn’t do a good job of hiding their affair.

Blo said something in Spanish. Lily didn’t understand. He repeated in English.

“The days run into one another until they unravel.”

“Neruda?”

“I try.”

“You were close this time.”

Syl lit a cigarette under her coat, then smiled.

“Come to The Din with us,” she said. That was the bar beneath Shorty’s. The same people owned both places. “We’ll fix you up with a boy,” she continued.

“I have a reading,” Lily said. Syl sneered. At some point she’d wanted to be a writer. Now she was saddled with a mortgage and middle age.

“And then what?”

“Then first morning will become early morning,” Lily answered.

Syl rolled her eyes. She and Blo continued on. Lily walked to her place, a three-story house she shared with seven other people. A half-block away, she heard the familiar sounds of a party – loud, bass heavy music, high-pitched laughter, someone cursing. Her throat seized. She asked her roommates not to have a party, yet the place was lit from top to bottom. About 20 people huddled on the porch in the proximity of a keg.

She stood in the drizzle for a while – maybe it was a rain now. When did drizzle turn into rain? Lily figured she’d stand in it until she had an answer. The morning she wanted was gone. The first person to see her pondering the weather was one of her roommates, a tall blond named Tess. She ran down the porch steps with a cup of beer.

“What the hell is this?” Lily asked. She took the cup and gulped at it.

Tess belched. “It’s a poetry party.”

“Bullshit.”

“OK, it’s a party. But it’s a reading too. People are waiting for you.”

“Where?”

“Up stairs. Come on. You’re covered in water.”

“I’m wet.”

“I can see that.”

“I don’t want people here.”

“Who would you read to if no one was here?”

“Just poets.”

“Maybe everyone’s a poet.”

Lily groaned.

“I have a surprise,” Tess said. She asked Lily to open her hand and close her eyes. When Lily looked down, there was a pill sitting between her heart and lifeline.

“Nice and clean,” Tess said.

“That’s what you always say.”

Lil put it in her mouth and swallowed.

–

WORKS OF ART is an exercise in serial flash fiction, as part of Declaration Editing’s Super-Short Summer Serial Challenge (S4C). Part one, First Fig, is below.

“First, Fig”

Fig went to work the way he always went to work – freshly stoned, slightly drunk and in greater need for sleep than he cared to admit or talk about. It wasn’t a sustainable lifestyle, nor did he intend for it to be. A poem about burning the candle at both ends bounced around his head. A professor had recited it in a literature class back when Fig was still a student. He never knew the title. Just a short thing about a candle and a lovely light. A woman wrote it. He didn’t remember her name. The world was full of poets – he didn’t bother trying to remember them all, especially the female ones.

He wished Pen Boulevard could be empty for once. It never was. There were too many bars in the six blocks between his apartment and Shorty’s, the restaurant he cleaned. There were always people waiting to get inside one or the other. Or they sat outside under umbrellas with drinks in their hands, even on a night like this with a little rain coming down. It was Art Week, which meant the town was again filled with students and strangers who came looking to get drunk and forget themselves for a few days. He wanted to be out there too, wasting the little money he had chasing a shot with a beer and making eyes at a girl. Any girl. As it was, he’d partied up until 10 o’clock at Smith’s, left just as the party was getting good, walked back to his apartment to change, rolled two joints and headed to his late night cleaning shift.

Lily was the first person he saw when he walked into Shorty’s back entrance. Lily with the crystal blue eyes and mean furrow between them. Stark white skin Lily who used to sing in coffee shops before she decided poetry was a more serious art. Now she hosts various reading series that Fig never goes to.

“You look like hell,” she said.

“Thanks. Are you heading to Smith’s?”

“Should I?”

“Depends.”

“We’re having a reading circle at my place. You should come.” She smirked. She knew he was working but said it anyway. It was all she could do to make Fig feel somehow lower than she was. They’d been friends, used to workshop each other’s poems until they started sleeping together. Then things went to hell.

Lily bent over and scribbled something on a slip of paper.

“This is for you,” she said.

He looked at it.

“Is it a haiku?”

“You’re an idiot.”

“What is it then? Who’s St. Vincent?”

“Millay.”

“OK.” He still didn’t know.

“Edna.”

“A woman saint?”

“You’re a jackass.”

She couldn’t tell if he was kidding. Neither could Fig.

–

A stop-off on the ride home today with a view of Mt. Hood to the left, Portland to the right, the Willamette River in between. I wrote in in a small notebook under the initial title, “View of Hood”.

SOURCE

I drink the river,
secret source of water.

Drink the bridge,
secret source of the city.

Drink the heron,
secret source of ink.

Until I drink the mountain,
secret source of sky.

–