Random
A dream that leads to something real that I made up
I had a dream last night that today was National Prose Poetry Day. I just looked it up. Today is not National Prose Poetry Day. In fact, surprise surprise, there is no such thing as National Prose Poetry Day. That does not deter me. I, nobody Lily Hoang, declare today National Prose Poetry Day. In celebration, here is a prose poem by Mary Miller, published in Rose Metal Press’s awesome collection of flash fiction chapbooks, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves.
Diagnosis
Her heart swells like someone turned a faucet on. It is enormous. A fast-moving cloud of blackbirds dissipates into the trees. Or are they bats? They’re at the zoo. It is the same as the bowling alley or the skating rink only there are animals. They sky looks like snow. The thirty-year-old woman doesn’t know what the twenty-two-year-old girl was like. She only knows this: the girl spent a lot of time in the mirror but she never saw herself. The boy asks if she wants a Coke, she says she doesn’t, he gets one and she drinks most of it. They watch a couple of rhinos on a mound of dirt, just standing there. It looks boring, she says. It must be boring to be a rhinoceros. He agrees. She says the same thing about the spider monkeys and the elephants and the giraffes and he agrees, but at the manatees he says: you’re boring. They marry, live like old people.
So, HTML Giant, happy National Prose Poetry Day! I hope you’ll celebrate with me, somehow. We are, after all, always looking for a party, right?
I LOVE YOU
you know how when you ask your parents as a child on either mother’s or father’s day: “hey! why isn’t there a children’s day!” and then they laugh and laugh and say something like: “silly son/daughter… every day is children’s day!” and then they laugh some more and you still feel jilted?
well… if you’re a writer, everyday is prose poetry day.
also, your parents were lying: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children’s_Day
“Dissipates” is a funny word to use there for that. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I know I don’t want to feel whatever she felt about it.
I once had I dream where I went to a party, drove home drunk, fell asleep, had a wet dream involving Edna Krabappel, woke up to my roommate inviting me to a barbeque. I woke up from the actual dream still under the impression that I had driven drunk, and felt guilty about it until I got in the shower and realized I didn’t own a car.
I’m celebrating National Prose Poetry Day!
Fainting
by Margaret Atwood
You’re upright, standing on two
feet in the usual way, and then suddenly you have a different point of
view, the roots of the trees instead of the leafy tops, closeup of the
floorboards, with nothing in between but a narrowing down and a rushing
sound which is like wings but not the wings of angels.
The
first time I was nine, in a crowd of winter coats in a Victorian
building, steam-heated, looking at a display of chicken embryos, one
day, five days, each one stopped short and bottled. There were twins
too, human ones, identical and fraternal, their arteries and veins
injected with coloured rubber, the purple sea-fan placenta, greyish now,
in with them. After that I was looking up at a forest of canvas
overshoes and legs. I could not remember folding or the moment when my
head hit the wooden floor.
The other time I wa carrying a
basket of broken glass along a dock and I tripped and fell and cut my
finger to the bone. I sat up and looked in, to my own body; there was no
blood for a moment and I could see, it really was to the bone because
there was the bone, not far down at all, shining up at me, white as an
eyeball. I was older then so I put the basket down as soon as I heard
those wings. The cut was right where the finger bends so there was no
scar later, which I missed. You want to have something to show for it.
Worse things have happened since but the dark bird stays away. You
faint when there’s something you don’t want to see, you can’t bear to
see. Someday, the bird calls from its leafless tree very far away, in
the land where there is no sun and no moon, I will be back, and by then
you will find me merciful.
I’m celebrating National Prose Poetry Day!
Fainting
by Margaret Atwood
You’re upright, standing on two
feet in the usual way, and then suddenly you have a different point of
view, the roots of the trees instead of the leafy tops, closeup of the
floorboards, with nothing in between but a narrowing down and a rushing
sound which is like wings but not the wings of angels.
The
first time I was nine, in a crowd of winter coats in a Victorian
building, steam-heated, looking at a display of chicken embryos, one
day, five days, each one stopped short and bottled. There were twins
too, human ones, identical and fraternal, their arteries and veins
injected with coloured rubber, the purple sea-fan placenta, greyish now,
in with them. After that I was looking up at a forest of canvas
overshoes and legs. I could not remember folding or the moment when my
head hit the wooden floor.
The other time I wa carrying a
basket of broken glass along a dock and I tripped and fell and cut my
finger to the bone. I sat up and looked in, to my own body; there was no
blood for a moment and I could see, it really was to the bone because
there was the bone, not far down at all, shining up at me, white as an
eyeball. I was older then so I put the basket down as soon as I heard
those wings. The cut was right where the finger bends so there was no
scar later, which I missed. You want to have something to show for it.
Worse things have happened since but the dark bird stays away. You
faint when there’s something you don’t want to see, you can’t bear to
see. Someday, the bird calls from its leafless tree very far away, in
the land where there is no sun and no moon, I will be back, and by then
you will find me merciful.
party time
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Party time, indeed. M&Ms, no less. Of course, this party will not be complete w/out a cameo by the godfather, Mr. Russell Edson. Here’s “Elephant Dormitory.”
An elephant went to bed and pulled a crazy quilt up under
its tusks.
But just as the great gray head began filling with the gray
wrinkles of sleep it was awakened by the thud of its tail
falling out of bed.
Would you get my tail? said the elephant to another
elephant also tucked up under a crazy quilt.
I was just in the gray wrinkles of my sleep, sighed the other
elephant.
But I can’t sleep without my tail, said the first elephant, I
like it stuck just above my anus; I feel more secure that way,
that it holds my anus from drifting out to heaven.
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Hexcellent suggestion, wise and mighty Raptor. Next time I get pulled over, I will say, “What, ‘drinking’. I don’t even own this car!”
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