Month: December 2024

Roses – Flash Microfiction

Serena was the human equivalent of a marigold – bright and always heralding the dead. She tended her roses tenderly, until one day is a vortex of hurt she approached her violated wrists with a long thorn, sliding it deep into cuts trying desperately to heal. As her elegant friend ripped open her tortured flesh, she quieted. Her blood fell upon the sleeping soil, awakening it

The next morning, the rose bush was covered in fresh blooms, some as large as Serena’s head. Amazed, she watered them carefully. But the water sat in top of the soil, useless. Serena looked at her wrist and picked the corner of a developing scab. A delicate drop of blood fell in the soil, and from somewhere deep, the sound of slurping.

Day by day the roses grew taller, the blooms prouder. Serena grew weaker until one day, her husband came home to find her head rolled back, her arms and body drained, and roses wrapping around her corpse.

On Michigan Drive

On Michigan Drive, I grow up pressed between rocks. “More weight,” I cried as I gasped toward maturity. The fire that formed my bones still burns bright in the bleeding Earth.  I won’t break just because the universe demands I do. Trees claw through the twilight sky, sagging under the weight of amber weight of Autumn.

In My Mind

Circles circumnavigate my globular mind. My day is a spider waiting to suck the marrow from your youth. My night is a silken web with stars captured in it. They are desperately trying to writhe and squirm away. Time is always hungry. I am cornerless, fearful, fecund. In my mind are three races of thought, and they are always engaged in some imperial war.

Soft and Hard

I am soft like sex when it’s raining outside. My musical blood plays Lacrymosa while my feet climb toward success without me. The ivy strangles the wall, and everyone driving by talks about how beautiful the wall with the ivy is, as though tendril and stone were lovers. As though a kind of abuse isn’t happening in front of us. I am soft like the fertile hillocks of Kansas. The disaster of vine and structural integrity. Gravity is a cheap hooker and a terrible pessimist, always bringing everyone down. I am soft like a memory of pajamas with feet in them. I could never pretend to be a stone wall, but still I am tenderly hunted by the tendrils, their iron wills coiled and ready to strike.

Air and Light Vie For My Skin’s Adoration

The curve of my hip presses into the jealous air. Air and light vie for my skin’s adoration. So often, my silk casing lies in the sun drying out, making love to the light in front of Breeze and everyone. Light is a selfish lover, taking more than he gives.  Air is the lover my convex body craves, my breasts in their bra a topographical map of desire. Air whispers idiosyncratic verses into my eager ears and strokes me lightly on the thigh, stokes the fire between my ears. I am alive with error and noble aspirations.



Inspiration- or Crime and Punishment

The raindrops watch me furtively, avoiding my thirsty skin as they fall. The elevator will go down and down until the dead are dancing on you. The resin ballerina at the old wrought iron gate at the precipice of punishment resonates with me. Please commute my sentence or send me to the joy mines. Elegance and Grace get drunk off old rose at my great pearl table.  In the yard with the whip cream colored unicorns, lightning licks little Lisa with bolts of genius like bolts of fabric to stretch over the folds of her cerebrum.  Rainbows croon in every euphoric hue.





The Future Comes to Collect

The future comes to collect minutes from my aging face. Mitosis carries out in every cell to the rhythm of Bailamos. The code corrupts like a politician. The future wears a blue gown and a crimson pelerine. Minutes vacuumed off the edge of my life now will make daisies grow in the future.  I tell her to take them. My bones walked off the job, and I’ve been melting into new days. From the back of my telepathic woods, the past comes to compete for my guilt and my telomeres.

The First Christmas in North America

In the bleak midwinter on a brackish morning, while the vultures watched their breath freeze above the drowsing marsh, salvation arrived. People carried on with their weddings and wars. Nutritous flora was farmed, and water ran forever into herself. But the world had changed, and in the silent bogs of what will one day be Indiana, the stones cried out in praise of who was, and is, and is to come.

The Love of a Woman is a Desert Dweller

Cool sonnets soak the sweat off my cracking skin. Here in the desert, ghosts made of love hover everywhere. The cacti are ringed in bubblegum pink halos. The love of a woman is a desert dweller. If you water it a little bit once a century, it will cling on, carving your name on grains of sand. Just the tiniest drop will keep it alive. He met me in the onyx city shellacked with heat. My dance card was full, and then he tattooed his name on my silky spirit and wiped my mismanaged hours away. Somewhere, my old self dances and dances because if she stops, she will die. But here in the parched peace of premium paradise, I can rest my weary bones with the ghosts and count my pinkest wounds.

Vision 12/22/24

Hear the blue holler of the electric cat under the full moon. Low and mournful rivers flay rocks. I have been granted a gift of visions. I will be able to be at peace with and fully connected to God. Poetry is the window. Keep the judgmental adverbs away from me. Though wilderness and wildness cloak me like fog cloaks an autumn woods, though I am thick with stars and statistics, I will reach euphoria