Micro Fiction – My Grandma’s Trailer

I walk down the rickety lane to Grandma’s trailer, the Taj Mahal as we called it, and knocked on the peeling yellow door. It was a single wide, and the siding was coming off from a recent hurricane. The North Carolina humidity shimmered, speckled with mosquitoes. Then grandma opened, her expansive voice welcoming me into the marble foyer. As she closed the door behind me, I greeted the koi in her fountain.

“What brings you over, Cupcake?” she asked.

“I need to borrow a little TNT for my mom.”

“Ok honey. It seems like every day it’s something, which would be fine but she never returns anything. She still has my cyanide shaker and my mentrual map.”

Grandma takes off, surprisingly spry for a hip recipient, down the corridor on the left. She whisks past the library and the music room, the terrarium room and the aquarium room. She comes back with a carefully wrapped parcel and hands it to me gingerly.

“Be careful. Remind your mother Sunday night is dinner with Father Rohrer and the Zeitgeist of the 80s.”

 

Stars Like Tattoos

Your parsimonious attitude neglects the vitality of the sunset sky bleeding all over us, the petrichor scented rainbow above leaking down on us, an infectious fluid of madness. The flag of the granite country that bore me waves in the breeze as it unfurls, rubbing stars like tattoos on the blueing sky.

Cheese, Salt, Audacity

The ghosts of sunset are tubular and fantastical. The last lingering color on the backporch of my vaporized brain is defrauded pink. Teal waves of entropy ride over me like the 4 horsemen of a very soothing apocalypse. In my letter to you, I described my life as “cheese, well grated.” I described my personality as “salted.” And you wrote back laughter and guesstimates on the waiting time in God’s pharmacy. Harvest hums, gaining ground on us. The sickle is at my back, my mind far away salting fields of lavender. Cut me low. Cut me clean. I can not bear the aggravating taste of my own audacity anymore.

Lost

Churlish water churns in my private ocean of antipathy. Sunlight maneuvers on the surface of the slate sea, polishing it. From here will come my death, small and terrifying. Somewhere on memory lane, I am riding my unicorn bike with the pink glittery seat. Somewhere, I am eating lemon clover. Somewhere, I am drunk in a dorm room writing poetry my future self will lose, like I’ve lost my name.



My Seafaring Love

Elizabethan frost coats my cold coated dreams. My husband’s name means rocky place, but it also means steadfast. He’s steadfast in rocky places like the craggy shores of my thalassophobic mind. Mosasaurs prowl the coast of my psyche, hunting stray thoughts as they sail desperately to the blue safety of open synaptic water. My husband is a man of the sea, the tentacles of his love entering my royal chambers like an octopus. He enchants me with his intelligence, his ability to open jars. The sea breeze he carries with him that tousles his hair when we sit in the doldrums of life, currents snubbing us as we drink ink on the beach.

Prayer of a Sinner

My celestial heritage makes my poor connection with my fellow man somewhat more palatable. Lord, save me from my private sins. The ones only You know about. In an alluvial dream of glittering scales and madness, my backstroke will not be enough to get to the haughty shore. My circumstances are humble, my virtues stoned on my mother’s lawn and unsure how to shame themselves next. Please throw me your love soaked lifeline of blood and grace, pull me to a tranquil rest I have not earned. In Jesus’ Name I pray, Amen.

Misery

Misery has a halting melody, a rubbery and filthy chord clamoring like chlamydia through throngs of joylessness. I’ve brought my blue sequin shoes to dance, and truly the coagulated chorus matches my hot and discombobulated body perfectly, but I feel self-conscious as my nipples perk up in the tearful rain. Across a bridge of bone, holographic islands dreaming in opalescent bays. I want to travel somewhere original and thrilling, but I find myself lost like the balloon I had for a moment as a child, pink, precious, poppable.

The Accounting and Finance Departments- a poem

Mimeographed Mondays blow around the office of my life in an ancient, unnerving breeze. My boss is capricious and vain. I’m fairly certain the accounting and finance departments are trying to bend me over and make me their bitch. The whole place smells like my grandmother’s carpet. I dream of a beach far away, monochromatic and silent.

Jagged, Glittering Edges

The jagged, glittering edges of my anthropomorphic mind betray my feral, untouchable nature. Fire is my frenemy. On Wednesdays, I swim along the river, redefining the definitions of my name in the magical moonlight. My mind sometimes trails behind me, gathering ghosts and children’s balloons as I go through the luscious cities of flesh. Flesh exuberant. Flesh demeaned. On days ending in why, I dig through trash cans and wash my hands on the blood of mosquitoes. My mind is an amethyst cave, painful and expensive to sit in.

Hammers and Nails

Crackling flames crinkle the cold air in the woods outside my memories. Why run when the river can carry you smoothly to a symphonic sea? This fire’s name is Aurora, and she is melting the guns my father taught me to grow. The blasts pop like candy in the mouth. X rays blast through my holographic skull, revealing dancing neurons. The sinewy little sluts grind on while my memories collapse like the furniture I tried to put together, too female for the hammer. Familiar only with the nail.