Tag: surreal

Trash Collector

A mother’s fear – a sharp, wrinkled, black thing – shimmies and shimmers across the planes on the wind. My job is to collect the trash blowing across the mortal plane and refine it in fire. I take my grabber and carefully clutch her fear and jam it down into my designer trash bag. The epoch of sour cherry dreams is over. The hills have rolled away from us. Christ floats over the horizon, beckoning gently. I wonder whether the fire will refine her fear until it is fierce and returns to destroy her, or if it will refuse to burn.

In The Tide Pools

In the glistening tide pools, an octopus polls his neighbors about the upcoming tide. “For or against?” he asks. The tide comes regardless and the octopus pulsates purple with anonymity. In the glossy horror of the sea, ghosts bathe in hot vents with life forms the living will never sea.  The tide does not care for the fish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.”

 

Oh Yellow!

The grass is so unfair, blemishing the earth with shades of antipsychotic and anesthetic green. I long instead for flowers. Flowers mailing a parcel at the post office. Flowers mending my broken spirit. Flowers mining the sun for smiles.  Purple flowers purr fancifully. Pink flowers harvest at the vineyard. And yellow flowers! Oh yellow! Toying with my tresses and my head, leading me down alleys of lust.

February – Or Limits.

The ghost of February
Rummages through my garage,
Unearthing thousands of decayed dreams.

February is ice blue
Is lonely
Is unhinged.
Climate Control
Battles with her every year.
But each year February dies
And her ghost
Is a pick pocket on the beach I grew up on.

When she comes to my home,
My pink dwelling by the sea,
She searches for her brother,
January.
I do not tell her
But I buried him
And selfish ambition
Under the Norfolk Pine.

One of my dreams is delicate,
Lacy,
Shy.
Her I named Aurora
For the lights I long to see
At the ends of the Earth.
She almost turns to dust in February’s
Damp hands.

February takes a shine to her and asks me,
“May I?”
I acquiesce.
She wipes away the frost
On her eyes,
And sachets out of my garage,
My little green dream chattering away at her.
May my tender little dream

Go where I cannot.

My Shadow’s Nation

An ocean flutters from a flagpole,
A 3×5 slate blue ocean with dolphins leaping in and out.
This is the emblem
Of the country of my shadow.
My shadow is a princess.
She warbles,
Her tax code a filing system
Of feathers.
Beneath her flag I am wet.
My vision bordered by swaths of salt.
Here in Kansas oceans are special occasions,
And many rally around her flag,
Though they cannot swim.