Tag: surrealism

A Dirty and Dangerous Little Thing

I’ve been telling a story with leaves and flowers I pressed the life out of. I’ve been telling a story about blue blood, ballerinas, and balls. The story has many climaxes, like a woman with her lover who is with the beat of her heart. My heart is a snare drum, making rickety rock music and frightful calls to war with the past. I don’t allow children to listen to my story and neither should you. How grace bred with elegance until the world, fat with starlight, burst and space filled with shimmering crystals of silence. My heart, a dirty and dangerous little thing, leapt from a shadow into the great knowing.






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.”

 

Addie – flash fiction

My old house was creaking under the weight of ghosts, and I knew it was the uneasy time labeled bed. Sleek, blue Addie hovered in her crystal aquarium.

“Goodnight Addie,” I said, placing a few pellets on the serene surface, that ether boundary of her world, residing as she does in the meniscus of life.

Later, I am yanked awake from fitful, light sleep by the sound of splashing water. Eyes bleary, I stumble down the hall to the studio to Addie’s aquarium.

Inside was a feral little girl, curled up inside the tank, her bony, bluish body pressing against the glass. Her hair, brown and unbrushed, was tangled and soaked.

“Where’s Addie ? Who are you?” I gasped.

Then she looked at me, staring bleakly out of her hollow face, and I knew it was Addie.

I blinked, and the girl was gone. The aquarium was still there but almost completely empty. I felt inwardly disheveled. My discombobulation turned to horror when I saw Addie beached on the neon rocks, gasping for breath, her gills clutching at whatever water got too close.

I ran to the sink and filled a measuring cup with water. I dumped it out into the tank quickly. First one then another, until the tank filled.
But when I returned to the aquarium with the last cup of water, Addie was gone. Wet footprints scampered out the door, and a wisp of a child somewhere runs wild.

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.

Dominated by a Day

Tomorrow lies in my bed
As rugged as a coast.
I marvel at the sleepiness of my fist.
Where has my fight gone?
Has it left me for another woman?
A woman with more steel in her back,
a chest of gravel?
Tomorrow hums,
Brawny and blue and wastefully.
I adore extravagance.
He wants to tell me what to do,
I luxuriate in commands.

I am no longer holding my dice.
They burn in the green fire writhing in the corner.
This is not my game.
This is not my life.
It is time to surrender.

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.

Once Bitten

Fireworks of pain in my fecund teeth
Advantageous chalkboards fill with unmoored drawings
In kid script
Of dragons and lagoons and devils.
Open red. See the wet birds waddle out cheep cheep.

Alarming threads sew me a bag for my head
In this titillating twilight.
Once I was 21 and I buried myself by a birch tree.
Then instantly I was 23 and I was born,
Having gestated under a plaid lamp.

I can barely bite but oh how I am bitten!
Hurt a cataclysmic light in my eyes.