5 Prose
Poems
from the manuscript
How the World was Made
currently in
the Spring 2017 issue of
Day of the Dead
Sage-smoke weaves around yellow leaves, wraps a bare, black
trunk. I hear the continual heat-crack of hollow stems. You appear out of the
smoke, stand there, mute. I want to return to that dim-lit kitchen again, watch
your arthritic hands knead dough, flour-dust across your apron, while you tell
your stories. (But this is not you as I once knew you. This is you as you are
now: half-smoke, vague guide, weaving something new).
Years after your death I found some of your notes in the
yellowing margins of your copy of Labyrinth of Solitude. Incomprehensible
scrawl, written after you were more than half-blind. I thought: odd, so
uncharacteristic, to be reading that book. What did I know about you? I
thought: if I can decipher those words, I would have the key, some key, some
important key. “Why were you reading Octavio Paz?” I say into the smoke. (But
this is not you as I once knew you. This is you as you are now: half-smoke,
half-guide, weaving something new).
Please tell me a story tonight. I will follow you as you
ride the flying elm leaves out in the street, wherever they lead…
You
can find the rest at Blazevox
here.
Or this:
The Crow Tree
1.
The city crows have been using the ash tree in front of my
apartment as their roost for the last week and a half. There’s nothing stranger
than a bare tree full of crows. I find it oddly comforting, though, waking up
late at night, and hearing them rustle together, dreaming their crow dreams:
pizza scraps and road kill, the chanting of flies.
Some think that a tree full of crows is a bad sign, a dark
omen. The last time I lived near a crow-tree I was working in a dish room with
boys on loan from a school work program and sad women on subsidized half wages
from a home for the mentally disabled…
You can find the rest at Blazevox
And be sure to check out the rest of the magazine
(poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, experimental fiction,
text art & Vispo...)
(poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, experimental fiction,
text art & Vispo...)
Other prose poems and/or flash fictions from
How the World was Made
can be found at:
Anti-Heroin Chic (2016): Salvation, Near the Border, More Ghosts, Bernardo, The Great Migration
The 2River View (Fall 2016): All the Beautiful Dead, The Impossible
The 2River View (Fall 2015): Dolphins During a Storm, Plumbing a Pipe
Blazevox (Fall 2015): Trinity-Site's
Last Stand
Blazevox (Fall 2016): Selling
Magazines to the Joneses
Serving House Journal (2016): March in
Denver
Bopa-lalla.
