Write the Year 2024—Week 1: de lumine

Well, I guess I’m going to continue to combat the Sunday Scaries (or contribute to them) by continuing this? I’d like to try to reduce the number of weeks that I just punt to finding a poetic form and letting rules work for me. In that vein, I picked a Reedsy prompt, and I guess this is a weird piece of flash fiction.

Title: de lumine
WC: 500

In the beginning there was chaos. You’ve heard this nonsense, yes? Or maybe you are from down the mountain, from the heart of the desert, the sea, the treetops, or where-fucking-ever. Are they into nothingness where you’re from? Nothingness before somethingness. That’s rubbish, too.

Do you want to know, really? I doubt it. But you’re here and I’m here and the truth never exactly waits to join.

What there was, in the beginning—what there has always been—is light. Without permission, without precursor, without some lover’s quarrel or autoerotic mishap, without some sudden whim or family psychodrama to kick things off. There has always bhere een light.

How do I know? You would ask that, wouldn’t you?

You stumble in here, bare-skinned and barely alive. You drop to all fours and wait for your other senses to blossom into revelation. You hold your breath and hope for silence, but the blood drumming in your ears is deafening. Your skitter-prone fingers and toes tell you nothing more than the panicked slap of palms and soles. Taste and scent tangle and clog what may or may no longer be your throat.

There is nothing to see here. That’s what you came to learn, isn’t it? That’s why you have curled in on yourself in such spectacular fashion and undone the eons. You have ginned up the opposite of a pulse and rewound yourself till you are the dark spot on a flat disc of cells. There’s no hint of downy hair or tail or momentarily monstrous jaws. You think this is the truth—that this is the instant before and there is nothing to see.

You are not the first. You won’t be the last. How many have come before you with their schemes and silken threads, with their pens poised and their heads cocked smugly to one side, with their chaos and nothingness and their oh-so-obliging where did He come from? Divinities handing out permission slips for being? How many? How should I know? Why should I have bothered to count those foolish enough to question what is obvious?

There has always been light.

The dance of shadows, black-on-black, could show you if you would look. The pop of spark and flame would whisper it to you, gently as you like. Its warmth, if you would but unclench your fists, might coax the ache of cold from the deepest part of you. It laps at the air, sweetening it, as all creation but you already knows.

It has no interest in saving you, nor do I. I would be its keeper if needed to be kept. It doesn’t. It needs nothing from me, and never has. I know this in the knobby press of knees into the floorboards of time and the stack of my spine climbing to the infinite. I know it in the soot black creases of the palms I have cupped around it since before any of you had lies to tell.

There has always been light.

Write the Year 2023—Week 45: Incommunicado

This is technically a promptless Logolift, except it’s sort of prompted by the hilarity of this week’s Reedsy prompts, which make reference to Dark Academia (and also makes me aware that I know literally nothing about Gilmore Girls). Friends, Academia is, indeed dark. I am on strike at one job, the other has an ongoing horrible dumpster fire that people are enthusiastically throwing gasoline on, and the oddest thing in an odd week is that I got an offer letter for a class that someone mentioned in one email months ago, then ghosted me when I sent my course description and asked for more information about . . . you know, when and in what modality they wanted me to teach, if I could see syllabi to make sure that I was roughly using the same workload expectations as others, etc. I started writing about all that—something narrative—and I got sick of the sound of myself, so here, a tiny poetic window into the dumpster fire.

Title: Incommunicado
WC: 42

Incident: there’s been another
We must smother
It quick!

Community: we hear, we see
Your speech is free
But sick.

Missives: we specialize in vague
There is no plague
Of hate

History: is that an echo?
Don’t we all know
Our fate?

Write the Year 2023—Week 31: Come On, Nature

This is an odd thing. I was sort of attracted to a Reedsy prompt this week: “Write about two strangers who are both heading to the same destination and agree to do a long distance drive together” (okay, I guess these two are not strangers), but I was just daunted by the idea of embarking on a story (as I have, as always, left this until the very last minute). But then I remembered that I really liked writing in Ginsberg’s American Sentence poetry form. So I wrote a sort of flash fiction of those—each stanza/sentence is 17 syllables. I don’t know why I always forget that constraint helps.

Title: Come On, Nature
WC: 263

The brutal sun
bounced off every
glossy black inch
of the dead sports car.

In the distance,
a cloud of
sound and sand
gathered, rumbled, and approached.

The old wreck,
which must have been
white once,
coasted to a reluctant stop.

Some angry spirit
beneath the hood
punched the underside
in protest.

Gravel crunched
and skittered—
an avalanche
down the collar of his shirt.

She struck
a looming pose
at the edge of the ditch,
blotting out the sun.

He bit back
a sigh of relief
as the temperature
dropped sharply.

Her silence punished,
unforgiving as
the heat
her shadow banished.

He could
hold his tongue,
but to what end,
when she’d out wait eternity?

“Come to finish me off then,
have you?” he said,
though he knew
she had not.

“Penelope’s running,”
she replied,
“and we both
have a job in Sparks.”

He tipped back his head
and gaped at her,
towering, calm,
and upside-down.

“Your job is
to stop me
from doing my job,
and you want to carpool?”

Her hand dropped
to the gun on her hip
and she smiled,
“You coming, or what?”

Resigned,
he clambered
out of the ditch
and into the passenger seat.

The old wreck
she called Penelope
lurched its way
back on to the road.

There was no
conversation,
only the violent racket
of the car.

The whack-a-mole
rhythm of its
pistons firing
became hypnotic.

“You know you can sleep,”
she said,
eyes on the road,
“some of us have a code.”

He leaned his head
against the window
and dreamed
of scorpions and frogs.

Write the Year 2022—Week 48 (Belated): Bipartite

A Cortes Nonet very vaguely inspired by this Reedsy prompt. (Violence is communication, right?)

Title: Bipartite
WC: 112

Neither stands wordless.
(Wordless, they might have been saved)
Saved for such an occasion, wrath coils.
Coils tighten and stack themselves heaven high.
High-frequency shocks eloquently erase distance.
Distance seems, too late, the key to peace beyond the fleeting.
Fleeting, the silence before the roar dons the bull’s horns, takes up its string.

String theory holds that with a hemp grocery bag, all things are possible
(Possible things I have made up include string theory bullshit.)
Bullshit is the force that brought the not-quite-wordless here.
Here, let me explain in the smallest of words:
Words twang the last nerve of leaden clouds.
Clouds sing with shocks of lightning.
Lightning is a fist.

Write the Year 2022—Week 37 (Belated): Idle

A very short thing, sort of based on this prompt from Reedsy.

Title: Idle
WC: 600

The chair had stopped rocking sometime in the dead of night. It had jolted her awake, or out of whatever state it was one could say she was in.

It’s funny the things you get used to. That had been the thought to settle her back into the chair—the non-rocking chair—once the fury of it had died down. It’s funny how long the night is when there’s nothing to count. Not that she’d realized she’d been counting until just then, until the creak–groan–creak was gone and with it the illusion of movement. It’s funny.

The light came eventually, dull. Counting or no, grey slivers of it made their fearful way through quivering clutches of dead leaves still clinging to the black fingers of mostly bare branches. They flicked timidly through the gnarled vines that gripped the branches tight.

It made no difference to her. She wouldn’t deign to cast her eyes downward, let alone lean to the side to give it the satisfaction, the root or the floorboard it had finally punched far enough upward to halt the forward motion of the long, wooden curve that had carried her back and forth, back forth all these countless seasons since she’d stopped. Since she had simply tucked away her weapon and just . . . stopped.

How many had it been, she wondered. Now that the dull, grey light had arrived—now with nothing left to count—she had to admit she’d been wondering if there was any way to know. Could the thorns, perhaps, tell her in their thickness? If she were to bend down to count each tight spiral could she work her way back? Not likely, she thought. Not likely at all that the thorns would give up even so trivial a secret.

The branches were the key. How many times had they dropped their quaking leaves? How many winters had she listened to them scuttle in dry, boneless circles across the floor when the wind came moaning through the pane-less windows? She wouldn’t look up to ask. She wouldn’t so much as tip her chin to consider the obscene stretch of them, arching overhead like the ribs of some monster from the deep.

Her weight shifted forward by force of habit. The chair tottered, one rocker still willing to carry her along the well-worn imaginary path she’d traveled—she’d been traveling for some unimaginable stretch of time. The other did its best to show willing, sending the chair hard to her left, toward the tight twists of vines, of bramble, of stalks as big around as her wrist.

She threw herself backward, breathing hard. The laddered slats of the chair met the base of her skull with a crack swallowed up by the thick press of green all around her. Stars sizzled behind her eyelids, a sudden shocking light. She howled at the brightness as it collapsed into a solid slash of red, filling her vision, filling her mouth, filling the hundred miles of veins branching out beneath her skin.

She fought her way to her feet. Her fingers closed around her weapon, caught now on the tattered remains of the pocket she’d tucked it into who knew how many seasons ago. She drew it out, closing her hand to test the coiled fury of the spring in the handle. The wicked blades flashed, even in the timid grey light.
“Enough.” She caught the nearest stalk in her free hand and pulled. The shears clashed hungrily. The stalk fell and she was on to the next and the next and the next. “Enough.”

Write the Year 2022—Week 35 (Belated): Smoke

Dumb and nothing. A Joseph’s Star? Vaguely a Reedsy Prompt.

Title: Smoke
WC: 30

Smoke:
A tell tale
curl. You could not hide.
You tried, though. A green wall failed.
I wished it hadn’t. Still do.
The mask slipped for good.
A hero
lost.

Write the Year 2022—Week 22: Harper Court

So, I think I understood what a Rispetto is, and this is mostly it? There’s some flexibility on rhyme scheme as I understand it, and technically, I think for mine, it should divide more sensibly into quatrains, but I’m a rebel, Dotty (Dottie?—I have never seen Rebel Without a Cause, and I think that’s one of those famous misquotes anyway). My brain kept spitting out the iambic tetrameter in places, but I think I wrangled it? I was sort of motivated by this Reedsy prompt.

Title: Harper Court
WC: 44

Exactly like a playground child,
down yellow tubes the odds and ends
will tumble, rattling and wild.
Chaotic rest, confusion lends
its thin disguise to pasts disposed.
The hands, efficient, thoughtless, gloved
strip bare, tear down, ignore beloved
and crumbling places gone to ghosts.

Write the Year 2022—Week 18: Still, Life

Sort of, but not really, responding to the Reedsy theme for last week.

Title: Still, Life
WC: 500

There’s a picture of a turkey among the clutter on the shelf above the TV. It’s tiny. It’s in a cheap frame, no doubt from Walgreen’s. It sits at an angle and doesn’t quite fit. It’s a joke and a totem. If my aunt ever steps foot in my home, there’s a prize in it for me if the turkey is on display.

It was my grandparents’ turkey. I don’t know which one. That’s the joke. My aunt has a basement full of my grandparents’ things, the source of all prizes to be awarded. The source of the prizes she awards at the brunch she has—she had—on Christmas Eve morning every year when she’d run a game of family trivia. It turns out that the turkey is, hands down, the most frequent photograph subject in my grandparents’ collection.

There’s a picture of my grandparents on the cluttered shelf above the cluttered shelf above the TV. It’s black and white, and the frame might’ve come from Walgreen’s, too. It was in the goody bag my aunt sent everyone home with a few years ago. Maybe the year before the turkey. They’re on a lawn. They’re walking toward the camera, it seems.

My grandmother is wearing a dress, a shawl, a stole, or a long, wide scarf. She has on ankle-strap shoes, the kind I am sure I’d love if I could see more of them. They’re some dark color. Her hair is some dark color, and so is his. My grandmother is looking up at my grandfather, laughing. He’s squinting into the sun. He has one arm around her. His right hand is shoved deep into the pocket of his pleated-front pants. His white t-shirt blazes. He is not looking into the camera.

There’s a third picture leaning against the frame that has my grandparents frozen within it. This one is small and square, in a metal frame so old that its finish has corroded a bit, sticking the photo to the glass.

It’s black and white by design, not by historical necessity. There’s a tall, thin, dark-haired woman in a halter top and flared jeans. There’s a little girl next to her, young enough to be wearing something that would have come in two matched pieces—a long, blousy smock and tiny shorts with frilled elastic around the thighs. Her mushroom-cut hair is not light, but it’s not as dark as the woman’s, either.

There are white geese all around. They are huge, taller than the girl whose hand is outstretched. We see them from the back, the girl and the woman, that is. The girl might be afraid. She might be exhilarated by this as she has been by everything about the days surrounding this moment. She is learning what an apartment is and that some of them have ponds with geese and ducks. She has the undivided attention of the woman who knows the value of this.

She knows about prizes.

Write the Year 2022—Week 13: Thunderclap

Poetry three weeks in a row: Yikes. Vaguely responding to this prompt? The form is a Waltmarie.

Title: Thunderclap
WC: 42

We exist in ripples.
We have
settled according to the specific gravities of
the last
desultory raindrops. And sundry afterthoughts
tumbling
further still needn’t trouble the almighty with its
promise
that stratigraphy can be shaken by the frailest collision
of air.

Write the Year 2021—Week 29: Summoning

This is just a start, but it’s based on this prompt from Reedsy.

Title: Summoning
WC: 500

The back of the photograph had my name on it. That was strange enough, tucked between pages one-third of a way from the end of a murder mystery I’d checked out from the library with three or four others. I’d had no intention of finishing any of them. They were all the same anyway, and I’d simply needed a plausible reason to get out of the house, out of the heat, out of the line of fire at home, and the unkind crackle of dustcover plastic was my only escape.

My name was not the kind one would find on key chains or novelty license plates advertising the sunshine state or a state for lovers. Hell, my name wasn’t one you’d find on any of the fifty, thanks to the old country proclivities of the shouting family the library was critical in helping me escape for afternoons at a time—for far more than an afternoon, if I’m really to give even the cramped and crumbling local branch of my childhood its due.

Libraries were where I learned what Americans liked, what Americans craved, what Americans could lay their hands on absolutely at will. Libraries were where I learned that women were always dead by the end of the first chapter and this was how men found themselves—in the act of violence, in the obsessive fuse lit by a crime scene photograph, in chasing down the story of a woman, a girl, a dame cut down in the flower of life.

I never expected to find myself in a library, but there the photograph was, with its scalloped eighth-of-an-inch border around an overexposed black-and-white image of . . . a beach? There was sand and water of uncertain character. There was the night, unoccupied by any soul I could see. There I was, my name in block capitals, scrawled in ballpoint pen across the back.

It startled me to find the photograph. The corner poked out from between pages that surely had the killer going on and on about how he’d never be caught. I’d tugged the thing out, little by little, knowing it would count as cheating to open the heavy hard cover, let alone flip the first two-thirds of the three-hundred-and-something pages flat on to wire milk crate I’d bump my knees up to, just to get some peace in a quiet corner of my family’s part of the two-flat. So I had coaxed it out with blunt fingernails. I had acted, for once, with patience.

It knocked me back to see my name—my almost entirely unspoken name—stretching across the back. And that was before the image began to move. Gunsmoke pixels dropped down, then slid left and right to bleed the silver from their brethren who had one depicted the glint of moonlight on some unknown water. That was before cruel-cornered black bricks formed a mouth, opened wide and ambivalent jaws, and began to speak.