This is really just leaning into prompt (one of the words from writers write for this month) and constraint (this is a Dr. Stella)
Title: Stowaway
WC: 42
Her fingers closed around the key
Its teeth of brass bit keenly,
Embedded memories in skin
To sow tomorrow’s trouble
The lock revealed itself to be
A compact broken cleanly
To spill its secret blue-green sin
A pin to pierce the bubble
An Interlocking Rubaiyat born of a photo I’d forgotten about. Technically, my rhymes are pentameter and I’ve followed the rhyme scheme, but my actual meter is a warmed-over mess. Visual prompt from a photo I took weeks ago.
Title: Cursive
WC: 84
Stop with me, there’s the touch of knuckles here.
Curve, cells. Bend your heads together. Draw near.
Wait for rain to fall. Tomorrow, we’ll see
that the bones have rolled; there’s no point in fear.
One surface ripples, true and lazily
conversant. Those brave enough to see
a contretemps of violins entwined.
Here, harmony battles with destiny.
This cannot be news to those left behind
to steel themselves to everything unkind
In this too-persistent world. Yet the page
will turn, its alabaster will enshrined.
No prompt. I did see shredded thank you notes blowing down the street a few weeks ago, and I formed the idea in my head that they were from a wedding that didn’t happen. Then things got weird. This is a Blood Quill.
Title: Asunder
WC: 70
I see pieces of cards
Torn by who knows whose hands
Each says Thank you in cursive, in gold
Falling softly in yards
Not quite snow, each one lands
Like a tragedy, blank page, untold
In my mind, guests arrive
In their Halloween best
How the groom-less and blushing bride grins
As the sun makes its dive
For its bed in the west
By a sliver of moon Now begins
Very dumb. I have to go to bed. A single Balassi Stanza.
Title: Mirror(ed)
WC: 46
Consume what would stare back
Each shape glittering black
Crowding out the unmissed face
Of clocks you can’t unwind
Keep the abyss in mind
When you lift your hand to trace
Futures in the pink dark
Don’t blink. Await the spark
The red-checkered flag of grace
My brain decided to take this prompt from Writers Write perversely literally. And so, a strange bit of flash fiction.
Title: Hearth & Home
WC: 1100
The table groaned under the pile of dirty tea cups. Brennis groaned a quarter-tone out of tune with it. The dissonance was agonizing. She probed the thinnest part of either side of her skull with fingertips that throbbed almost as badly as her temples.
“Shut up!” With a desperate, burst of energy, she aimed an ill-advised kick at the thick, rough-hewn leg and regretted it instantly. The tea cups clanged in deafening protest. The table groaned again and the drip of the spigot against the tectonically precarious stack of filthy dishes in the sink grew louder and more disapproving. And, of course, her big toe lit up with pain. “Everyone . . .” she gulped down something that was trying its damndest to be a sob. “Everything just shut up.”
“Everyyou shut up.”
The kitchen was empty save for Brennis. The voice was beyond unexpected. It was positively inexplicable, and her spine, by rights, should have gone rigid with shock. But given the sheer intensity of the hangover, sudden movement of any kind was off the table, no pun intended. Besides, it wasn’t exactly inexplicable was it? It was not, in fact, beyond unexpected. Not after the book and the candle and the nonsense a month back.
“So it’s words now,” she snorted. Her chin swung heavily downward until it was lodged in the notch between her collar bones. “Sentences. Sort of.”
“You shut up.” The table retorted. It sounded like a table. It sounded like something solid and heavy that had been sanded smooth decades ago. It also sounded, at the moment, childishly gleeful. “You stop kick.”
“Stop kicking,” Brennis corrected. The automatic reply conjured up the image of her brother Jace, not as he was now, enormous and earnest, lumbering and a little bit slow in more ways than one, but as he’d been at three, at five, at seven, when he’d followed her everywhere so closely he was always stepping on her skirts. “Kicking, not kick.”
“Not kick!” The table rattled the tea cups for emphasis. Or maybe they were rattling themselves. Maybe things had progressed that far.
“Not kick,” she agreed, inching her still-throbbing toe further back from the table’s leg. “Any other demands?” Silence. A minute or more of silence and a desperate kind of sanity inched its way out of the dark corners of Bennis’s mind. Maybe she’d imagined it. Sentences and words and groans, Indignant self-rattling and disapproving drips. The scent of cheaper-than-cheap alcohol hung so heavy over the towering pile of cups, she half expected it to land like diamonds of dew on the straggling ends of her dark hair as it hung down. Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing—the fire, Jace, the book . . .
“The stink.” The table cut into her reverie. “More stink than weight.”
There was a faint tinkling, delicate at first, but building. Brennis’s head whipped upward with regrettable speed. Her brain sloshed painfully against the back of her skull. The cups were definitely moving—vibrating, working their way up to something fierce . . .
“Not good company.” The voice of the table had gone soft, somehow. Placating. “Tiny pretty things. Lined up. Good company. I see you over there.”
The shelves, Brennis thought as her eyes tracked across the room to the nearly empty, dust-caked rows of planking opposite the sink. It knows the tea cups go on the shelves.
The idea was unnerving, even in context. Even given everything. The shelves hadn’t seen a tea cup, or anything else for that matter, in . . . she couldn’t remember how long. Well more than a month. Well before the book or even the fire.
“I didn’t wake you up,” she said slowly. She lifted one hand. Her fingertips flirted with the edge of the table, stop just a breath shy of the grooves they’d come to know over the course of a lifetime. Her hand fell in a fist to dangle at her side. “You haven’t just . . . come to be.”
“Always come to be.” The table’s reply came swiftly, punctuated by another rattle and the affronted plop of a particularly loud drop from the spigot t on to the back of what had once been her best skillet. “Your whole life. The life of the big man.”
“Jace,” Brennis breathed. Another image, Jace only just taller than her now, his shoulders grown broad, but the rest of his body still long and think and awkward. He was bumping her aside at the sink, taking the tea cup from her impatient hands, drying it gently with a faded flour-sack towel and reaching to stack it inside one of its mates on the highest shelf. “You remember Jace!”
“No Jace.” The table stopped and started again. “Yes. Little big one. Jace.” There was something like a murmur from the tea cup pile. A swivel of handles conferring. “And the bigger man.” The words had clearly arrived in conference. “And his big man. And the littler ones.” Another pause, another conference. “Ladies. Not kicking. Not leaving all the weight and stink. Remember. We do.”
The bigger man. And his big man. And the ladies. Brennis’s breath caught, high and tight in her chest. The cheaper-than-cheap liquor burned at the back of throat. Her dad. Her granddad. Her family, all the way back to whoever had made this godforsaken table.
“All of them. All you’ve seen.” Her palm found a few square inches of clear tabletop, somehow. She felt a jolt of realization—of connection. “You remember them.”
“Remember.” The table nodded. It didn’t move, not in the slightest. There was no rattle or threatening sway from the precarious tower of cups. But it nodded. “Can tell.”It hesitated. When it spoke again, a sly note crept into its knothole tones. “But the stink.”
“The stink,” Brennis repeated.
She leaned her weight into her palm and groaned. The table groaned back, but she was on her feet now. She was shuffling slowly, painfully, head-swimmingly across the floor. She was approaching the sink.
“Can . . .?” Her hand reached out and recoiled, fearful of what might happen if her skin made contact with the metal pump handle. A drop sounded from the spigot, wary but accepting.
Brennis paused. She rolled up one sleeve, then the other, wincing and shivering at the touch of the room’s cold air on her skin. She glanced toward the long-cold hearth. She’d need wood and kindling. She’d need courage from who knows where to light a fire after so long, but later. Later.
“First,” she said out loud to herself, to the spigot and the shelves and the table and the tea cups. “First, the stink.”
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.
No, I don’t know how I’ve wound up with 53 weeks. Yes, I did technically start this after the year had expired. No, I don’t really know what this one is about, other than my last-minute-ness. It’s a cethramtu rannaigechta moire to end a weird day and a pretty bad year.
Title: Overflow
WC: 40
In the end,
the eye stocks
the soul’s purse.
The mind locks
much away.
What breaks free?
Good soldiers
haltingly
lying down.
Sunday’s bane:
I have made
my own pain.
Full five years.
Do I plan?
Fingernails
since I began.
Ok, I have to be up in like 3 hours, so this is a bananas Spiral Quatrain on something I probably mistook. But this thing (pictured after the poem) looked like something that had met its end in a massive, dangling spider web. It’s probably trash caught on the branch.
Title: Pendant
WC: 70
The bare branch’s reach
Seems to exceed its grasp
The disregarded last gasp
Of dangling something cannot teach
The gazes of passersby miss
Cautionary tales like this
One anonymous end
What might it portend?
One quite sticky thread
At first, a minor drag
Then rapidly mounting dread
The truth revealed: a body bag
High above an envious screech
Of the ravenous night-bird
It circles, hunger stirred
A bleak grave-side speech
A prompt from Writers Write sparked this bit of flash memoir. (of course, it’s about a seed I didn’t plant, but still. The prompt prompted. At least it’s not a poem?
Title: Samara
WC: 500
Darlene and I peeled helicopters in the gangway between my house and the Hickeys’ two-flat. The brick was cool at our backs as the pile of tiny green seeds grew on the flagstone between us. We’d hidden cigarettes under it the summer before. Two, stolen from her mom’s pack and wrapped up in a sandwich bag from my lunch or hers. We never smoked them. Darlene forgot. I went back for them, terrified we’d somehow be caught. I’d torn them to pieces over a sewer grate and lived in fear for days afterward. Today, though, we were flicking feathery yellow tails, their heads split open, in the general direction of the cement beyond our bare feet.
I was methodical. Darlene was sloppy. The pale, rice paper skin on the seeds, I thought, would doom the whole operation from the start. I stripped it carefully away with the nonexistent edges of my chewed-down fingernails. Once in a while, it came away in a minute sheet, leaving me with a wriggling sense of satisfaction. Darlene refused any work beyond snapping the neck or sometimes squeezing the seed out between her fingers. She was growing bored.
“We should just plant them all,” she said.
She made a sudden move to scoop up our pile. I’d just coaxed the translucent sheet free of the seed in my hand. Her impatience stopped the wriggle dead in its tracks.
“We can’t. They need space and water,” I protested, “Their own water. We need to pick the best one.”
It’s what we had agreed. It’s what we had planned, but Darlene’s fist was closing around the pile. A few seeds squirted out between her white knuckles and bounced away. Those that didn’t were crushed under her bare foot as she quickly scuttled into a crouch.
She clawed at the flagstone with her free hand. Her longer nails caught at the thick plastic my dad had laid out underneath to keep the weeds from growing up between the flat, irregular rocks.
“This won’t tear anyway,” she snapped. She thrust her hand toward the house in a gesture of disgust. Her tight fist opened and the remaining seeds pattered like unexpected rain against the window of my sister’s basement bedroom. “This is dumb.”
“Dumb,” I echoed. I set the last of the seeds delicately on the window sill, trying and failing to keep the gesture casual.
“Let’s go do something,” she demanded as she shoved her feet into her thongs.
“Yeah. Okay.” I pushed myself up.
I searched blindly with one foot, then another as I hurried to find my own pair, even as I kept my eye on Darlene. She’d leave me behind if I wasn’t quick enough, if I let her out of my sight. I found the sandals, deep under the bush where she’d thrown them, laughing as she did. I moved to hurry after her, sparing barely a glance for the lone seed on the windowsill. The best one. The one I would not plant.
This is super dumb, but I am brain dead from grading all weekend. Based on a thing I saw while walking the dog. There’s a photo credit I can’t quite make out, but the artist’s signature seems to be Nikkolas Smith, aka something? This is an entwined.
Title: Unite
WC: 67
In watercolors, masked,
Douglass lies in the yard,
his mind a thunderstorm.
Such callous disregard.
Really, you might have asked
the Valentine to warm
the bones the canvas keeps
pressed to autumn’s dry grass.
While your fragrant tea steeps
the elm’s skittering swarm
whispers to him the brass
laments of summer’s end.
I wonder, has he basked
long where the clouds portend
the present trapped in pasts
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 