Tag Archives: prose poem

Cupcake Windchime

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Her Cam Girl name was Cupcake Windchime, and boy, could she ever dangle. She was a dangler, because she had sex in the woods or else she could chill. She could hang, @petergriffin-studmode69 had put it. And she tells us where to put it, he nodded to his old poodle in the corner.

Her parents had looked at her screaming twisting body and named her Loretta. They thought she would take on the name like a dough, but Loretta never took. Loretta was in a fluorescent kitchen by six am, whipping a cupcake batter into shape. She did not feel like Loretta- she wanted to be the cupcake. At the first opportunity, she was cupcakelover12@hotmail.com. Then, icedcupcake86, semi-professionally. And now, she supposed, her reasons were spiritual.

She never signed off the chat before 4am. That’s when you got the real freaks. She woke up at 2pm every day, without setting any alarms. In her mornings, the soft tinkling of chimes seemed to follow her around the house. Looking down at her ankles, she’d see the circle of thread and the knot. The attached pieces doing the tinkling were just plain-old cutlery.

Cupcake shook her head, bubbling over in a big laugh. Same dick different day, she said to the coffeemaker, and it bleeped its red eye, snarling out a few more drops of decaf. She grabbed the mug, and with it in one hand, and her hairbrush in the other, Cupcake climbed the stairs to her office.

When she walked in the room, a man jumped up from the desk chair. He landed on his feet, cat-like, facing the window. Legs spread apart and tensed. His audible breaths came like popcorn popping and she couldn’t see his right arm. His black leather jacket was turned towards her. Cupcake screamed and flung the mug across the room. It missed the intruder completely, breaking into shards and splashing its contents on the wall and window. The man threw his head back and cried out. She felt his whole body clenching- the sensation rocketing through her seemed both erotic and holy- driving at last into the buried pink nerve heart of each one of her teeth. Cupcake screamed out once more, then fell silent.

The man began lowing like a cow in heat. His bald head ran into a pink folded nape, reddening steadily.

“Spread those butterfly lips for me, chica, how ’bout it?”

How did you get in here? Cupcake asked. She watched in terror as a thin ray of moisture crept up on the air, her tongue ran along her bottom lip without realizing it.

He had said it all without turning around.

“Chica, I bet you’d do it with dirt in your mouth. You wouldn’t refuse me. Even if I sat your ass in a puddle right before.” He laughed- a high aluminum whisking sound that reminded Cupcake of a deli slicer. Her mood darkened, and she pictured pushing a great tube of salami into the path of a blade.

The black leather jacket began to shake, reveling in the bloodpump pleasure of its own lewdness. The right arm was again wrenched out of sight. Before Cupcake could speak, he had zipped his fly and was making a break for it! His legs swung up over the windowsill and in a flurry of chimes he was gone.

It was a long time before Cupcake could move. When she finally did, she walked over to the desk and unplugged the computer. Unplugged the webcam. Maybe she should take the night off. Maybe it was time for a different career altogether. Loretta, her mother wrote on lunchboxes, Loretta, at the top of her papers. Cupcake looked over at the kit, lying open on the desk, and her arms and face began to itch, itch, itch.

She carried the desktop over to the window, and, ever so carefully, pushed it over the edge.

Music Bit My Mouth Open

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The whining cars up on the hill are missing home. They beg, where is our tomb? The answer shudders underground and in my hands are flowers. And beside me is all my family standing in a Domino row.

If I combine the only witness, slump his tongue right under mine…

Afraid to feel without a thudding chest to get the blood out. And. Tastes like clockwork, works like climate change. How? Press a thumb to my lips, taste the hard-won tip of a bee-stung corn. Size of grapefruit. Lanced on my abdomen.

Come up the riverbank, my seasick carp.

The night that

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The night that I turned thirteen was the same night that the old man down the street died and took up skateboarding and was found almost three weeks later, down by the tracks with canary-yellow fingers and a drug habit that maybe he was just experimenting with them at my age.

The night that she locked her daughter out of the house happened to be the same night that the policeman found a loaded gun in the mailbox of the neighbour’s house, which was chaotic and boarded-up during the day and where a thin woman with blue hair lay on a mattress full of wet wounds with her ear to the floor.

The night that my father lit the corner of his apron on the gas stove, threw it on the burner on his way into the fridge for another beer, looking at me and my mother from across the city where he held the people while they shivered, having to face the snarling waste of their lives, and having to resign from the police force and shake hands with the insurance representative all in one day, and having to look himself in the eye and make a promise to still believe that it mattered if you killed a spider, that it mattered if instead you blew it lightly off your palm and out of the window into the night.

Nine Shapes of One Woman

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A favorite short story is about a woman who climbs the stairs in her building, with much difficulty.

The short story is about a woman who wishes her husband didn’t take her for granted.

This short story is about a woman who has to drive her husband’s Mercedes Benz from her exclusive rich upper class area through the poorer districts of Kingston, Jamaica to deliver the car to her husband at his factory on the other side of the city.

This short story is about a woman who suspects her husband is cheating on her.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story is about a woman who is driven into madness because of a rest cure that gives her no room for excitement, change or work – including writing.

This short story is about a woman who suffers from poverty and borrows a necklace from a friend for the ball.

This short story is about a woman who thinks back…

This short story is about a woman who thinks back.

The short story is about a woman who receives the news her husband dies and she gets really happy, she closes herself in her room and starts dreaming about her new life.

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Kate Chopin Story of an Hour
Robin Black Divorced, Beheaded, Survived
Erin Wilson comment published on PB Works
Jack Erickson Perfect Crime
Hazel D Campbell See Me in Me Benz and Ting
Diddl WordReference.com Forums
Anon Bookbite, booktrust PDF

On 9.18.14 I googled “short story is about a woman who”. The first sentence of the abstract of the first nine links (sourced respectively) made a sort of poem.

you’re welcome

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Out of a long list of lovers
Someone’s neck smelled like gingerbread.

Yes, it is possible for someone to follow you down the elevator
There is such a thing as laundry room etiquette-
flip through a magazine and know it.

There is half of a welcome mat outside my door
I put the other half where I jump off the balcony.

I am on the eighth floor and the squirrels still find me
They are welcome because I am nuts.

Relocation

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Our city becomes another’s city and they don’t even live here.

Our city becomes another city that will one day glow, for miles underwater.

Our city has strategically-planned streets, and accidental cobblestones. The neighborhoods have their symbols, their light-pole banners, their car washes and coffee shops. Clogged drains and stray dogs and condos and bullfrogs. A little fence to keep the heart in. A garden. Ten Thai restaurants in a row. A bus stop and a newspaper on every homeless porch.

The neighborhoods remain separate, or they collide. Some are ramming into each other, smash-mixing, in the time it takes one body to fall from the observation deck.

The streets below the streets are daunting, gurgling with sewage. A black-gloved hand motions outside a window. People are coughing, steaming into each other’s faces on the subway. No one has a face unless it is cut out of a magazine.

I moved out of the city. Now, my neighbor is the one whose name I forget every other conversation. His neighbor is me, and a young family with closed blinds and a yard full of broken plastic. We circle each other like dogs, not saying anything. But the truth is that we live with our families and this is a nice neighborhood, close to schools and shopping.

I moved out of the city and now I don’t even live here.

My neighbor remembers how bright his city glowed too.
Our sons are jerks and we are embarrassed by what we thought we knew.

 

This poem of mine was just published on uutpoetry. so this is basically a cross-blogging platform #reblog.

2 Pigeons

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We stood, hand in hand, two pigeons on a live wire

when time edged in, under the door like a folded rug.

The neighbourhood cats circling, tails twining below

they stopped at once, to lie on their backs and open

their jaws wide as whales. Our skin prickled with fright

under our feathers and we twisted our heads

all the way around and looked down at them-

their pink-ribbed mouths reminded us

of our bubblegum-thin lungs. Age came to us,

grayed us and curled around us on the wire before

 

the cats left us alone.  

Whiteflesh

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I went to your lifeguard job.

Asking if you wanted to show
me your mussels – you know what
I mean – said yes as you
clamped a hand around your pipefish,

said yes to the whitecap wave
of your shoulders – I mean it –
pinched by the unwelcome mitten crab
then, going out with the tide
and coming in, and even then

to come upon fluorescent monsters, inkling
a newborn squid- that ancient tingling.