Month: Jun 2016
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Miz Quickly Has a Few Words
A Town Like Ours This town’s worthy of hate, its valley cloud-soaked, flowed with rain and smoke, and dingy as old grey sheets, a bed unloved, a corner where the sun never shines bright enough, where bells plead and peal plain expectation off-key, off the back of war that emptied our town of hope but…
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Miz Quickly on Chances
What Are the Chances What were the chances that I’d survive bitterness, outlast my misspent childhood. What chance was there that I’d find space to dry my wings, to fly before I learned to accept life’s slips and pits and stumbles, and eventual fall. And lately I pray for belief in God’s goodness — that…
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dVerse Haibun #15
I am awake. I wake too early some days. No pattern – not just odd days, not just even days, or days with certain vowels or syllables. Some mornings I seem to wake in a neon blast, a flickering slap. A toothpick in the eye. My bones are agitated the way Jackson Pollock’s paintings sets…
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Rattling Along with Sunday Whirl
“Honey is the only food that doesn’t spoil” — anon Cars rattle, and that could move my dad to break into a howling burst, an echoing drawl of purpled complaint. And my sister and I, we’re split apart by pillows and sleeping bags because we encroach on each other like a red tide, and we’re…
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Miz Quickly on Marilyn Monroe
On a Slip of Dark She reminded me of a little bird, perched on black and white. A feminine sea, inconsistent as sunshine, and she was stucco pale on a shriek of dark. That unbalancing dark — follows you around; prey in the background. Like a stage. Like a shadowy prop. And it would stutter,…
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A Diminished Hexaverse for Poetic Bloomings
Beyond Rust and Red My pen grows silent as a silhouette. I write of life, write with dues of truth’s bones. Beyond rust and red. My first poem was red like that. An untidy dark appetite. Like father’s final words, gone unheard. He slept, We slept. Silence. Poet form: “Diminished Hexaverse” — A…
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For Miz Quickly ‘s Old Coin
Salt and Lot’s and Lots Saturday morning was library day, and on the way home, two or three blocks past the Holy Blessed Heart Catholic church, was a tavern with red neon lettered signs scrawled across the windows. I can’t recall its name; we weren’t allowed to look directly at it. And Mum, in her…
It's Still Life 