It's Still Life

I. (Miz Quickly’s Rainman) 

It’s Just Another Tale (except the moss is true)

There’s a man scraping moss
off the roof in balls the size of
cantaloupe, and his voice fills
the air with a flat tone song
in a foreign language, a song
he probably learned from his
grandpa, who learned it from
his grandpa dot.dot.and.so.on,
or from his grandma with her
ample bosom, oh woe are we,
which no other woman in the family
had the good fortune to inherit.

II. (Poetic Asides: Sweet) 

Just Another Conversation

Clatter of teaspoons and dishes.
Waiters in black cotton aprons.
Conversation rings out like violins.

An old woman wearing widow’s black
stares into white space — a space
between herself and two women
sitting nearby, too near for privacy.

And the one woman angles her fork
gently into her mille-feuille.

Sugar for breakfast, she says, sweet
as a fluttering soul, like god-sent sun.

The other woman holds a cigarette
in one hand, a glass of wine in the other,

Sugar will kill you, she says, sure as
gunshot. It’s shrieking scary stuff.

The old woman in black glances up.
My flat breasts scare me, she says.

III. (Twiglet: Soft Fruit) 

She didn’t much appreciate it —
Your tummy is as soft
as sweet fruit, he said.

---

These poems/prose are draft versions, written in participation of Miz Quickly’s prompts and Writers’ Digest (Poetic Asides) November poem-a-day challenge. The aim: to produce a chapbook for submission. ©Misky 2022 Shared with #amwriting on Twitter. AI artwork created using Midjourney.