Category: Miz Q
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Miz Quickly’s Day 5: Limitations
A Withering Rain for example, he says, the rain drummed on small thunder, but we called the drought rain. The red ground naked by night — a fine drizzling, a withering rain. To dance, to dance, into all that falling and blowing at clouds, and men with mud faces spilling the air, and the mist…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 4: Unexpected Tales
The Night I Smiled at a Fox I saw a fox in the garden last night. It was the colour of rusty iron. Or Kenyan soil. Sturdy little thing with a long thick tail, just like the tail on Daniel Boone’s hat — Fess Parker’s Daniel Boone. On telly. When I was twelve or so, I…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 3: A-Not-Ghazal
Chairs Our chairs are wooden, straight-back and Puritan. There’s godliness in discomfort, or so I’m told. And to think that chair came from deep forest green. Its nose in the clouds, feet deep as a biblical read. I dust off its rungs once in a while, when I remember. Is that sloth…
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Day 2: Miz Quickly’s Inventive Momentum
The Momentum of a Long Thin Shadow I. It feels good to let my head go still, go quiet as dust. That’s why I walk. With direction. With momentum. Purpose. — toward a blue sky horizon, just beyond the red tiled roof of the house over there. Through a landscape damp with winter. And my…
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Day 1: A Bit More Quickly History
Into and Out of It Again Even the dogs hang on to their hunger, these wretched days of suspicion and selfish prayers. Last year we lit beacons to brighten dull skies as the news fell in and out of truth and harm. Now we hide our thoughts in our eyebrows, and long for some past…
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Day 1: A Little Music for Miz Quickly
I Made a Little Music …bought a piano, learned that my fingers no longer belong to me, but I can make a broad blade of grass whistle; it’s such a torturous sound, so I sip tea and hum delight, fold hankies into origami shapes. for Miz Quickly’s Day 1:
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Miz Quickly’s Limbo Week
Why My Favourite Sound is a Lawnmower As I recall it was the summer that dog bit me on the thigh — a black dog named Ought Not. The doc stitched me up with beige twisty string, like the thread that Mum used for sewing on my coat buttons. And all during that summer I…
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Pressed Between Estop and Ethiopia
Pressed Between Estop and Ethiopia I’ve never heard a cuckoo sing. I lost that moment of spring to the big city, to its noise, and roar and smoke and feet, which might explain why I press flowers and leaves between unabridged dictionary pages, (usually between estop and Ethiopia) in weighty books and scrapped paper, and…
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Miz Quickly’s Dishing Out Words
A Disturbing Paragraph from a Housewife’s Ecstasies Crane fly on the wall licking at grease, and a blueberry pie cooling on the pine table, you know the one – it has the Queen of Spades folded into fours so it stays level, won’t rock, the one in that corner; that always seems empty of air.…
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12th Night
12th Night a red-handed wind carries that sort of crow-black heat. a curious quiet that’s always just off the boil. a rapt listener; devourer of flush and glow; delver into sweeps and swarms. grabs and gasps. your ear. your neck. your heart. boils your bones whilst painting shadows wherever there’s a vacancy. heat, just heat.…
It's Still Life 