Category: Miz Q
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Being a Bit Backwards with Miz Quickly
Slips It’s all so odd, they thought, as if I were wasted scenery. Their failed passion. I was scuttled there for a while, my own narrative movement, and they looked at me like a foreign religion. You find that there’s nowhere to hide in an array of silence, like when Mum hid away all my…
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Miz Quickly Celebrates Bloomsday
Bloomsday I’d triumphed over that hill, the one I could never manage when the weather welded my joints, and now I stood there in a cold squint of low setting sun. Directly south was Spain. East was France. West was home – but it’s a distance too far no matter how far away west is – there’s nothing…
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Recipe Swap with Miz Quickly
I. Not Quite Summer We launched into those days like uninterrupted pages, iced the sky blueberry and jalapeño hot, dipped our spoons into molten fudge on ice cream. And we were just warming up. II. Pickled No matter how you slice it it’s still a cucumber, and I feel as white and tender as those…
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A Little Bit of Drab-Peculiar for Miz Quickly
Miz Quickly is counting down from 7 (this is 6) until she closes shop, calls early doors, and goes fishing. Or plays baseball, possibly. I don’t think she’ll be using a bicycle though; Fred has it, and he’s disappeared into a low horizon. Anyway, the Miz wants drab. Peculiar. Mundane. I give you a paper…
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Dreaming with Miz Quickly
A Tin Wind Rattled I disown these homeless dreams, these friendless and wandering merry bands plucking at my broken strings. And whose familiar voice rings lost — those words, noisy as a tin wind rattled. Dreams — a fractured beauty scenting a broken night. And then its final moments fade, scatter mute as stones. To…
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Less Than 20 Questions for Miz Quickly
It’s a Very Short Duration I’m like a tiller. I’ve learnt to live with stones, keep a course of steps to climb, my personally chiselled architecture, the pain makes me feel alive, and I dig my boots in for the duration. I chat with the neighbours, “How are you?” I say — good manners are…
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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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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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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 