Category: prose
-
0311: dVerse Quadrille
The Shrilling that storm left us chilly mornings,hedgerows more thorn than leaf, and every bird, insect,winged or walking shrilling with sound. I scarcely moveshould they ceaseand fall into quietness. but they sing,so persistentand insistent. T’is joy, by my own creation. Written for dVerse Poets and De’s Quadrille #259 (44-words excluding the title) including the word…
-
0211: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Heist a double Six this week The Heist — Episode 6: Another Door in the Wall The gargoyle on the right is still quibbling with the Soup Gobbler on his smartphone — “no, not that wall, the other wall” — when the signal breaks into static and dies exactly as we step through the…
-
0111: Samhain
Air Won’t Hold Her this air won’t hold leaves,it is to watch a thousandsouls falling. wind.unstitched. I am allof my ancestors. it is as she said,to hold darknessis your last veil. this is the lastof eight days, of Samhain. I remember the yearit snowedon Samhain, the dark arms of treeswidespread. I walked in my footstepsback…
-
Stream of Consciousness
Don’t Swallow Your Chewing Gum (in the style of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom’s interior monologue) Woke from a dream those sounds of late night coming in through the cracked window coldish air and a cat prowling the street its voice tightening up into an air-raid siren like what we had on top of my elementary…
-
28.10: A Six – SSC&B The Heist
The Heist (episode 5) Dinner with the Soup Gobbler “I took it from a reclamation yard on the East Side,” the Soup Gobbler says when Chris admires the long wooden table, dark and scarred enough for a medieval feast; “you mean an antique shop,” says the gargoyle on the left, grinning, “you filched it from…
-
27.10: Six Sentence Story
Of Wood and Biblichor la bibliothèque – l’Université de Montpellier It’s a strange wistfulness, old libraries. Outside, the heat made the cobbles seem to rock underfoot, and sometimes the sun struck my eyes so directly that I went momentarily blind; but inside, the air was cool and loose, light met the floor at different angles,…
-
27.10: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #12 (catch-up with all episodes here) I obey the conservator for exactly twenty-three minutes, which is long enough to find an old manila envelope, write DO NOT OPEN on it in block capitals, and place the spiral lock inside as though firm handwriting has ever saved a woman from herself. The…
-
24.10: Stream of Consciousness
It’s stormy. Windy. Rainy. Well, windy is putting a British edge on the word; it’s 75mph gusts and 50mm of rain in twelve-ish hours or so, rain going sideways, upwards occasionally by the look of it, although technically I suppose that’s still downwards eventually, everything comes down eventually, except perhaps petrol prices — not my…
-
21.10: dVerse Haunted
Two Poems for the Rain Woman I. Rock-Steady Ice Rock-steady ice.That is the precise truth of her.Not a storm that rages,but a glacier that’s settled in the marrow.The rain inside is ancient, patient,frozen at its core.She is not haunted.She is holding a winterthat no spring can reach. II. The Weather Within The sky is mute,…
-
20.10: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #11 (catch-up with all episodes here) Dear Ms Macleod, thank you for the photographs, which show what appears to be a folded letter secured by a spiral lock, though I agree the name is unhelpful, since the finished packet looks less like a spiral than a paper tongue stitched through its…
