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Miz Quickly’s Day 25: Value
I’ll Tell You the Value of … that 2nd week of August; it was all life should be. All I wanted. Sitting there on a seawall, on a Monday, on a tide-swept step, algae-green, emerald-slick, still slippery from the retreating sea. And I’m a slow spoon into gelato. Never had a thrill quite like this…
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Twiglet #8 “Folding Chairs”
The Art of Being a Chair Measured and meticulous, we put them there, lined them up like a keyboard, organised in tidy rows of rules, standing, whalebone stiff, and I bet that van Gogh’s chair was never this breathless. But there’s no funeral here, no sermon, no ceremony — just a room, waiting for the…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 24: Spiral
When Twiddling Your Thumbs Just Won’t Do I’ve emptied the fridge. There’s a shallow pool of water on the floor, and a repairman is due in an hour. Appointment times are an opportunity to fidget, so I rearrange cupboards, restock tinned veg and beans, realign spice jars, fill canisters with rice, with flour, with sugar,…
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dVerse Haibun #29
That Dog And your little dog, too. Toto. Totally Toto. Barking at wind and witches and straw and wizards. I’m not an enthusiast of cute and fluff noise. Terriers — too small to know their place. No perspective. A constant scurry, and never waiting for their own tail. My dog never barked at wind. Nor…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 22: An Object
That Dog And your little dog, too. Toto. Barking at wind and witches and straw and wizards. I’m not an enthusiast of fluff and noise. Terriers — they’re too small to know their place. No perspective. A constant scurry. No waiting for their own tail. My dog never barked at wind. Nor witches. Far too…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 21: Summer
Summer Feet My feet have a shallow hold on summer. Clean as sea air. Cleaned by sea waves. Sand cool as periwinkle blue, and days sweet as pears. It waits. There on the calendar. Just a few pages away. written for Miz Quickly’s Day 21: Summer
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Miz Quickly Day 20: Dialogue
A Minute’s Deliberation ‘You look like a hundred year old piece of Gorgonzola,’ she says, ‘or a cabbage leaf.’ Five minutes later, she is still talking but I’ve forgotten to listen by then. There’s a lot of mileage in a nod and a smile. This is a woman who I’d introduce as my friend, but…
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dVerse Parallelism & Repetition
20th January: West Sussex the sun rises across the leaves, daffodils sprout, a green as tight as clasped hands, and I’m half-hid behind a steaming cup of tea. and I woke with a headache today, Peder’s caught The Queen’s Cough, the dog’s nerves are humming, and I’m at war with bone-breaking cold. and there was…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 19: Aubade
The Duck Down Blues Farewell, my pillow, whose duck down seeps into fringe-edged seams. Feathers, a gander up my nose, and scribes itself into poetry that reaps and sows my kind weathered dreams. This old pillow, filled with worlds of dust, dead skin and mites, and slobber spit. Sunrise parts us — farewell fair remnants…
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Miz Quickly’s Day: 18 & dVerse “Artisans”
Meatballs and Fish Scales Nothing’s more Italian than meatballs, Mum says. She’s holding a salmon by the tail and scraping off its scales. They’re spraying all over the place like unravelling sequins. Meatballs were invented by the Italians, she adds, in that I know everything about everything tone — and she’s hunched over the old…
It's Still Life 