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dVerse Haibun #28 and Miz Quickly’s Day 11 Image
Burlesque Girls I still think about that cafeteria, those downtown girls with bright red lips and hair sleek and slicked into ponytails. They slid like valley fog, slow and easy into the gaps of long leather booths. I watched, quiet as a speck of dust as they sipped Pepsi and ate and laughed, and to…
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Miz Quickly Day 10: Letter A
Another And and and and, as if ands tie everything together, and we’re looking at him, kinda askance, and waiting for another and, because they always ride in tandem, like stuttering eyebrows, and we wait, listening, and and and, he says, and that’s all we hear because we’ve gone deaf to any other word he…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 9
Five and Half Crows My view is a windowpane — up the street, and then back down. It’s Monday, which means the neighbours have filled up their charity bags, and set them at the curb for pickup today. Sod’s Law, it’s started raining early, and probably will do all day long. The charity shop hates…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 8: An Unknown Man
A Partial Memory I can’t remember the street name, but there was an antique shop on one corner, can’t recall the shop name, and there was a stop sign, leaning, as if fleeing, after being hit by a feeble drunk with a baseball bat, and the shop had broad milky windows, air-tight and sealed by…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 7: A Moment with the Mechanic
The Mechanic He’s explaining how it all works, why that yellow light comes on, when it resets and regenerates, how it clears. It’s all about this diesel particulate filter. He keeps saying DPF and DPF, and I realise it’s one of those things condensed into three letters, which makes everyone outside his circle of friends…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 6 (take two)
A Simple Life I am at home on this fertile foot, my own place above the sea. This is my small plot, veiled sombre and fair. I hold it close as life, a treasured lock of hair. And I tend it, as if in its obedience. Taking to its roots and tubers, the carrots and…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 6 & dVerse Pub Form
Brushed Off This was his landscape, that young boy who played the streets, whistled tunes and ran barefoot. Happy ignorance, his laughing days, each morning caution raced him hand in hand. And he brushed off death when he took to chasing trains, that young boy who walked the tracks, always laughing, tempting fate. …
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Twiglet #5: A Cold Radiator
And That’s All I Know I was born in a pocket-sized skinny town that was pelted with a great deal of want. Our neighbour was a large man, reminded me of a cold radiator, or a kettle full of thunder. I recall that he had impeccable aim; he could pee on a gnat before it…
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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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dVerse: New Beginnings
It’s Pleasant Enough You and I fell into this notion of newness, me tucked into your fluid surface of thought, floating away easy as water-logged idleness, and you’re a reflection in the eyes of stars, I say, and I’m a silhouette, or a ripple in the bathtub. It’s all very new, new as your touch;…
It's Still Life 