Job Application

Position: Flash Fiction 55 co-host.

Qualifications: I once met G Man in person. I am fluent in Englash.

Job history: fast food, phone sales, community service.

Why I want to host the 55: Because G Man threatened to expose my old sea monkey scam asked me to!

Co-applicants: Mama Zen, Saver of the Universe.

References: G Man, Kwame Kilpatrick, Babs St. Argent, Catblossom.

______

There is nobody who can host the 55 like our G Man can, but while Galen blazes new trails, it would be a shame to let the 55 die. 

So, on Saturday, May 3rd, it will take its place as a regular feature at The Imaginary Garden With Real Toads! (During April, The Garden is taken up with NaPoWriMo.) 

To keep the 55 fires burning during April, I will be hosting here on Tuesday, April 8th, and Mama Zen will be hosting at Another Damn Poetry Blog on Tuesday, April 22nd. 

Forgive the Tuesdays...I didn't want to compete with The Garden, where there is already a regular Friday feature, including my own. G Man put on his funny Pope hat and gave this his blessing! He better...he asked me to do this!

Photo: My beloved Aunt Lucy, posing in her car with Catblossom's dear old grandmother, "Muffy". 

Zulu Cat and Her Many Disciplines

I was at my doctor's office,
in the waiting room,
gestating the latest creature within me,
when the door opened and she invited me in.

Her fern plants swayed as if we might soon be plucking doubloons
from chests heaved up on the surf from storm-sunk galleons.
Did I mention that my doctor is from some island?
Off the coast of Spain?
Majorca, I believe.
Maybe Easter Island,
because I have sometimes interrupted her at her carvings,
and had to stand there under the withering stare
of some ancestor or other.

My first inkling that she was in a rare mood
came when I noticed that she had become a cat.
A gray cat, specifically,
or was she tortoise shell?
The light kept changing, due to the swaying ferns.
She meowed, but I plumbed her meaning immediately:
she was in the mood!

Now, you will argue that I was irrational,
deluded, hallucinating, or worse.
I tell you, I am as precise as a court reporter.
I relate only facts, 
repeatable data from the snow globe of my therapy.
How I love the little cabin inside it,
the fireplace,
the polar bear rug!

Setting aside her Zulu mask and disguise,
my doctor demanded of me a tribute, a token,
a task to be undertaken,
if I truly wanted to be hers.
(In a therapeutic setting.
Under control of protocol.
In the name of science!)
How incredibly thrilling it was,
to see her jump onto the desk and switch her tail!

I crossed my legs,
I looked shyly down,
then up again,
my head tilted to one side,
my tongue playing at the corner of my lips.
I was a woman singularly eager to dispense with boundaries,
and to publish my name into the text of her desire!

Coyly, she asked me my name.
Constance, I told her.
Beelzebub, Candy, Electra, Spuddy, Spock,
anything you like, babe.
She wrote them all down.
Tell me about your dreams, she said.
You. They are all of you.
Tell me about your mother.
You.
Tell me about your father.
You.
Imago?
You.
Fetish? Obsession? Idee fixe???
You, honey. All of them.

With that, she stopped being a cat, and returned to being a woman.
Doubloon? she said, offering me one.
I took it and bit the edge. Real gold!
She beat her spear against her stretched hide shield:
boom boom boom, like our hearts!
She had a Rorschach birthmark on her thigh,
and I kissed it as if it were the Blarney Stone.
Hypnotize me, baby, I said.
Already done! she assured me,
and from the things I went on to say to her while I was under,
she is clearly the marvel of the swinging watch,
my counter-transference chica 
with the cool cat claws and the sexy librarian smile.
______

for my BFF Hedgewitch's word list challenge at Real Toads!

Death In Early Spring

I was born on a Sunday in late spring, nearly summer,
into a world already in motion,
just another new leaf alive in the daylight.

I will die on a Thursday in early spring, barely gone from winter,
and I will leave a world that remains in motion,
expressing itself in all the wings and blooms that take my place.

I regret the things I longed for that did not, or cannot now happen.
There will not be another love,
or any of the new beginnings I always depend upon
to assuage the losses and disappointments.

Still, I have lived pretty bravely.
I haven't been afraid, in the end,
to put all my colors on the canvas.

All of my life, I have felt the lack of something or someone,
always hidden around some corner I could never negotiate,
just out of sight,
too far to call.

In a little while,
I will find myself the one called,
by a voice so beloved and remembered
that it will astonish me--
so much, that I may hardly notice
that I have left,
and the world goes on.
_____

 

Brick & Mortar, Beat & Breath

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's: And Three Stories 

I used to live
there,
and there,
and there.

Sometimes, 
at odd times,
I dream of them--
that I am still living there,
with whomever I lived with,
slept with,
wounded with
there.

Look, here is the street
where I walked late one night,
my face wet with tears
when my marriage was breaking up.
And here,
here is the busy road where my screams stopped the cars
when my baby ran out among them.

Here is the table
where we ate Sunday breakfast.
I was doing impressions and had my ex and our son in stitches.
Here is another table
in the same house,
where I left my ring in a drawer
because it had lost its meaning.

Here is the yard
where my older brother put his football helmet on my three year old head,
and our dad snapped a picture.
I was bent at the knees, laughing so hard.
I could hardly see!
Behind me are the evergreen trees, new then,
that would grow so high and wild they finally had to be replaced.

Here is the door
where I carried in a four month old puppy,
to meet his new brother and sister.
They are gone now, and the puppy is a frail old man.

Loving brick and mortar seems absurd,
but we do it.
Loving anything with a heartbeat,
anything that needs to breathe the air,
anything that eventually will pass away,
seems crazy,
but we do it
again and again,
because it is worse to bear one's heartbeat,
one's breath,
one's dwindling days
alone. 
_______

for Play It Again, Toads #3. I chose Kerry's "The Story."

The Feast of Saint Creola

We are the adherents,
the Sisters of Saint Creola,
Our Lady of the Falling Piano.

We are a strictly female enclave,
here at the edge of a continent,
at cliffside,
with the surge of the waves below us
and within us.

Today we honor our blessed Saint C.,
she of the fair face and the wise word.
Born in the year 1899, she remains beautiful
in appearance,
in utterance,
and in her endless inspiration of us, her Sisters.

"Soooo, what's chocolate?" she demands in her honey voice,
entering the room like light from a taper.
If the Pope could see us,
in our unconventional garb,
and our unconventional affections,
he would want to be one of us, I feel certain.

Blessed Saint Creola teaches us that God 
is a waitress
in a coffee shop;
an expert at creating chalk menu boards,
and at assuaging that indescribable homesickness
we all carry inside us like some melancholy luggage
we don't know how to set down.

Today there will be blends from Turkey and the Orient;
chocolate from Europe and from two old hippies
who have a store down the coast a little way.
There will be the cerulean sky
and the indigo waves.
There will be the white stucco of our convent,
and the toasted tan of the cliffs,
the high grasses of late summer,
and our warm skins.

Today we celebrate Creola,
living saint and mother hen to all of us.
We are off the grid,
off the radar,
off the chain.
Have a chocolate truffle,
have a Girl Scout cookie.
The sun is right at home in the sky, her hammock,
and the pianos have long ago flown over the cliff 
and into the sea,
like gulls.
_____

for Out of Standard at Real Toads.

Terra Firma

I stopped the car,
got out of the car,
and started walking, barefoot, with my shoes in my hand.

It was early evening, in summer,
with a little breeze,
and the scent of lilacs.

The road felt warm and rough and solid beneath my feet,
but not far below it was just dirt and the roots of trees.
Above my head,
the branches of trees.

I thought, what if I were a woman going somewhere,
with my shoes in my hand, down this road?
What if I were a woman walking away,
putting space between myself and something else?

Over my head were the branches of trees.
In one of the trees was a red-winged blackbird and his mate, watching.
I stopped to look up at them; I turned in a circle,
beneath the leaves, and the birds nesting there.

What if I were a red-winged blackbird, or lilacs in a field?
Here I am, walking, but I don't know where.
Above my head, sky, beneath my feet, roots.
I didn't bring any shoes.
There never was a car.
_______

Book Review: "Love's Harvest"

Love's Harvest by Peggy J. Herring

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Oh dear. Where to start with this mess? First of all, even before I get to the writing itself, I have to mention that throughout this book, paragraphs end and begin in mid-sentence. Also, quotes seem to double as apostrophes. Doesn't anyone at Bella Books proof read?

Now then, the story. There actually is a kernel of a story here, but it is buried under a dung heap of terrible writing. I have read Herring several times before, and don't know what happened to her here; she is usually good for a reliable, if unspectacular, lesbian romance novel. This time, however, her characters are cardboard, the dialogue is wooden, the sex scenes are tepid and predictable, and the big climactic scene is more Three Stooges than suspense.

As if all that were not enough, Herring unerringly chooses to be vague when she should be specific. It never becomes clear exactly what one of the major characters does at her job. Oh, she reads files and makes calls, but it never gets any more detailed than that. That's just an example. The whole book is general and vague, more like an outline than a finished novel. But wait! There's more! Herring's word choices are comical at times. For example, her characters don't "think" something, they "reason". Over and over, she uses rather mechanical sounding language when plain language would be better. "A gentle kiss after a regular breathing pattern was restored" sounds like something from an engine manual.

It's awful. Don't read it. I can't believe she put her name to this nonsense.



View all my reviews