Prose Poems

Here are some prose poems/flash fictions:

Tsunami
I had a dream about a tsunami, but that’s not the important part. The important part is when we got up to the tower and I still told you I didn’t want you to hold me. I’m not sure who you were and eventually we got up and watched people out the window, dying.

The Things that Leave
I think about the things that leave and the time I was twelve and asked my dad about the meaning of life and he said a lot of people have killed themselves asking that question. The Polly Pocket company stopped making their dolls so small because little children would swallow them and they would be lost. In elementary school a Native American man wearing a feathered headdress came and told us that nothing is ever really lost, things just go elsewhere. At the time it made sense, but all he really talked about was things I couldn’t see anyways, like things we emit when we start fires. I should’ve asked him about bones.

We all know I am talking about your leaving, but we’re acting as if I’m not. I saw you, up in the air. You were sitting next to a pretty English girl and I got stuck next to the large man leaking out of his seat. We watched movies without each other, predicting that would be how it was after you left.

My grandmother and my dog died four months apart. My dog lives in a cardboard box that used to be in the living room, but I haven’t seen it awhile. My grandmother and I weren’t even close when she was alive. I cannot help but compare the two. Two years later when my grandfather died, we dumped him out of a boat and into the water. It was said that the sun hit his body as he entered and created a swimming form, but I wasn’t in the boat, couldn’t see into the water. The Native American man would talk about how now he was in the water with the fishes, which I think was the point really.


Figure Drawing 2
I call myself a feminist, but in figure drawing my people have no faces. Only smudged breasts and accentuated hips and I see for the first time how I am seen.

Up There We Wouldn't Be Like This
He says, I want to go live on top of a mountain. She says, Why and can I come with? He says, no, because then it wouldn’t really be a mountain. She says, define the word mountain. He says, mountain has the same definition of everything else: continuous and cyclical. She says, when my mother was getting surgery on her cancer, I met a boy who got drunk going down a river and driving home ran into a semi and became a paraplegic. He says, what does that have to do with anything? She says, in the winter it was snowing and our legs formed caves in the white cliffs. There is something desperate about bodies being close in the cold. A matter of survival that doesn’t exist in the summer, when we pull apart, sticky. He says, on a mountain, the height affects everything, including cooking time and temperature. Up there, we wouldn’t be like this. She says, the thing about traveling down a shallow, narrow creek is that you hit things. Logs slide up against your backside that rests in the water. If you’re not careful you’ll hit the trees that dangle down. In some part the water is too shallow to drift and you have to stand and walk across the slippery rocks. I lost a shoe doing this.