I think it’s fair to say that this week’s challenge has been the most challenging to date. I am judging by the amount of participants who told me the villanelle form had stretched them, as it did me: the first villanelle I wrote did not follow the traditional rhyme scheme, so I had to write…EIF Poetry … Continue reading EIF Poetry Challenge #13: The Results — Experiments in Fiction
a bowlegged woman and a woe betide gent and a worrisome teen with marker pens, come suddenly through the door. Over the rim of his jar, he decides them, "a very rum number indeed."
The back lane, this new-year dawn, is littered, bleakly - tumbled bins, spent bottles, knuckled tabs, sodden boxes; hound shites, plastic wraps, a quilted headboard, yellowed hand towel; wrapping-paper tumbleweeds troubling parked cars; a bloody gown of herring gull (gutting something); and the last, the very last, or the first, Christmas tree, skulking and skittling … Continue reading The Wronged Tree.
in this narrow kitchen i dream a wild life with you. out there, he breathes. he loves you. i taste you and i believe, every evening, in everything. i don't know how we got here. but if this is where you find me, this narrow kitchen, with my heart on my sleeve. just whistle. .
they are selling salt and gold. do we care, my darling? mined from the mountain of the soul, beneath the fingernails of children. beneath the gaze of waged men, beneath the hourglass of women, the stalls are laid with mason jars and scales and ingots in glass cabinets. hark! the voices of the barkers trading … Continue reading Salt & Gold
i heard a man with a dry cough. i saw a dog with a leg hacked off. i forgot just what it was to wake up in a mess of hot cloth. the queen's speech don't cut it no more.
