manic pixie dream squirrel

Really love Twitter poems. This one’s by @paigebyerly: This Is Just To Say I have not responded / to your email/ that was in /my inbox

and which/ was probably/  pretty/  time sensitive 

Forgive me/  I am very overwhelmed right now/ and it looked so complicated/ and so long. This poem is, of course, an homage to William Carlos William’s famous poem, “This Is Just to Say”–– which is a hilarious and shady af poem about eating someone else’s plum in the fridge. 

"Fog" by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

* * * * *

“Fascism”

A fire spreads

with angry man words.

We stopped listening

for truth or meaning

in breathless reports

We can make the most of 

non-perishable food donations 

when you consider three things:

quality,

nutrition, and

usefulness.

____

They lay it on the ground, 

the anarchists––

and they start throwing it 

at our cops, 

at our police. 

And if it hits you, that’s worse 

than a brick

because it’s got force––

it’s the perfect size. 

It’s

like… 

made 

This is a flash fiction story, by Jonathan Cardew, published in 100 Word Story. It’s just a hundred words: someone finds a bone in an ash pile... witchy shenanigans ensue.

This story isn’t about how I poisoned Jackie Jemson in the fourth grade. This story isn’t about my fascination with an apothecary friar in the 1968 production of Romeo and Juliet. This story isn’t about how I meticulously peeled styrofoam labels off Very Fine Juice bottles, filled each with varying levels of well-water and Crayola watercolors, and placed them into the lacquered doll cupboard––as if each held a promise, a solution to my problems. This isn’t about Jackie’s mom calling at 3:45 PM on a summer Sunday to ask what I’d given her child. This isn’t about how she stayed on the line, the plastic yellow receiver swinging from its its cradle on the kitchen wall. This is about a child’s instinct to cower––thighs to chest, forehead to knees––as the hinges were ripped off the lacquered doll cupboard, as the glass jars exploded on impact and pastel water pooled across the laminate floor. 

Few queers, I imagine, would willingly answer a Craigslist ad for a basement apartment in the mountains of Jeffersonville, NC––but here we were: driving our harassed Toyota Camry up the steep gravel drive of Cranberry Lane. Neither Mandy nor I could have fully anticipated our landlady, Joyce–– but we had an inkling of her chaotic energy soon after our first phone call. During what should have been a five-minute phone call to schedule an appointment, this sixty-something mountain grandma glossed right over my explanation that we were a queer couple and proceeded to tell me about her brother (on the other side of the holler) who tried to cheat her out of her inheritance, about her youngest daughter who’d married a decent but distant man (making a slapshot living digging up ginkgo biloba root in her woods), about her eldest daughter (who also lived on the property with her two kids and their golden lab), and about a fraught relationship with her middle-daughter (who sometimes helped her clean houses but who no longer lived with Joyce because she “simply will not stay on her meds”). We left the call with a Saturday afternoon appointment and few other details about the place, other than the fact that Cranberry Lane is easy to miss, unless you keep an eye out for the row of six mailboxes that doot the foot of the drive. 

The road dead-ends into a freshly built country mansion with a wrap-around porch, surrounded by matching bungalows on all sides. Both my wife and I expected a petite, affluent lady who owned a cleaning service and a handful of rentals. Neither of us, I don’t think, expected the plump befreckled woman, towering over us at six-feet tall––whose dull gray roots peppered through a long since abandoned strawberry blonde dye job. Turns out we’d arrived at the property just minutes after Joyce, who had returned from a Saturday morning cleaning–– a shop vac and piles of cleaning supplies poured from her open Honda Civic hatchback onto the gravel driveway. 

Abandoning her hatchback and its contents, Joyce took us around the back of her house, kicked off her ruddy Asics at the front door, and keyed into a dark two-bedroom apartment. She’d barely crossed the threshold when her juvenile golden doodle, Doc, muscled past us into the basement apartment, leaving a trail of mud and twigs in his wake. Joyce had given up on wrangling the dog and, instead, ushered us from room to room at breakneck speed–– then stopped, suddenly in the RV-style kitchen to sermonize on septic-safe cleaning products. We watched red splotches spread across her face and neck as she decried previous renters, who “cost her thousands of dollars” by failing to notify her when the sump pump failed after a storm. “Pardon my saying so but there was... shit all over the yard. Feces everywhere.” 

And, with that, Joyce abruptly exited the apartment and began a wide-stride walking tour of her rental compound. Waving off the odd tenant as we passed, Joyce spun a story of a struggling single woman, whose husband left her right at “the change of life,” and who pulled herself up by her bootstraps with frugality (and, it seems, the hundreds of thousands of dollars it took to build a small housing complex on a remote mountain holler). All tenants must similarly value frugality, she explained, as all residents split the heating, water, electric, and internet bills. “I keep the thermostat at 68 degrees in the winter–– wear layers.” At that, Joyce abruptly returned to her husband (the catalyst for said frugality), who “had the gall to bring that woman into our home” this past Thanksgiving. Yes, ten years had passed, “but did he ever consider how his daughters would feel––no!” Standing on the hillside garden patch, our eyes darted to each other (and to our car), not thirty feet away. Surely, this tour had neared its end. Alas, no.

Joyce insisted that we also see the inside of her home (with its stacks of canned goods lining the walls, its pile of rolled up carpets in the entry, its two salt-water fish tanks in the living room, and its smell of cat urine and rotting compost). Offering us glasses of Crystal Lite and then quickly forgetting them in favor of a story about her “new truck driver beau,” Joyce began rifling through a kitchen cupboard filled not with drinking glasses but with stacks of lose paper. “My contracts,” she says, calling over her shoulder. Then, without ever checking our references or gauging our interest in the apartment, she retrieved her bifocals from behind a countertop compost bin, took a blue Bic from a coffee mug, and began to fill in our names onto a photocopied rental agreement–– taking this opportunity to share warn of the $525 penalty for breaking the year-long contract.