Chelsea flash fiction, prose poetry

She Says by M.J. Iuppa

The recipe for lime Jello with canned peaches and shredded carrots is a family secret. She says this with a slight smile on her face as her pin-straight, mousy brown hair falls over her eyes. No one knows if it’s side salad or dessert, so it stays on the kitchen table weeping a bit in its green Pyrex bowl. She says this recipe is her growing up in the heartland. Still, she just couldn’t wait to leave her family; and now, they have left her, one by one, without a proper so long. This too is hard to swallow.

 

MJM.J. Iuppa’s fourth poetry collection is This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017). For the past thirty years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.

Chelsea flash fiction

My Mama Wanted a Zebra by Francine Witte

But all she got was a stupid cow.

So there she stands in the backyard, paintbrush in hand. Gotta make the best of things, she is muttering.

She stripes white paint on the side of the cow. The sirloin side. The part of a cow I have eaten hamburgers from.

The cow turns its still-cow head to her as if to say, paint me all you want, I’m still gonna moo and give milk.

Mama hears this cow thought loud and clear. She puts down the paintbrush and walks around to face the cow head-on. “Look,” she says out loud to the cow. “I could tell you stories of how pretty I was born. You can’t see it anymore.”

And then she says, “there was music in my fingers, that also got leaked out.”

Mama gives up and goes back to painting. You gotta give some things time, she is muttering. She decides if all else fails, she will have to take off her dress and show the cow the stripes that are painted on her own side.

 

FWitte

Francine Witte’s full length book of flash fiction, Dressed All Wrong for This, has just been published by Blue Light Press, where it was the first place winner for the Blue Light Press Award. Her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind, is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction. Her second full length collection of poetry, The Theory of Flesh, was recently published by Kelsay books. She lives in NYC.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

You Know This Has To Be True, Or Else You’ll Dissolve, Too by Hannah Grieco

Your four-year-old holds your cheeks tightly in his tiny hands and whispers, “Kill me, mommy.” You shake your head, no, never. You pull away and he screams, “I WANT TO DIE.”

Later, a diagnosis appears and you hate yourself, your parenting, everything you ever did and said that fragmented your child. You go back in time and place your hands over his. I will love you forever, you whisper. I’m your safe harbor, you say.

It takes years. It takes setting yourself on fire. It takes being almost positive you won’t live through this. It takes living through this. It takes emptying your charred body of all it knew and fire-proofing the remaining shell. Now you are ready to learn, to forget what you were taught before. Now you remember how to breathe, to walk, to smile cracked lips.

Your daughters wait at a distance, watch you burn and reemerge, your face the same but different. They mirror how you stand. How you hold out your arms. How you bury your dread and stay intact.

Were you ever a good parent? Was there one day you did this right? Where you held them close and whispered and it was enough, it was good, they felt loved?

You wake up in a panic, your youngest asleep curled into you, your dream about her older sister clogging your throat. The four of you stood in the backyard of a house you never owned. Your middle child screamed and tore out her hair. She slapped you across the face. She pulled a gun from her pocket and shot her big brother while he begged her to love him. She ran into the woods and you knew you would never see her again.

You pour water into the bowl of cereal. You burn the toast. The last thin thread connecting you to this kitchen, this house, pulls tight and then tighter. It will break any second.

You take your children to school, stopping for doughnuts on the way. The powdered sugar on your son’s upper lip is so perfect that you reach for it with the tip of your pointer finger. He ducks at the last minute and blows you a kiss. Offers you a bite, even though it’s his favorite, even though he’s starving.

For every down there is an up. For every dark hole, a ladder reaching toward a distant ball of something shimmering. You know this has to be true or else you’ll dissolve, too.

You listen as your children eat dinner and talk about their day. They laugh, tell stories about friends, complain about school. You hold your breath and incise this moment into something fleshy that now grows inside you. You repeat their words out loud to yourself so they don’t fade, but they are gone the next day. You poke the swollen scab to remind yourself that good things happen.

You kiss your husband for the first time in months.

You and your son in his big kid bed at 3AM, your phone and his iPad blending blue light, two islands, his hand on your arm. A bridge. He is hallucinating again. The meds aren’t working again. You kiss his forehead until he collapses, boneless, his mouth open, into an infant’s sleep. You close your eyes, at last, and lean back against the wall.

This morning you wake up to a love poem typed by young fingers into your phone. Your son gets dressed for school, recites the poem as you read it. He smiles like any other kid. Your daughters run in and hug-attack him, three human pups rolling around the floor, squeals rising until you back out of the room and go downstairs. You turn on the coffee machine. You pack their lunches. You are not empty, you whisper as you pour coffee. People don’t dissolve, you say as you stir in sugar.

hgrieco

Hannah Grieco is a writer, advocate, and teacher in Arlington, VA. She can be found online at www.hgrieco.com and on Twitter at @writesloud.

 

Chelsea prose poetry

When Someone Cuts the Tulips from My Front Yard in the Middle of the Night by Christine Taylor

I wonder if they think the world already has too many flowers. Five tulip stems, the heads severed clean by an apparently sharp blade, are left to quiver in the breeze. These five tulips burst from the ground outside the stone-walled flower bed, bulbs gone stray after decades of confinement. I planted those flowers when I was six-years-old, removed the bulbs from the mesh-net bag my father handed to me as gingerly as a six-year-old can. While I watched holding a small spade, my mother dug the first hole, planted the first bulb. Her thin fingers patted the dirt firm. Then I dug and planted. Dug. Planted. After bearing the heavy winter, those bulbs pushed into spring red, glorious. Decades later, I’ve moved on to dahlias, dusty miller, marigolds. Yet the tulips persist.

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Christine Taylor identifies as multiracial and is an English teacher and librarian residing in her hometown Plainfield, New Jersey. She is the EIC of Kissing Dynamite: A Journal of Poetry and the author of The Queen City (Broken Sleep Books, 2019). Christine has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her work appears in Glass, Turtle Island Responds, Haibun Today, and The Rumpus among others. Right now, she’s probably covered in cat hair and drinking a martini. Visit her at www.christinetayloronline.com.