Chelsea prose poetry

The Magic of Scrambled Eggs by Caitlin O’Halloran

When my mother still cooked me scrambled eggs, I thought that eggs were magic. I watched her melt butter in a pan and swirl it around for an even coat. She poured whisked eggs out of a bowl, waited awhile as they warmed, then pushed them gently with a wooden spoon until they solidified. Butter melting made sense to me, just like the heat of a summer day can melt ice cream and a candle’s flame makes wax drip. But eggs transform from liquid to solid with just a difference in heat. This was alchemy, surely, the golden yellow elixir becoming something delicious to eat.

 

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Caitlin O’Halloran is a biracial Filipino-American poet living in Rochester, New York. She has a Bachelor of Arts from Boston University in Philosophy and History. Her work has been published in Vast Chasm Magazine, Midsummer Dream House, and Apricity Magazine. http://www.caitlinohalloran.com

Chelsea flash fiction

Coast by Allison Field Bell

“I’m thirty-seven,” I say. “I want to have a baby.”

He looks at me the way my cat looks at me sometimes: with expectation and judgement and unblinking green eyes. Except his eyes are dark. And here he is with this look that tells me not no exactly, but that I’m maybe crazy.

It doesn’t help that we’re in line for a rollercoaster when I say it. Surrounded by teenagers with too much makeup and hairspray. I didn’t know hairspray was still a thing. I didn’t know fake eyelashes were such a thing. I imagine them ripped off in the wind of the rollercoaster: a pile of plastic caterpillar carcasses below the tracks.

I wish we were away from the amusement park: in some sunny garden near a coast with too many tulips. I wish I were pregnant already. So we could avoid the whole talk of becoming pregnant. The talk of becoming pregnant means me admitting I am just a normal woman who wants a baby. Means me thinking about being pregnant. I don’t want to be pregnant exactly: body huge and unmanageable and somehow delicate too. I want and don’t want. My body wants. My body feels some existential doors closing and it has jammed its foot in and demanded to be served.

We’re next in line for the rollercoaster, and he still hasn’t said anything to me about babies. He has said: “Do you want to finish that?” (my cotton candy) and “I think it might rain” (the weather?) and “Rollercoasters always make me think about physics” (physics?). So, we climb into our seats, and a teenager in a bright shirt tugs on the plastic at our chests.

“I want a baby,” I say again, as we move forward on the tracks.

He squeezes my hand. And in the hand squeeze is either everything I want or everything I don’t want: the confirmation of baby or the accusation of crazy.

I start to speak again but the rollercoaster blasts forward and I feel my face melt backward and my stomach drop out. He yells in delight and I yell because it’s impossible not to. And he keeps holding my hand and I see eyelashes fly overhead or maybe just flecks of dirt or stray hairs and the whole scene seems blurry and for a moment my body doesn’t care one way or another about babies and I hold onto him tight and feel everything I need to feel about rollercoasters and the sky and the way the world tilts and spins and coasts forward without us.

headshotFINALAllison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, Without Woman or Body, forthcoming June 2025 from Finishing Line Press and the creative nonfiction chapbook, Edge of the Sea, forthcoming Spring 2025 from CutBank Books. Allison’s prose appears in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2024,The Gettysburg Review, DIAGRAM, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Smartish Pace, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.