MY FIRST HORROR SHOW
I remember screaming and wanting to run from the living room that time you came home drunk. When we lived in Redwood City, in the house off Bayshore Highway on Hoover Street, the same name as my grade school. Mom had locked the door even though it was still daylight and Sunday afternoon. The grass outside was thick California green, mowed and raked like you’d told me to yesterday before I went downtown to the Paramount’s Saturday horror matinee. I’d edged, trimmed, and swept the brick walkway up to our front door where you now stood wild and raging at the door like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, only come to 1616 Hoover Street. And Mom saying, “Don’t you let him in, not on your life,” while the dark, loosed Creature, shaped like my father, flailing out there beat fear into the house as far back as the bedroom where my brothers had gone to hide in their closet. For how long the terror went on I’ve forgotten. But then, just like in the movie, this green, hairy arm came splintering through the front window, the glass exploding like a small lake onto the carpet. And I could see the red, wet blood dripping from the balled green fist, its knuckles looking like they’d been torn by rose thorns. The Creature groped its slippery paw on the gold safety lock and I knew the door would open soon.
Ed Higgins
THE SUN’S RAYS SLANT
through the kitchen window as you stand by the microwave waiting for your breakfast cinnamon roll to warm. I’ve just come in from my early walking our dog Harper around the hayfield’s edged path. You have not yet noticed me standing in the open doorway between the mudroom and the kitchen. The sunlight’s glinting off your hair and I am enjoying its beauty. Your head’s tilted slightly upward and I’m wishing I’d not left my phone on the kitchen table earlier because now I want a picture of you like this. The summer sunlight from the window warming the streaks in your graying hair. To hold you there forever. Beautiful and still. Pondering maybe nothing but the humming microwave. What are you up to, I ask, pulling you out of your reverie. What are you doing, you ask, smiling back at me. Well, I was just loving the beautiful you with all that sunlight shining on your lovely hair. Well I love you too, silly, you say.
Ed Higgins
DECREATION
Decreation is not destruction of creation. Rather, it is the new creation
that reveals what creation, especially humanity, is and its real vocation. –Simone Weil
Unspool the tools and unmind the word for untoday we celebrate misunderstanding! All hammers are boomerangs flirting lazily untoward nothing. Screwdrivers could be pillows! Rename that fat skull molcajete. Should everything undress as pasta salad? Let unmom & dedad impeach all the fruit, especially peaches—dismiss them as tennis balls so harmless & then we introduce spatulas as rackets. But unwork is never finished. We must depractice archaic arts such as romance. Let mating be a contest of headstands, heels over head is that not what we said? We’ll unmake love til’ it’s a pack of rabid doves, unbind books as pages too are feathers. Unwind there where it all began, when all we had was undulation, tug-o-wars between sound & meaning. O, just forgetting spins me pink, oh even spaghetti makes me swell with undoing.
SELKIE
A call is a capture, is it not? To be smothered like all minor gods in the threads of your tenor. A month, or more, was it? When my pelt fed your covet for iridescence and brilliance, yet if capable of Babel, you would still choose to rebuke the feminine. I have come to warn you. The sea has forsaken your stumble unhumble, night will impart brambles of long, harrow, and dark. Like my hair. Recall its swing against my spine–like a bough, like a trap, as the axe. I need only tilt my heart to make a weapon sharp. A call is a capture, is it not? Hear me then, he-djinn of stolen skin: wear all my words as your mantle chosen, and I shall crush this sorry shaft you dare call a throat.
Kale Hensley
LAUD
Nothing could make me happier than to evening with you in a booth and delay the blistering storm we together see but love ignoring. It’s charm-fed although light-infectious surplus here in the pretty sprawling city where we reside and confide in nature where we see it along the canal the ritual ducks once ducklings now slide across brown or dark blue water depending on the day. Nothing could make me more Auntie Mame than this syllabic twist of mundanity toward this blissful departure from dishonorable war plaguing hearts gone depressive silent. In the main we’re only human including this delicious surge of relief infusing past with present in a future we insist we’ll form and frame and polish again and again. Go ahead and sing some mystifying high tones including touch-brushed harmonics regardless of whether monotoned in fact. I hear them unwither from storm fed grief I taste them coming from your happy for the moment mouth.
BARN SWALLOWS
The father asks his child: Why don’t you tremble the way I taught you. The child seemed resistant to the idea and climbed a ladder to the roof, where she remained for the remainder of the day. From there, she decided to empty the hope chest he had gifted her, as though it really were a gift. Just then, a band of barn swallows, members of passerine songbirds that chew pests, made their way overhead. The child began to cease being a frightened child beset by chores that bored her. She watched the birds hunt close to the ground without acquiescing to gravity, feeding their young as she wished she had been fed unconditionally.
Sheila Murphy
DELUGE
A flood had recently been visited upon our town, and, once the waters receded, the citizens found that some of the graves in the local Catholic cemetery had been uncovered. When examining the matter further, though, they discovered that several of the bones belonged not to the plots from the cemetery but from members of an Indigenous tribe, which had their own burial site on the land previously. Leaders from the tribe argued that their ancestors’ remains should be repatriated to them, and the other graves removed. The Catholics, by contrast, argued that the cemetery was consecrated ground and therefore belonged to their ancestors. Prolonged legal wrangling ensued, made worse by the fact that, in many cases, the remains themselves were a jumbled mess, at times neither clearly belonging to one side nor the other. Meanwhile, the low-lying, decimated area of the cemetery remained roped off. Beyond the flimsy barriers, it exposed a few chipped jawbones and cracked femurs in easy view. Teenagers, of course, would come to make love or mischief in such a place after dark, pilfering an odd tooth or desecrating the wobbly obelisks. And so, one rainy night a young man, egged on by his companions, stumbled down the ridge causing a mudslide that buried him among the rubble. This decided the judge, who, fatigued with the proceedings, deemed the area unsafe. The municipality reclaimed the condemned property, then quickly sold it to a developer who was under contract to repair the grounds. The site—filled in and paved over—is currently a new strip mall, containing a Super Wal-Mart, an Applebee’s, a Tim Hortons, a Korean dry cleaner, and a discount liquor store, with one storefront still up for rent. On clear days, the sun endorses the signboards until they advertise an illegible void. Fat, grumpy crows bicker for pickings around the overflowing dumpsters out back.
AFTERNOONS IN HELL
I live inside a little hole. A little hole that’s been filled with bad dreams. Beside me, somewhere, a field of brittle grasses and thick briars. The grasses sway and pitch among tall, slanting stones. Colonies of lichen speckle the impedimenta. Once, each stone was graven with a story that some chance visitor might bend down to read. By now, however, the weather’s pored over every word until they’ve been glossed away. Overhead, a wrinkled mantle of cloudbanks scumble by like a great wreckage of flotsam. The cloudbanks block out the sun and turn the whole panorama into faint shades of purple. I distinguish things by faded tones of violet, gradations of lilac, outlines of lavender. Everywhere I look, the vacant medium of air’s been hypnotized. Between the object and my eye is where the edges unravel. Where objects deliquesce into texture, into tincture and hue. Still, I abide. I bide my time. I exist amid this avid twitching without purpose; without vigor; without rest. Atoms explode into imperceptible fire. A fine powder blows away in the wind like a dusting of chalk. The sky has no clue. My little hole is forever. My dreams are riddled with the glancing weather.
Will Cordeiro
Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals. Ed is Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction. He has a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek. A collection of his poems, Near Truth Only, has been published by Fernwood Press, Dec., 2022.
Kale Hensley is a poet and visual artist from West Virginia. Their work appears in Gulf Coast, Booth, Evergreen Review, and Epiphany. They live in Texas with their wife and a menagerie of clingy pets. Find more of their writing and collages at kalehens.com.
Sheila E. Murphy. Murphy’s most recent books are Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023) October Sequence: Sections 1-51 (mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2023), and Sostenuto (Luna Bisonte Prods (2023). Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy’s book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland).
Will Cordeiro has published or forthcoming work in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, and The Threepenny Review. Will is the author of the poetry collection Trap Street (Able Muse, 2021) and the fiction collection Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024). Will is also co-author of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) as well as the forthcoming New Foundations of Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2027). Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Image credit: Whipple, George. The Microscopy of Drinking Water. John Wiley & Sons, 1914.
Prose Poems Issue 10