Watch This Space for the Return of the 55

Greetings, all. 

I would like to welcome you to the revival of the Friday tradition of the Flash Fiction 55, the first of which will take place January 31st. The challenge will post at Thursday midnight and be good thru Sunday, on the last Friday of every month. Your entry can be in any style or form, prose, fiction, non-fiction, and of course,poetry, so long as it consists of 55 words, and 55 only.

I had been hosting this challenge for awhile in honor of its originator, Galen Hayes and his form that never fails until my husband's illness accelerated and I became unable to do so. Kerry O'Connor generously took it up and continued it as a once a month prompt at the now archived Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. Since that forum is no longer available, and Kerry has indicated her approval, I hope to continue in that format now that my life has calmed a bit. 

For many of us who spent years regarding the Garden as our own favorite site for poetry, with its uniquely intelligent and multitudinous prompts and features, and its inhabitants as our cohorts in literary crime, its retirement leaves a bit of a blank spot. Other sites, new such as earthweal, and  old, like d'Verse will surely help to fill that spot, but it's a large hollow space, and it seems to me there is room for this challenge as well to keep us writing and to keep our community together. Plus, I am a huge fan of the 55, and often when I feel I can't write anything, it will prove me wrong by popping 55 words up for me. So here's to Galen, the 55, and all of you whom I hope will participate.

See you on the 31st.

Birthday Moonsong

Birthday Moonsong

Born  in the wolf moon,

at century's half-crack,

before the moving shadow box

before the singing pocket, the talking hand--

disjecta  membra of a war and peace,

nuclear snowflake crystaled in the cold aftermath,

fallout caught and whirled up

by black arms of concrete

into the sweet dance of chemical fog;

all around me

blackbirds falling

from the sky like almanacs

pages open to the gift of silent prophecy

and in the mirror, a white raven

solitary,
a meal, a target, a danger

to the flock, burning the eye like
a scarlet poppy

on a gravemound, or

a working girl unbuttoned

hungover 

in the convent.

* * *

In the house

at the edge of the world,

with the wolf moon low in the west,

its yellow eye on the scattering stars,

its tongue longing

for the fat white hams of Venus,

the north wind sleets the window glass

bitter green, rattling the taste

of old snow and bad design; the wolf moon

the hunger moon,
stops to lap

pooled pink from blood-red Mars,

swells its belly 

with faltering stars, the small and weak
gnawing them out one by one as I hum

dusting the ape statuettes, the

draped clocks, perplexed still

that the empty chair

stays empty another winter,

while the fire throws white shadows,

while ghosts fall with the snow.

~January 2015

A repost for my birthday.

Images:Wolf Dog, 1976 © Jamie Wyrth  Fair Use

The Snow Queen Flies Through The Winter Night, by Edmund Dulac  Fair Use

Firebird

Firebird

While a continent becomes a sore

spreading to shingle the destitute globe, 

we lie wrapped in broiling

blinded abeyance, knee-jerking a galvanic

response that is only more of nothing.

The colossus god-thief's

gone small as a pea no longer green

beside his golden foundry,

abandoned like a warped wheel

murdered by its own machine,

shamed to a face in a clockwork locket
that's dropped too hot on a 

cowskulled outback

where fire tornadoes are the new djinns

where the breath of burned brush leaves

a path of smoking cinder, 

where even the dirt

is beginning to burn.

We are the thing that un-cocks

the flower gun, whose apocalypse hand 

knifemelts the Mother, making

her bleed a drowning of ice-water tides,

the mad un-scientists who breed 

the firebird to rise and rise again.

We are numberless now, an ashslide of rapists

pressing our weight against a mouth that would be willing

if only it could breathe.

~March 2013

(originally written as quite a different poem)

Repurposed January 2020

 for earthweal

Image: Photograph via internet, showing the Australian wildfires of 2019/20 from space. Fair Use

Witch of Tides

Witch Of Tides

I. The Wet

I cannot be

the Witch of Tides

with her greenalive

and mutable eyes

with her wavefoam curls

her saline sighs,

but only the constant

Crone of death's dust

where all things fall

because they must

when they've bled out to nothing

their sweet salt blood.

We meet in that place

neither sea nor shore;

the liminal wing, the liquidless pour

not wave nor field nor barren waste,

only a dead god's breathing face

on which we stand, the Witch and I

where three winds vie

to make the storm of rattle and fly

where the veil is rent,

where One and the Other

can mingle unkempt.

I cannot be

the Witch of Tides

whose toy is life

whose palette is clouds

whose hand is so wet,

but only the Crone of a

soft and dry

and whimsical

death.

II. The Dry

Yet her blackened

inversion am I,
with my sandy surf
of dead glass and dry

pushed and rolled
like a moving eye,

tho the sweat that's brought

is the only salt

except alkali.

We both have our wrecks

of sphinxes and ships,
of stones and decks,

of cities buried

with a murderer's care,

a privacy to the ones we hide,

shrouded in the swirl of our hair

as their world dies;

and who is to say

of the wet or the dry,

which was the Maiden

which was the Bride,
the constant Crone

or the wild Witch of Tides?

~October 2015
Reposted January 2020 

for earthweal

Though it may seem strange to post an old poem to such a brand new site, this one simply selected itself from my memory banks, so I hope I will be excused for letting it have its way. In its own equivocal voice, perhaps it addresses some aspects of the weal of the earth.

Top Image via internet; author unknown. Manipulated. No copyright infringement intended.
Great Sphinx and Pyramids, circa 1890 via wikimedia commons
Manipulated. Shared under a Creative Commons License

Cricket Cage

Cricket Cage

When I fell

I came belly to belly

with gravity's captain.

I lay curled, crying

unable to rise, waiting for

your lipless apparition to come for me

to spin me up from the earth,

light on the snow of molting swans

but nothing came.

I was bound in

distorted hours, a prisoner canary

crammed into a cricket's cage,

whose solitude has not improved her song

whose circle of bamboo

bars catches fire

whose moonless screams

won't spread her charring wings.

I wept the rasp

of my beggar's chant;

for release,

for something more,

something without tears

that lives behind the moment

when all the universe was fragrant

with life's confusion, but

nothing came.

Only the root born

of dissolution pierced my spine

with its sharp shoots, as it pierces

each bloody battlefield

where

only the dead

have seen the end of war.

January 2020

Disclaimer: The final couplet is not mine, but a rendering of a quote often attributed to Plato, as in a speech by General Douglas MacArthur in May, 1962, but is actually by George Santayana, from his Soliloquies in England (1924)

posted for Kerry's January word list

Image of cricket cage via internet, author unknown, manipulated. Fair Use

The Last Spell

The Last Spell

The sorceress said:

My blue eye comes from a peacock's pride,

two magpie plumes, one black, one white

are my cheekbones' span, one left, one right,

and the chilblained heart of a drunken man

beats out time for the madwoman's rhyme

that runs through my nodding head.

The hedgewitch said:

I'll work in the dark of a gone moon's quirk

with a sickle of poppy stem that I've curved

slicing dust from the wing of a moth with no sting

for a paste of bat's grease that paints shadows for skin,

nurse a mandrake root with blood, milk and soot, then dance
on one foot to the lord of hell til it smiles in my bed.

Yet none of these but this blackened art

can give back to me what died when I fell.

To make me again both young and well, my craft has no skill

except in my heart.

December 2019

posted for Kerry's final prompt at

The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

I used Kerry's play it again selection, on the poetic voice

Images: Crone, from the internet, author unknown, Fair Use
Zenobia, © Warrick Goble, Fair Use

Call of the Crow

Call of the Crow

The crow called,

What world is coming?

A world with no ease in the seeing

where the last battle

finds no ending, where gold eats up valor

where no sending of ravens

can swallow the feast.

The crow called,

what world do I see

where summer kills flowers

where kine have no milk

and die eating dust,

where women
gamble their worth,

and old men
bring false judgment;

where each child

is a reaver, each man

a betrayer,

blinding his own eyes;

 

where the sea can feed no one

not even a gull,

where poison is flowing

deep in the well.

The crow called,
I shall, I shall
see it all,

but no more

any world that is dear to me.

~April 2015

Poem 27 for April--unlinked, and a total self-indulgence.
Reposted and lightly re-edited today, December 27, 2019 for Sherry's last prompt
at 
The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

Process notes: This poem is drawn directly from a 9th century(?) prophecy(below) I happened on that reminded me very strongly of the description of the final days before the Ragnarök in Völuspá. Bleak as these prophecies are, I also see them as vital warnings, informing us so perhaps their dire ends can somehow be averted, foretelling as they do elements of a personal disintegration which leads to the more universal one.

This prophecy is Celtic, and spoken by the goddess Babd, the war goddess aspect of The Morrigan, who often takes the form of a crow:

I  shall not see a world that will be dear to me.

Summer without flowers,
Kine will be without milk,
Women without modesty,
Men without valour,
Captures without a king.

... ... ...

Woods without mast,
Sea without produce,

... ... ...

Wrong judgments of old men,
False precedents of brethren,
Every man a betrayer,
Every boy a reaver.
Son will enter his father's bed,
Father will enter his son's bed,
Everyone will be his brother's brother-in-law.

... ... ...

An evil time!
Son will deceive his father,

Daughter will deceive her mother.

prophecy of the goddess Badb,  from "The Second Battle of Mag Tuired"

~wikipedia








Image: Crow in flight at Isfahan, Iran, 2012, shared under a creative commons license
via wikimedia commons     Manipulated.