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Six prose poems.

By MEG POKRASS.

 

1. Gemini Forecast

IF YOUR BOYFRIEND is only your boyfriend because you’ve created a relationship based on how annoying someone you both know is, you need to hope this person remains annoying forever. Otherwise, the connection will be nothing but froth. There’s a good chance that eventually things will deteriorate to the point where you launch mopey tweets at one another, him tweeting coy pink hearts to your tweets and you regurgitating chartreuse hearts back to his. While it’s true that you have nightmares about having been nothing but an emoticon to him, try scaling up the positive ways you correspond. Shoot for the moon: ask him out for a cappuccino and see if he falls apart.

2. phone intelligence

TO UNDERSTAND THE world you must first understand your phone. There’s so much more to your story than selfies with soup. Wipe the screen down with a microfiber and recharge your life. A full horoscope reading based on your birth details will give you the whole picture… and may just change your life.

 3. Luck in the old West

THEY SAY LUCK was never really developed in bed, but when a woman felt pretty enough, she could smile the luck out of her body and into the body of a man with a hat. A man with a schoolboy’s posture in bed would stare at a woman’s trustworthy eyes and smile at his luck and she’d pop out those cheekbones and frog her wan face at him and watch him disappear into her sheets like tumbleweed.

4. Paper Doll Men

THERE WAS A warming shift when the new one appeared in her living room, of heavier construction than the last. Tired and slumped over, crooked glasses making his face look crooked. Those water-logged eyes will hold him in place, she thought, remembering the last one who blew away.

5. Dream

YOU’RE MOONLIGHTING FOR your ex-husband. Answering his emails, filing his taxes, light-watering his purple rose garden. When you finish walking his dog, he visits your new apartment. Lands on the foot of your sofa like a silver haired butterfly.

“Great job with those ridiculous taxes,” he says, a gentleman. Walks over and hugs you near your living room window. Squeezes so tightly it’s as if he’s handing you gravity. What you don’t say is that being squeezed by him is all you have ever wanted. When he lets go of you, you feel boneless— the tangle of your heart freed from its graveyard shift.

6. outside of bed, they’re ill-marked, shadowy, indefinite

NO SENSE IN going all mopey-eyed, she tells herself, tired of moon-blindness and ready for more. She materializes in bed. Glimmers and stands out. The blinkers are on, her heart is warm. He is her phantom limb.

And now she is showing him the moss all over her legs, showing him trees all over her shadows, showing him the things that her husband can’t see. But he shuts his eyes, hums a little song, loses himself in wishes.


Meg Pokrass is the author of seven flash-fiction collections, two flash novellas, and is a two-time recipient of San Francisco’s Blue Light Book Award. Her work has appeared in hundreds of literary journals including Electric Literature, Tin House, and Washington Square Review. She currently serves as Festival Curator for Flash Fiction Festival UK, Flash Challenge Columnist for Mslexia Magazine, and Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction. Meg lives in England near the Scottish border.

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