For My Sister I Never Knew

Tags

creative writing, dailypost, family, poem, poetry, sisters

She adores tea cup and hot dogs.

Today, she is a gringa wearing
a crushed, straw cowgirl hat as
she parades up and down Lexington Avenue.

She throws butterscotch hard candy at the passing children.

Originally Southern, she gap tooth smiles as she says something smart and sly.
Her sugar seduces and releases her words’ heat.

She smokes pack after pack of Camels, ’cause she finds them familiar and exotic.

She greets me on the corner
with a kiss to both cheeks and a poke.

She demands I write her ten years younger.

She thinks we should invest in tropical fish and biscuits.
The fish for beauty; the biscuits for sustenance.

She quietly accesses me and decides I have lost weight.

She gets me.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/delayed-contact/

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Sylvia Walks In Cinderella’s Shoes

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cinderella, creative writing, dailypost, flash fiction, fractured fairy tale, micro-fiction, prose, short story, sylvia plath

Out of the bell jar and into a single glass slipper. How strange the fit!

I prefer anarchy to sanguine royalty, so I hide the remaining shoe in an electric blue velvet box my dead mother gave me and bury it by the tulips next door.

My malaise thickens as pumpkin becomes life coach. I don’t believe her platitudes about attitudes and feed her to the mice.

I slice an apple with a butcher knife surveying my work. But, the eating of an apple is another woman’s tale.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/pleased-to-meet-you/

Experiments in Love and Tea

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creative writing, dailypost, family, memoir, postaday, relationships, short story

For Frank…

My lover’s teapot screams with its steam song bringing me back to the present from my post-holiday ennui float.

I watch him carefully pour the water over his special wellness tea of nettle, echinacea, astragalus, ginger, burdock, and cinnamon.

Without asking he puts an ice cube and as much honey as his good conscience will allow in my mug. He drinks his plain.

He smiles down at me as he hands me my cup.

We don’t speak as we sip.

He loses himself in the European news hour’s stories about violence and intolerance. He sighs and mutters to himself words like “compassion” and “anarchy.”

I smile at the back of his head.

The tea’s heat reminds me of my father. Ever the anglophile, he drank his black tea with a thin slice of lemon.

I remember the horror he and I felt when I put milk in with the lemon, and it curdled.

I don’t drink tea or try anything new in front of my father for the rest of his life.

Now, I have this man who regularly sees my foibles without grimace or judgment. I have this man who allows me to revel in my “me-ness.”

I can laugh at the curdle of my ill-fated life experiments. And, I can fully experience the joys of my successes now that I have someone with whom to share them.

We drink our tea in silence letting the volumes of our love rush through us creating a river of warmth and cinnamon on a frigid early January night.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_writing_challenge/ice-water-steam/

Venus Versus Veronica

Tags

creative writing, dailypost, poem, poetry

Emperor Caligula declared war on Poseidon and ordered his soldiers to thrust their spears into random, threatening, foaming waves.

i approach wearing only a gauntlet.

i slap her pale cheek with the heavy glove creating a small, bloody crack in her perfection.

i remove the violent hand covering.

naked, i toss it, and it lands on the cutting, shell’s edge.

offended, she tries to pierce my eye with her slave cupid’s arrow.

refusing to be blinded by love’s aggression, i duck my head and spit in her navel cavern,

i pounce on her and intertwine my legs with hers.

i indian leg wrestle her.

i flip that bitch.

she submits.

she offers no wishes. she is a defeated goddess not a genie.

she offers to answer one prayer.

“venus, please bring him back to me even if he never loves me or recognizes me. i just want to see his face one more time. i just want to breathe in the molecules that once caressed him.”

she smiles enchantment and answers, “no.”

i murder her and eat her hoping to take on her immortal soul.

she, like me and other women of sea origin, was soulless.

i eat love and am still empty.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/showdown-at-big-sky/

MOM

Tags

creative, dailypost, fiction, flash, microfiction, short, story, writing

“Yes, Mom.”

“I know. I don’t want the subscription to run out either.”

“It went really well! He loved my ideas. I forgot I told you that was today.”

“Yep, I–”

Dial tone.

She reaches for her purse and pulls out her credit card. She replenishes her Maternal Output Mechanism (MOM) account.

“Mom, are you there?”

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/daily-prompt-big-thing/

Diana Ross Good Morning Heartache

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blues, dailypost, diana, good, heartache, love, morning, ross, song, video

home, soil, rain…

“When I Think of Home” by Diana Ross
Saying good morning to the worms makes them rise out of the soil.
All the gloom and rain for the past few days have led to heartache.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/daily-prompt-free-association/