doing a bit of review of my last published book - Prosthetic Amalgams III
Here is one from it.

No Where Left to Go
by Kenny A. Chaffin
 
Just before the sun exploded we popped out of the system. Jin was always pushing it right to the edge closer and closer every time. Adrenaline junkie – I guess we all were. Each time we jumped we lost thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. That was just part of the physics. Everyone we’d known were long gone. We might be the only intelligent creatures in the universe for all we knew -- or cared. The universe was growing older and we stayed the same. The stars dying, the dark growing, the universe dimming and us laughing and loving. And finally we were there, at the end of the universe. Just few muted dispersed red giants hardly glowing at all and this one bright late-born star at the end of time, at the end of life. We watched as it grew. Expanding and then collapsed back on itself in a final death throe. We watched as it exploded, the blast reaching out, rushing at us at lightspeed, Jin wearing a shit-eating grin, finger poised over the jump button. Justine looking worried. Jin pressed the button. Nothing happened. We stared at one another in horror as the nova tore us apart.

#flash #poetry #prosepoetry

Brilliant Silence
by Spencer Holst

Two Alaskan Kodiak bears joined a small circus where the pair appeared in a nightly parade pulling a covered wagon. The two were taught to somersault, to spin, to stand on their heads, and to dance on their hind legs, paw in paw, stepping in unison. Under a spotlight the dancing bears, a male and a female, soon became favorites of the crowd. The circus went south on a West Coast tour through Canada to California and on down into Mexico, through Panama into South America, down the Andes the length of Chile to those southernmost isles of Tierra del Fuego.

There a jaguar jumped a juggler, and afterwards, mortally mauled the animal trainer; and the shocked showpeople disbanded in dismay and horror. In the confusion the bears went their own way. Without a master, they wandered off by themselves into the wilderness on those densely wooded, wildly windy, subantarctic islands. Utterly away from people, on an out-of-the-way uninhabited island, and in a climate they found ideal, the bears mated, thrived, multiplied, and after a number of generations populated the entire island. Indeed, after some years, descendants of the two moved out onto half a dozen adjacent islands; and seventy years later, when scientists finally found and enthusiastically studied the bears, it was discovered that all of them, to a bear, were performing splendid circus tricks.

---

Reprinted from Flash Fiction, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka

#poetry #prosepoetry #flashfiction #literature

Sentences - Jayne Anne Phillips (Black Tickets is a marvel of sentences)

https://lithub.com/revelations-of-language-on-prose-poetry-and-the-beauty-of-a-single-sentence

#writing #literature #prosepoetry #poetry #sentences

Nice Little Girls
by Jo Gatford

Nice little girls in pinafore dresses and shiny Mary Janes don’t go around giving last rites to roadkill. They don’t scoop water from the ditch with their bare hands, anoint the matted fur with a practiced flick of their fingers and whisper of salvation to inside-out foxes. ...

https://ceasecows.com/2023/02/16/nice-little-girls-by-jo-gatford/

Jo Gatford writes flash disguised as poetry, poetry disguised as flash, and mostly can’t tell the difference. Her work has most recently been published by The Lumiere Review, Full House Lit, Flash Frog, and The Woolf, as well as winning the Molotov Cocktail Flash City competition. She is the co-founder of Writers’ HQ and occasionally tweets about weird 17th-century mermaid tiles at @jmgatford.

#poetry #poem #prosepoetry #literature

(just read this incredible prose poem in the latest Ploughshares)

KATIE BERTA - [It is like a long tunnel]

It is like a long tunnel, the strange, shallow light of the hospital hallway shining against all the stainless steel they always put around those kinds of places. The steel shines a dark, tunnelish light. A feeling of objectivity they want to impart to you. Like, your baby has died. Objectively. I read once that they change a person from a person to a patient by asking them to fill out all that intake paperwork. On the paperwork, you can’t write, under Symptoms, bone-splitting sorrow. Crying that won’t stop. And anyway, I didn’t fill out any paperwork when I came in because I was screaming my face off. So when was I converted to a person whose baby was dead. Is what I’ve been wondering. We all came to the hospital and briefly scandalized the nurse, who told me, You have a large group of visitors—what should I tell them? She leaned down and whispered, You don’t have to see anyone you don’t want to, honey. Her breasts pressing onto my shoulder. The starched uniform and the smell of detergent near my face. I did see my mother though. Alone and small looking. Straight mouth trying to control my perception of her shock. Trying to control her inevitable I-told-you-so. A psychiatrist told her we should set up my apartment again. Not healthy for me to stay at her house. Long stretches in which we say nothing to each other. She writes. Something to do with her hands, besides wringing them. I could stay here for the rest of my life, I’m so tired. And really, there’s no one out there worth seeing. No one to come close to, or—no one who can get close enough.

#literature #prosepoetry #poetry #Ploughshares #litmag #litmags

(p.s. one disadvantage of Mastodon is you can't post Long Messages like this one. :( )

Only because it's a new year and a new decade for me :)

I'm not much for marketing and tooting (pun!) my own horn, I write and do art mostly for my own pleasure and sharing it these days but I do self-publish (been a while since the last one) my Poetry, Prose Poetry, and other ebooks through Amazon.

My author page is at:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B007S3SMY8

#literature #author #books #ebooks #poetry #nonfiction #prosepoetry #fiction