I hid half of you inside my womb; a secret you knowingly planted but wanted to forget.
Two halves made whole then multiplied by division along lines we drew down each other’s bodies.
Until the time I presented her to you and showed you who you were, who you are and who you could be.
And you had the audacity to ask for her to be called Grace.
Posted in Ars Poetica, Creativity, Short Stories
Tagged creativity, experimental, fiction, fiction friday, flash fiction, Friday flash, handwritten pages, writers, writing
Return to Sender
As the mail dwindled to bills and junk mail, so did his supply of scrap paper for shopping lists, reminders, numbers to call for appointments and snippets of love letters he wrote to his wife, dead now for three years; and the secrets he told to the person he imagined at the end of the address marked, “Return to Sender.”
Posted in Creativity, Short Stories
Tagged art, creativity, experimental, fiction, flash fiction, handwritten pages, micro-fiction, microfiction, slice of life, writers, writing
cof
in between all the sadnesses
we must promise
to talk again
Posted in Ars Poetica, Creativity, The Writer's Life
Tagged art, blackout poetry, creativity, microfiction, micropoetry, writers, writing, zentangle
While you and I loitered outside the 7-Eleven after school, sucking down one dollar Slurpees, I saw a tangle of sneakers hanging like a cluster of grapes from the power lines.
I said we could harvest them, make bootleg memories that won’t mature until we’re twenty years into the future when we’re telling our stories to our children.
It made you laugh and you dribbled onto your uniform and I could see the colour of your bra. You asked what if it tasted like a ragged doormat. I shrugged. We walked on past the high-hanging fruit for ours is the now. But I looked back and wondered, if in the future, we’d buy from the Bottle-O because it’s convenient, rather than labour for the truth of our storytelling.
This piece was inspired by a line from Omar Musa’s TEDxSydney talk in 2013, Slam Poetry of the Streets. You can view it HERE.
I hope he doesn’t mind the appropriation of his lyric.
Posted in Ars Poetica, Short Stories
Tagged creativity, fiction, fiction friday, flash fiction, Friday flash, handwritten pages, microfiction, slice of life, writers, writing
cof
Fumbling in the darkness you believe you can read the lovers’ braille of gooseflesh on my arms. Except you stutter like a toddler, stuck sucking simple words found in my nipples; repetitively mouthing without nuance or inflection, nor grasping the meaning of what you read. I hold the shaft of the pen you want to write our history with, squeeze the ink dry. You’ll read my note on the table in the morning.
Posted in Ars Poetica, Creativity, Short Stories
Tagged art, creativity, experimental, fiction, flash fiction, Friday flash, handwritten pages, micro-fiction, microfiction, short story, writing
Two For One
we
are only two of
flesh and blood
compare us once
Posted in Ars Poetica, Creativity, The Writer's Life
Tagged art, blackout poetry, creativity, experimental, microfiction, micropoetry, writing, zentangle, zentangle poem
He grasped the early morning shafts of sunlight striking through the gaps in the curtains. Strips of sunbeams speckled with diamonds of dust. Harvested like shards of honeycomb, stored in jars and placed around the house as lanterns. He spooned mouthfuls of amber twilight from the jars and ate the light to satiate the darkness.
Under the shelter of the summer storms clouds he waited, held within a womb of humidity, his body slick with sweat.
As he drew breaths, held deeply then exhaled slowly, the skies rippled and pulsed, heaved and held back their waves before splitting above him in a gushing of waters.
The tackiness of his sweat sloughed off like old skin beneath the baptism of new rain.
A midwife to his own rebirth.
Renewed skin, perfect in its newest gloss, dressed in the lifetime of variables: family, work, love, pain, futility, faith, doubt, hope and sex, until worn threadbare, stained and tattered.
And he would wait for the next storm, for another baptism, another cleansing, seed to impregnate the soil with his vision of himself.
* with acknowledgement to Bruce Dawe and Shakespeare
Posted in Creativity, Short Stories
Tagged creativity, experimental, fiction, fiction friday, flash fiction, Friday flash, handwritten pages, micro-fiction, microfiction, writing
Their kiss was a reintroduction to joy; the passionate self-belief everything would be ok in a screwed up world when the screwed-uppedness manifested in a constant shit-storm that threatened to drown them and salt the earth in the aftermath.
To get there, invitations slipped in as ordinary moments as the antithesis to pain’s physical form: meals in Tupperware containers reheated in microwaves and eaten with grief and gratitude; cups of tea with phones ignored and flowers as prayers for healing.
And in the end, the scraping away and the shovelling of shit to make manure for a broken soil leading to the kiss of forgiveness and the parched desert of intimacy soaked with rain awaiting the bloom of wild flowers.
Standing inside the phone booth, its panes of glass crumbled to hail stones on the concrete floor, with the receiver cradled against my ear, I pretend to put coins in the slot while listening to the dial tone. The static drone a soundtrack to the anonymity of pain. Stabbing the numbers in a sequence I have never forgotten, hoping to call the ghosts of the future to tell them not to wait up for me.
Posted in Creativity, Short Stories
Tagged creativity, experimental, flash fiction, handwritten pages, micro-fiction, microfiction, slice of life, writing
I am an English teacher and drummer/percussionist with an interest in literary pursuits, creative endeavours, rhythmic permutations, theological amplifications and comedic outbursts.
Here you will find my creative detritus: articles on living a creative life and writing explorations.
And other ideas I have snaffled from the papers stuck on the fridge door.
Twitter: @RevHappiness
Instagram: @handwrittenpages
My collaborative epistolary novel, "Post Marked: Piper's Reach," written with Jodi Cleghorn (@JodiCleghorn) out now via Vine Leaves Press.
Come and browse through the library; there is no need to be silent.
A Fullness in Brevity - Adam Byatt 