folio : short takes on the prose poem
One Short Take on the Prose Poem or My Infatuation with Justification
The journal I was gifted for my birthday had a navy blue cover and square pages. I scribbled a few short sonnets along the left margin, leaving the page oddly dominated by whitespace. The square page required square, or at least, horizontally rectangular poems. The poems themselves, while adhering to the visual geometrics inherent in their blueprints, could be of any which nature, though three main variations arose. First: of a narrative sort. Second: of a cerebral, automatic writing. Third: of an erasure. Stories felt comfortably at home in a paragraph. The stream conscious needn’t be conscious of line breaks. Words pulled from novels resisted a change of form. I wrote poems where I was me and poems where I wasn’t. I wasn’t writing, but my hand swept the pen across the page and I read what was written. I wasn’t writing but dissecting, condensing, jotting. I wrote in multi-colour for distinction. Blue ink was a myth or a fairy tale or a fable or a journal entry written on the bus. Green was a river of words that more often than not seemed meaningless because it was meaningless, but sometimes seemed meaningless when it was not. Red meant I was a cowboy.
The City of My Eventual Birth
The bus stops and I scrounge around my pocket for change. An elastic band, two paperclips, the receipt for a haircut. “How far will this get me?” I ask. “Not far,” the driver replies. I pay and sit. The driver closes the door and opens it again. “Your stop,” he says. I step off the bus into a city I can hardly recognize. The pigeons on the sidewalk flutter away whenever I approach for directions.
Magpie Overture
Unpacking the ice storm in the architecture of a gaze, the attic coughed-up a boisterous Anglophone dialling a shrimp cocktail racket. Toadstools balanced on the delicate railway. The sun bucket flopped on the welcome mat with a puckering bounce. Parking meters flaked chicken scratch shadows. The skyscraper stared upstairs, ringing a plankton’s dressy club. A pack mule for condiments muttered the ancient incantation, but when the musketeer struck midnight the whole town was mustered.
Towards a Stillness
The sun entangled itself in the spun gold of her hair. She was elegant as a parasol, and her smiles were of many different kinds. Her dress was gray. Her mind, uncluttered. I felt a sharp twist of pain, for she was of the hills, ageless, as it were. She measured her eyes against the land inhabited by wild cattle, occasional deer, and great flocks of geese at certain seasons. The low hills around drew from her palms. “Someday,” she said, “it all has to change.” She waved toward the distant hills and what we saw out there, a mouse-coloured mustang, with three white stockings.
