I didn’t join
Twitter until 2010; casting about for a username, I was stunned to discover that “monostich,” the technical and often misspelled term for a one-line poem,
was somehow still available. How is that a platform seemingly designed for
aphorisms and one-line poems did not already have a dozen variations on that
handle? I scooped it up and proceeded to tweet out the monostiches that I’d
been collecting in a little notebook.
No one cared.
Later, I found that my thirteen word horror stories gained slightly more traction, in part perhaps because they were termed “stories” instead of poems. I wrote over 300 of those, and duly collected them into a manuscript later, but the original monostiches I’d tweeted out over 2010 and 2011 gathered the fine digital dust that most things on the Internet gather.
It was only after I’d downloaded my tweets and deleted myself off that site that I, unexpectedly and thankfully prompted, began to go over them and pluck some out and revise them into what became Parallax Days, rescuing them from their electronic oblivion to return them to the thin but immortal arms of print. I’m glad they have a potential new life... and I’m just as stunned that the handle of monostich was still available when I signed up for Bluesky.
