The day was mean and sweating
(a lazy leaking
too big
for any amount of ocean)
so
we climbed inside
the heady weight of an egg
blood boil.
The ground was a thick red mud path
and the eggs suspended
everywhere
slipping across the back roots of Louisiana.
The heat fed us with a
necessary humidity,
and we took a
smaller boat
to wade through the guts
and the watery insides of
each other.
All parts were damp,
but misery was not an option
as his hand swam on my wrist.
I fell in love
300 times
in succession
with the swell
of his slickly salted smack of lips.
I never did think
my tongue could hold
too many spices
for his weak stomach,
so
I let it snake out
between upper flap and
lower,
speaking like a sea-master of the bayou.
I think we became
liquid
as we reached a ravine
with fallen tree over water,
and he asked me to cross with him,
the fearless fight
of a worm
that repels the fish’s bite.
I did not wriggle away from
the fear of that
slick stab of pain
or the knowledge of melting.

______________________

April Michelle Bratten is currently tucked away in the peaceful Badlands of North Dakota.  She co-edits the online literary journal Up the Staircase.

Sincerely Not Sharp Dressed Men

Every time we listen to ZZ Top we think of an earnest cover band. Not sure why: we like ZZ Top, and we’ve never seen a “tribute” band to them. Maybe it’s because there used to be a late night commercial for Carey Hilliard’s restaurant in North Charleston, SC, that featured peppers in beards, fedoras and sunglasses spinning guitars. Go figure. Anyway, on with Thursday’s Flurry… Joshua Braff tells NPR his guilty pleasure. Tim O’Brien tackles the challenge of writing the imaginative story. Speaking of cover bands, a new book examines the history of the search for fame. Glenn Stout has a rollcall of The Best American Sportswriting of 2010.  The Vonnegut library opens in Indy. Franzen returns to the family quest in Freedom. And then there’s this, for the reader who has everything. We gotta lotta nice links, yah. — Andrew Geer

_____________________________

Meg Pokrass is a fiction writer who lives in San Francisco where truth is questionable. Her debut collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” will be published in 2011 by Press 53. Meg’s work was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Flash Fiction 2009. She has published over one hundred stories and poems. You can see more of her animations here at http://pokrasstinations.com/

When I was eleven, my mother told me my father was never coming home. It was September, shortly after school had started, a few weeks before my birthday.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Now go do your homework.”

I never questioned what I was told by an adult. Not the existence of God, not the claim that the ancient Clovis culture once roamed the very ground on which we lived, not the fact that our tiny house was built on a swamp which might decide to swallow us all while we slept.

My dad was never a huge presence, so I can’t honestly say I missed him. But for the first few nights he was gone, I could hear my mother crying through the common wall between their bedroom and mine. Usually it was drowned out by the radio on her nightstand where some deep-throated bigot would rant about welfare and crime and Affirmative Action. After about a week, though, the radio went silent and so did Mom.

Kenny Pontillo lived directly across the street from us in an identical house painted one shade grayer. He was twenty-years old, mentally retarded, and sat staring out his front window most of the time.

“Where’s your dad?” he’d ask practically every day.

“Not around,” I’d tell him, and Kenny’d be satisfied with that answer, at least for awhile.

One Saturday in early October I came home from playing Tetris at Kenny’s and found an envelope, addressed to me and postmarked from Largo, Florida, on my bed. Inside was a birthday card — one week late — with a five-dollar bill. It was signed, “Dad.” I threw the card into the trash and gave the money to my mother who was in the living room vacuuming.

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