Over the Fence
31 March 2021 Wednesday Prose Poem: where do the stories end up?
Your stories in hand, glares switch off with searching patterns, rifling through the world at snail-speed, there’s a cross in the road and the spikes on the wire, a red-tailed hawk chooses my moment to scan the field from up high again, and I want to know what it sees as I stroll past, glum unraveling then the cheer as the wire becomes superceded by the air that fell past as you missed the action of the actual hunt
but it clearly wasn’t after you, wasn’t trying to work its way between you and the grey scar you keep moving on, the ekphrastic challenge of keeping the heart in one place long enough to write something about it, dying of tightening grip, snowblown, the ice rises up in a script we had a hand in but cannot fucking read
withered by the coming light, the starving wildlife that sits on over above the other side, trying to tell who to avoid and when not to make mistakes, kind of like what we’re doing now, standing on the front steps, one of us in the yard, the fragment of a history that matters now, that we’re coming open just in front of, and whatever stretches…that way, you swallow what you were going to say.
J.D. Harms 2021
Prompt:
