Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 109

Not One of Us, issue 53

This issue of Not One of Us has stories and poetry by people whose work I love, and I'm looking forward to savoring each piece. As it happens, my eyes first fell on a lovely poem by sovay for rose_lemberg called "Day, Sun, Night." It starts like this:

I worte this poem on a feather
and sent it by post of the sun

So lovely!

And this description:

Her hair a chime of coins and ancient gold

What's great about the poem (and it's short--I've just quoted you almost a third of it) is how, while remaining e...

Oh, and cherry blossoms

... just a pretty picture

How many balloons does it take to lift a tiny bottle?

duccio shared how he puts remembrances in the little single-serving vodka bottles that you can find dotting the landscape (at least around here), and he even sent me one, with a crow label. Meanwhile, oiktirmos shared about a school project he recalls, messages in bottles, but set afloat in the air, via balloon, to find out about air currents. A friend in town here remembers doing similar with her students.

I've been collecting the little bottles, with the idea of hosting my book group for a m...

high beams

You flick your lights at me?
You think these are my brights?
No, no, no:
If I were on high beams
You would see nothing
But the retina-destroying brilliance
Of twin suns in supernova
A radiance so profound
That the shadows it casts
Tremble in perpetual aftershock.

Strange flowers

Today, walking on the train tracks, I found pieces of a discarded bouquet, flowers that bloomed from copper cable.

creatures

There were many creatures in my dreams last night: a companion tiger who walked beside me along a snowy, busy highway, a crocodile that tried to eat Little Springtime (but she repelled him), kittens dashing about under dry leaves, and crustaceans and things like diatoms, but large enough to hold, filling a harbor.

"when you find this, the crew of the ill-fated ship Horatio ... is no more."

Today a dramatic and tragic message-in-a-bottle story came my way. Janis Blower, writing in the Shields Gazette, tells the story of a bottle that washed up in 1861 in South Shields, downstream from Newcastle upon Tyne in Great Britain. The whole story is here, but below are some excerpts:

The letter, which was dated February of the previous year, began: “Dear Friends, when you find this, the crew of the ill-fated ship Horatio, Captain Jackson, of Norwich, is no more.” It went on to say how the...

a warm and sunny day

The peepers were peeping in the lake behind the baseball field and in the low-lying area next to the Dunkin Donuts, where a duck was sleeping in spite of the singing.

By the rec department, the skate park was getting some use:







At the dump, a sign said, "New stickers are pass due!" They meant past due; they meant, you need a new sticker, for 2015, if you're going to be dumping trash here, but they'd written "pass due," because in American English, that's what it sounds like, and if you think abo...

Aural coloring books

I was driving to the high school yesterday, and anytime I passed a wet, low-lying area, the cheerful sound of spring peepers rose from it. Not only water, but also frog song, collects there. It was as if the scene were a giant coloring book, and someone had colored in the sounds, filling in the low spots with peepers. So then I got to thinking about how else the scene was colored, aurally. The roads are colored with the sounds of engines. If the picture is colored in the early morning, the ro...

It all began in 1990

You know how you can think that things have existed basically forever (like, say, the song "Happy Birthday to You") and then discover that no, they have a knowable and more-or-less datable origin (like the mid-nineteenth century for the combination of words and tune for "Happy Birthday to You" source)?

Well, the other day wakanomori and I were having a conversation about I-don't-even-remember-what, and guess who came up as a figure of comparison? Hitler! And we both laughed and joked about God...