Submission Guidelines

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Michelle Reale-

Aurora Sets the House on Fire
 
But first, because it mocks her, she kills the fat fly over and over again.  It’s wings leave an iridescent smear on the French vanilla colored wall. It pleases her to no end. Outside the sound of a basketball hitting the cement at eerily slow intervals threatens to lull her to sleep, while she stands. She snaps back to attention and remembers how she once read about a serial killer’s mother who never left home without her big scrapbook, as if your life can be held together with some glue and some tape, something she may have to resort to in the near future. It’s curious details like this that spur her on.  And the questions. She’d like to know how she can stop raking at bloated desire with her bloody claws.   Anybody? The avenue is full of other people’s trash and she is up to her ankles in the different stories they tell all on the same day. Listening went out of fashion years ago.   There are rivers that flow with molten wax, but in the end, the heat, the burning and the light it gives will have to be enough.  Even pleasure has a life span and she’s lived long enough to know, that it is usually a short one. 
 
Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at Arcadia University in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is the author of four chapbooks and her work has appeared in various anthologies.  She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She blogs on social justice, immigration and migration in the Sicilian context atwww.sempresicilia.wordpress.com 

1 comment: