Two Micros

Two Micros
About the Author

Stripe-tailed with downy head plumage, amphibian up to ankles—truncated by Reorganized Latter Day Saint knicker flannel, she claw-writes ambidextrous each time the thunder comes. They published her without knowledge—just the way she prefers. You won’t catch her ass on a video or an Insta-selfie. Self-taught violinist in a Columbian cave covered in vines, blooming with sphinxter-clinch-inducing bats and widows.  Finger painter. Theemithi. Multi-talented muckraker, pie shaker. Titanium tempered. Fudger of bios. They couldn’t resist her fakery. So many tsunamis not to surf, but the sun beats fuchsia as editors bumble fuck like chicken knuckles through slush piles. She writes blindfolded, with her feet and teeth gnashing. Call her beguiling, profound, she, them, un-locatable whatever—just not “him.” Yes, there are manuscripts. And phone numbers. And lovers. More than she can count, some of them pretend (which is better). And oh, the writing. Somewhere in another country an editor peels open the envelope, and red sand streams onto the desk, forming an oblong spiral in the drool—a publishable one.

 

Wings of (Alternate Version)

Two angers long for the glitter and desolation of Berlin. Hanging near its portal, they provide gratuitous commentary on distressed passersby, looking to mirror their wounds or at least stuff them with the resulting orange tufts of anonymous air. One anger, distracted by their parallel monologues, stops to notice the other, his pocked skin and greasy locks, then catches a beam of green light mistaken for hope, but it was only a flash of chrome from a passing train. Anger 1 lights up, the other asks for a smoke, to which the anger says, “Nope, not tonight. You ain’t getting lucky on my dime.”

There are no words for tomorrow, yesterday, hello, or cigarettes in this gateway. The portal snaps shut its aperture leaving them to each other and infinity—a deep purple platform braided in plastics and littered with scrap heaps, smoke rising into the flaming red sky.

ARTICLEend

About the Author

Koss is a writer and artist with over 170 art and writing publications in journals and anthologies. She has work in Diode Poetry, Schuylkill Valley Dispatches, Bull, Variant Lit, Bending Genres, Spillway, San Pedro River Review, Gone Lawn, Petrichor, and many others. She had work included in Best Small Fictions 2020 and won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Award. She’s received several BoTN and Pushcart nominations for poetry, fiction, and CNF. Recently, her manuscript Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect was chosen for publication in Diode’s ’23 Poetry Chapbook Contest. Find links to her work at https://koss-works.com.

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Photo by Caterina sanders on Unsplash