Prompt: The idea is to write your own prose poem that, whatever title you choose to give it, is a story about the body. The poem should contain an encounter between two people, some spoken language, and at least one crisp visual image.
I don't know if I'll be able to finish out this NaPo, since post-Covid recovery fatigue is all too real, but I guess I'll try. Rusty, out of practice, but anyway.
THE THINGS SHE LEFT BEHIND
Caffeine. Ca-ffeine. Ca-ca-ca-caff-ei-ne. Ca-ca-ca-co-phe-ine. Ca-ca-ca-ca-co-pho-neme. Tension headache. Clamour. The noise in my head rings like the muted brr-brr-brr of the old red telephone in the childhood house where lived the child who dreamed the castle who feared the dark who became the I that now lives in the bomb shelter inside my head that I built. Phone. Ca-co-phone. Ca-co-pho-ny. Did my grandmother hear the same, watching the world with hooded eyes, sunken into herself by the mutant cells that would eventually mutate her life away? Ca-co-pho-ny. Ca-co-pho-ney. She had an eye for the real, for the phoney. Quality gemstones, quality food, quality people – she saw. She knew.
Did she know the day I combed out her kitten-soft white hair would be the last time I saw her in her own bed, before cancer caged her in the hospital? The day the text message came, the evening of that 3-hour taxi ride home after work as night fell over the world and curtained her eyes, she defied the darkness just long enough so I could say goodbye. She waited. She knew I would come. When I was thirteen, she told me, "You have phoenix lobes – your earlobes are wide. Earrings will look good on you." I wore her love like earrings, an invisible adornment - private, precious, secret. Something only she and I could see. In that dark still antiseptic room with only my father in attendance, her ghost-fingers brushed my ears as I slept dreamlessly in a distant bed – a last farewell as her spirit evaporated like mist in the dawn. For a moment, the cacophony in my head ceases, stilled by the gentle sway of unseen earrings.
