HOOT ONLINE, ISSUE 72, AUGUST 2018 – MICRO FICTION, POETRY, MEMOIR, BOOK REVIEWS

That Way Lies Madness
by Rachael Warecki
art contributed by author

There’s a chair in the corner that looks like it’s trying to escape.
It’s springing from the top of a stack near the window, its hind legs straddling the back of the chair below, its arms reaching toward the ceiling, its back aimed at the window. It’s a suicidal high jump, as if it could reach the cemetery across the street with a Fosbury Flop.
It’s got the right idea: across the room are the remains of a lecture on George Eliot. If I’d been trapped with a lecture on George Eliot, I would’ve sat in that chair—the one with a death wish—and enjoyed the world from a 45-degree angle.
But I’m not attending an Eliot lecture and I’m not sitting in that chair, so all I have to focus on is the fact that the television in the opposite corner might be staring at me.
END

 

 

Summer. Oak Ridge, Tennessee. 1982.
by PB Johnson 
art by his 9-year old daughter, Clare Johnson

It rains every day before noon so I ride my bike home and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with potato chips on it. The rain stops and I go outside to wet grass and dandelions. The bumblebees are huge. One has two heads. My brother doesn’t believe me until I find it again lumbering slowly above the blackeyed susans. He gets a peanut can from the kitchen and the screen door slams behind him running to where I watch over the two-headed bee. Afraid no one will believe us, I won’t take my eyes off of him. He’s in the can now and we carve air holes in the clear plastic lid with a pocket knife. I leave him on the porch when I go to baseball practice. The coach says don’t drink out of the water fountains behind the dugout tonight.

 

 

Giraffe
by Beth Bledsoe

long-necked wanderer
traveling across the savanna
munching on the tallest trees
your colors are plain
though your patterns are unique

 

 

Like Balloons
by E. Kristin Anderson
art by Clementine Hoppy

With her big eyes
      there had been times
           when she would die
from        overheard seconds,
        the death     a little choky,
               built gingerly
                         with weeping,
                               isolated.

This is an erasure poem. Source Material: King, Stephen. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. New York: Pocket, 1999. 58. Print.

–

Rachael Warecki lives in Los Angeles, where her furniture is quite content. She’s received the 2017 Tiferet Fiction Prize, as well as other publication and residency acceptances, and is currently at work on a novel.

PB Johnson was raised in the Southeast and now works as a police detective in Chicago, observing and documenting life’s moments for the past 20 years. His essays have been featured on Chicago Publidio.
Beth Bledsoe has been published in Good News, The Westward Quarterly, and Red Ochre Lit.  She can be found tweeting poems and other silliness @themirthfulpen

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and Hysteria: Writing the female body (Sable Books, forthcoming).

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