Fracture
by Robert Miltner
Sunlight blazes over a canvas of spreading plains. Rectangular farmsteads, linen thread county roads, rolling contours formed by glaciers and insistent shallow river beds. Flowing through tubular canals from northern tar sands to coastal shipping ports, a pipeline is a running fence that crosses fiercely over border shadows, aquafers, subterranean watercourses, sacred lands. Movement of the opium dram of corvine ink is seditious to voracious to incursive. Dogs bark with graphite melancholy. Coyotes howl malignant as rust-jawed necromancers. Obsidian crows displace a red-tail hawk, finish what it caught. Body and skin are torn, flayed, ruptured, cleaved bone to marrow to maw to broken bellows of jaw. The spill reveals its secret as blood tints soil: an immiscible ointment imping sacrifice to slick gods. Geography leans in on itself, heft to depth to density to balance, inverting to an eclipse of ravens, a collapsed tornado, a swindling sea of rising crude, a black hole displacing a prairie.
Inspired by the painting The Vanquished
by Hans Hoffman
Flood Plain
Terrifying beauty seen from an airplane. A river channel crested, breached. Mixture of drowned cornfields and layers of dark topsoil pressed from paint tubes. Swirling slurry of coal waste and sheen of hog farm muck leaked from earthen lagoons. Thick brown swaths of mudslides applied with a scraper. Floating islands of unmoored barns, warehouses, marinas, houses, docks, boats. Oil from ruptured refinery tanks. Snapped power lines ignite and fire’s red ribbons incinerate shore’s trees, shrubs, cattail marshes. Bridges closing, submerging, sinking. Sections of gray linear highways cut like discarded sheet metal. The drowning of squares and circles, triangles and rectangles. Silver flashes of sunlight on sudden-wrought water meadows, meanders, estuaries. Weather drones show a deranged collage after a fixed cartography becomes an action painting.
Inspired by the Land painting series
by Morgan Dyer
Monochromatic Photograph
String snaps and master wind marionettes kite’s frantic and fragile dance. Released from the cupped hands of a gust, kite tips and trembles and plummets like a small airplane faltering from an electrical stroke. Earth’s magnetic pull grasps falling kite, pushes it into the vast ocean of a failing farm field. Airplane is sparrow struck by escaped kite, is sparrow bleached by sun glare to absence of color. White feathers scatter like exclamation points beside the crashed crushed kite frame of small bird. Three crows coast and land. They eat from the bowl of sparrow’s belly, lungs by muscle by intestines by sinew until only the empty cavity remains. The corvid trio departs. Gathered clouds rumble and rift. White sparrow cup with its feathered tail fills with rain. Scrap dealers arrive, claim the emptied hollow of sparrow kite plane. Master wind deranges the wreckage like a sky broken by a shooting, a coup, or a species extinction.
Inspired by the ceramic sculpture Sparrow
by Kate MacDowell
About the Author:
Robert Miltner is the author of two books of prose poetry, Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press) and Orpheus & Echo (Etruscan Press); several chapbooks of prose poetry, including Against the Simple (Kent State University Press) and Eurydice Rising (Red Berry Editions); a book of brief fictions, And Your Bird Can Sing (Bottom Dog Press); and a book of flash lyric nonfiction, Ohio Apertures (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming). His prose poems are included in Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press), A Cast-Iron Airplane That Can Actually Fly: Contemporary Poets Comment on Their Prose Poems (MadHat Press), and The Prose Poem: An Introduction (Yale University Press).
About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:
CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.