Flourish

Sun breaks skin on frozen pond, shattering milky puddles; grass glints like glass as spring mushrooms through forest floor, greeting a beetle with a thaw. Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image: pixabay.com My response to Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Saturday Mix — Lorraine 18.02.17 In Lorraine’s edition of Saturday mix – a mélange of flash prose and poetry – we […]

Ghosting

Gnats perform a ghostly slow gavotte, gathering like clouds in shafts of light, weaving, willowing wisps of curling smoke, drifting upwards and into the night: gathering, merging and dissipating, solemnly they join the twilight dance, fickle vampires flirting, mating, malign miasma of the Renaissance. Kim M. Russell, 2017 A swarm of gnats. Photograph: Martin Siepmann/Alamy […]

Screaming in Spring

At crack of sparrow bone,the dawn chorus begins. I moanwhen winged visitors make city spirits soar:birds madly squabbling for a morselfallenfrom the feeder is less a roarand more a scream.Diligent blackbirds turn over voluminous deadleaves by the shedand a robin settles on the narrowchain fence, all atrembleat the zenosyne advance of spring overmorrow. Kim M. Russell, […]

Birds of a Feather

Bellowing blarney in bare twigs, the oncoming storm is accompanied by gravel-rasp of crows and reverberating raven echoes. High above the ridge, the first appears, joined by a second artist of the air, wingtip to wingtip, rolling and diving, tearing apart the leaden shroud of cloud in a monsoon of rain and feathers: birds battling […]

No Remorse

The master crept into the chamber of his hangdog handmaiden’s shame again and again. There was no remorse. The bruises on body and soul got worse, while his penitent wife battled nightmares in their marital bed, plagued by guilty demons shrouded in shadows of sleep, which was never deep – just a wallowing in the […]