Adele Evershed
Water-Shed Blues
You can make up words by writing in long hand
And unisex yourself to appeal to all buggers
Cheek by jowl—curses and cursive—separated by a slipped tongue
You buy notebooks from art galleries or museums
(because they know old things and ignore old mistakes)
So you can see the architecture of your story—the bones of it
A blue tit flies in through your shed window
A lovely splash—tiny and intense
And you choose to write its death as omen
Instead of a metaphor for a limitless sky
Show and tell? Or merely just show?
Go forward in time when you don't recognize what you wrote
Someone else is carving up your words like a roast bird
Laying a wing on a white plate rimmed with cobalt—calling it heavenly
But all you remember is a whisper of grease and singed skin—
And drinking sherry in your shed wishing you were a better poet
Bio
Adele Evershed was born in Wales and has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in Connecticut. Her prose and poetry have been published in over eighty online journals and print anthologies such as Every Day Fiction, Free Flash Fiction, Ab Terra Flash Fiction, Grey Sparrow Journal, High Shelf, Tofu Ink Arts Press, The Fib Review, Wales Haiku Journal, Shot Glass Journal, and Hole in the Head Review. Adele has recently been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize for poetry, the Staunch Prize for flash fiction, and her novellain-flash, A History of Hand Thrown Walls was shortlisted in Reflex Press Novella Contest.