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The Year of Yellow butterflies (The Blog)

It was the year we named our children after songbirds

3/18/2016

Click here to hear a song by BOB KERR

(lyrics below)

It was the year
we named our children after songbirds
[don’t you know]
My son was Crow
My brother named his daughter Magpie
[Oriole]
My friend had triplets;
She named them Bunting, Chough and Jay.
[Hey-de-hey]

Before too long
They grew from hatchlings into fledglings
We kept them warm
We lined their nests with twigs and tinfoil
We fed them millet
We fed them suet, seeds and worms

Now they are grown
Who would’ve thought they’d be ungrateful
They changed their names
They go by Tessa, Kate and Arthur
They eat at Arby’s
And never raise their voice in song

--Bob Kerr

Bob Kerr is a playwright (and occasional songwriter) based in Brooklyn. His plays include "The Potato Creek Chair of Death," "The End of the Road," and "In Search Of...Sasquatch." www.robertkerr.net

Extra Ordinary

8/19/2015

It was the year all the girls carved their teeth into parallelograms,
something about the aerodynamics of it all,
the year unmarried boys sought solace in crescent rolls.
It seemed the clouds had borrowed trouble,
demagnetized worn cirrus paths and went wanton.

It was the year the city sang so as not to stutter,
breathy spell when New York misplaced its
exhaustive nostalgia, the very glow groaning.

It was the year step mothers were patient,
ganking hippie mama chic,
every blue jay quitting the forest in a send up of phantom rings,
making the nature scene with coveted spots
on endangered species shortlists
beside semicolons, beneath the black rhino.

It was the year uptight fathers shed fussy suits,
took up soft-serve and psilocybin,
all their "We’ll sees" becoming "Absolutes,"
clobber barons on high holiday.

It was the year obtuse ideas confronted actuality with a smirk,
their presumptuous ilk bought time playing chess
with exoskeleton as rooks, musty snail shells and crackle cicada.

It was the year tweens smoked moths by surgical moonlight,
that middling distance gone full mirage;
the year certain folks attempted forgiveness,
but most just had sizable seconds of Stove-Top and gravy.

It was the year Ornithologists wept at the soaring
octaves of red winged black birds...
field study, we strung carnations like wall-eyed
cult girls waiting for their songs to loosen.

It was a deafening year, "Loudness had won."
We learned to thumbs-up out of sheer American speechlessness,
inarticulate druggists, shunning pill-form
opted for misted tonics, every nosegay mid-wilt.

It was the year the last adult passed away,
the honeysuckles rife with their honeying,
the year still-lifing cats dozed in Isosoles of sunlight,
jilted brides in kelp crowns needled records,
gathered recyclables at dawn.

--James Harvey

James Harvey received his MFA from The New School in 2010 and has poems up at Boog City andsomanytumbleweeds.com. He is fond of Atlantic swells, honey-mustard and bass guitars.

Tender Desolations

7/29/2015

It was the year I broke my leg by being
So drunk a car ran over me & I didn’t feel it.

The year I had an offer to be a prostitute
As I waited in the hallway at 3rd and 9th
With the door open.

The year Kathleen Hanna took off
Her shirt and exposed her perfect breasts,
Then reprimanded everyone for looking.

The year, Tim, the guy I had been seeing,
Said he LOVED “cowboy eggs,” so I made them
For like 2 weeks to please him. There’s a hole
In the middle you make with a small cup--
Like a shot glass, then put the yolk in the hole.

He broke up with me even though I had
Perfected the technique. It was the year

Of Blur vs Oasis when Noel Gallagher
Said Damon Albarn & Alex James should
“Catch AIDS and die.”

The year I wore chockers and drank an entire
Bottle of methadone I had stolen
From a friend.

It was the year I discovered I had antibodies
For Hep C and slight erosion of the liver.

The year I gave up drinking for pot & had
My first experience with MDMA.

The year Brittany Spears had a reality show
And I thought, she’s just a nice, down-home
Girl with probably a really pushy mother.

The year I started Grad school, got certified,
Fired, and lost my shit.

The year of electronic town criers, blogs,
Extraverts, and wild kindness.

--Olivia Grayson

Olivia lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches expository writing and fundamentals of critical reading. She is the author of the chapbooks, Cat Lament and Being Female.

http://oliviadgrayson.tumblr.com/

The Cocoon

7/24/2015

It was the year of deciding to live
in the room everyone had already left,
uncozy & plummy mules with little-girl voices

deciding life wouldn’t be about this:
house of proud rooms
house of promising “never

letting anything be bad again”
swirled with swizzle stick, poking
through the custardy, egg-tempera cake.

No one will tell you
that the room is actually the kitchen
and the labyrinthine city was the new appliance,

happy, full, (auto)mobile(d)
Havana, Detroit’s little sister.
The room is sea, dipping its hip

into a bouquet of bugs, a mosquito’s kiss.
This city, screaming “you know
better than to drink when you’re blue!”

--Christine Reilly

Christine Reilly's first novel, Sunday's on the Phone to Monday, will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2016. She teaches at the Dalton School and lives in New York, New York. Learn more at www.cjreilly.com

It Was the Year I Divorced My Own Image

7/19/2015

I spun three times, unsaid all my Brownie vows, and looked for my face in the mirror,
but all I saw peering back was a Josephine Baker paper doll decked out in bananas.
After I ate the bananas, all the peels shrugged off in pairs.

There was nothing left but a brown paper bag I made into a puppet. I named her Frida
for her pipe cleaner brow, for sock monkeys dangling from toilet paper rolls

she used for arms. She was pumping the monkeys like barbells, and one squealed
“Diego!” and the other “Leon!” while the TP unrolled gloriously onto the sand.

*

It was the year they replaced all the universities with stadiums. The faculty were asked
to become mascots or referees, but there weren’t enough corporate sponsors

to keep the teams afloat, so someone decided to rip out the Astroturf and erect topiaries
instead. There was a hedge depicting Kim Kardashian flexing her ass and another
of Scott Walker with his finger

testing the direction of the wind, and there was one bonsai diorama of a seminar table,
with half the students looking up and half staring into their phones, and you or I or an open-

mouthed adjunct professor reading Audre Lorde or Euripides or Berryman’s Dream Songs,
depending on who was pruning the plant.

*

It was the year I saw my True Love stuffed into the belly of a cloud. The rain was playing
hopscotch with her veins, the cloud was launching pinballs from her lungs. The pinballs

catapulted into my eyes, my eardrums, wedged into the nests of my hair, and I lapped
them up, sliding deliriously into the storm, foisting my umbrella into its gut.

--Lauren Russell

Lauren Russell is the author of the chapbook Dream-Clung, Gone (Brooklyn Arts Press). Her first full-length collection, “What’s Hanging on the Hush,” will be out from Ahsahta in 2017. For more info see http://www.readlauren.com .

The Year of Hotcakes

6/18/2015

It was the year hotcakes cooked on sidewalks and puppies hopscotched between solidifying pock-marked batter. Even better was when sun-warmed blueberries fell from bushes and tasty breakfast was always baking.

There were flies that year, until spiders invited them into their traps and spinnerets, their looms, crochet hooks, their subterfuge and spongy fudge.

That was the year no one went hungry. That year, children excelled in school. That year the scent of air sent sweet, kind sentiments everywhere.

--Martine Bellen

Kryptonite Cantata

6/2/2015

That was the year we dreamt of the rebuke of gravity.
We flew into the light until we became light itself.
We dreamt that the sun warmed us into gods, baked
our bodies until, hard-fired, we became invincible.
We dreamt of secret identities discarded, glasses
melted away with a glance. We dreamt that angels
swam through our veins, & stood transfixed,
mesmerized by the sight of our blood
beneath our gleaming skins…

& when our nemesis smiled, teeth flashing
like the fires of fallen cities, we smiled back…
& when he opened the door to his chest,
we were illuminated in the decay of emerald.
We understood (at once) the dense origin of
what had come (not all at once) to kill us--
our toxic homeland, our radiant past.

That's what it takes to strike down
the blessed—secret hearts, ignited
where the vacuum meets abhorrence,
hard knots of heaven scattered, earth-
bound.

--Gregory Crosby

Gregory Crosby is the author of Spooky Action at a Distance (2014, The Operating System). He always wears a hat.
http://www.tinyletter.com/gregorycrosby

The Year of the Virtual Feather

5/29/2015

It was the year of not being able to find the birds in the sky
And the sky was everywhere scored by starling cloud With starting gun
Those who listened faithfully could locate the patterns they made
As the sky was everywhere and the music leaked thru from the other side

It was the year when the other side of everywhere first began to take shape
It took it from the age of sentiment and from the utopian impulse
From flowering cherries and the conquest of space
It took shape and made with it an aviary resembling planet earth

It was the year avairy earth graffiti first appeared in Brooklyn Then Paris Bogata Akbar
Entire city blocks were painted overnight with the thrilling songs of migration
Hundreds of The Friends of Aviary Earth groups were formed on Facebook
The virtual feather became the defacto trademark of the moment

It was the year of the birth and death of the virtual feather
This much I remember The sky was everywhere filled with conquering sentiment
Music leaked thru the flowering trademarks It took shape
and made with it hundereds of impulsive songs resembling planet earth

--Jean-Paul Pecqueur

Jean-Paul Pecqueur’s first book was titled The Case Against Happiness. A chapbook To Embrace Sea Monsters was recently published by Greying Ghost Press. Originally from the pacific northwest, He currently teaches creative writing to fine arts students at the Pratt Institute and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
http://www.h-ngm-n.com/17/jean-paul-pecqueur.html

It was the year of the erupting tenements

5/21/2015

of getting used to nothing,
of feeling lucky that it wasn’t us the city ate.
Uptown and down, the indigenous
were caught in the rubble.
The phantom residents of
the instant glass towers above
were revealed and no one blinked.
Their decentralized funds erased us,
made us Dubai and Kuala Lumpur,
Kuala Dubai, gleaming and vacant.
Our rents moved to the
vigesimal system of the ancient Maya.
We were hired to play versions
of ourselves like Hawaiians,
in graffiti grass skirts dancing for CronutsTM.
My one true hero was
the mummy Buddha monk of Ulaanbaatar,
stiff but alive, dusty in his rainbow body.
I invoked him every time
a new Brooklyn asshole
decided I wasn’t from there.
I shut down cross-legged,
radiated anti-authenticity,
my skin cells flaking as the asshole tried
to move me to a museum lobby for sale.
I let the roaming coyotes do the work of
terrorizing the interlopers and the ghost rich.
The MTA pitched in with their expertise
in disorientation and abandonment.
I decided on a meeting spot
for after the temples fell,
in the uptown forests
of Inwood and Van Cortlandt.
Telepathically, I texted
the GPS coordinates to my friends,
included a map of the secret bike trails.

--Sheila Maldonado

Sheila Maldonado summers in Coney Island and winters in Washington Heights.

It was the year of returnable urns

5/20/2015

Not all were very well-cleaned, & the finer dust of dispersing grouped grandparents rode the stale air together to lionize the glinting mournful eyes of mourners who filtered in tilted lines into my uncle’s modest mortuary, a fortune of respectable debilitation on parade, arms wrapped tight about their gilded rentals, those renewable casings of woe, the absence of their loved ones an aftertaste I sought to banish with bitter sourdough & crudités, a downturned gaze & ionized water. I had worked in retail & was not afraid. Even when their eyes came unfastened. Even when they barked up that gorgeous sultry porridge of sound the living make when unwound by suffering. When unwound, & rewound, & unwound by suffering. No urn is colder than an urn returned, except those perhaps that aren’t. I smile as I tip the urn lips from their pleading palms, their regretful palms, their shaking fingernails catching with a scratch the metal bottoms as they grasped back, slightly late. We let go, only to wonder & wrestle with regret, & then we let goer. I’ve done this dance a hundred times but most oftenly with words. All investments are eventually divested, I whispered to each of them, & this seemed to help, as the line curved back out through the narrow double doors. Beside me my uncle bowed to each mourner, lower each time. He had a loose vertebra that clicked as he bent, & this was how we kept time…before, of course, it fixed itself. But for a while there, nobody felt forgotten, finally. We were all in it together. & afterwards, smoothies.

Joe Pan’s newest collection of poems, Hiccups, will be published by Augury Books in September.

Author

Hi. I'm Joanna Fuhrman. This is a prose poetry/flash fiction blog in conversation with my serial prose poem "The Year of Yellow Butterflies" (The Year Of Yellow Butterflies, Hanging Loose Press 2015). I had fun writing these poems about fads and trends from imaginary pasts. If you would like to add your own section, write me and I can post it (along with a short bio). Start with "It was the year...."
"In this extraordinary book, Fuhrman seamlessly oscillates between illusion and reality, childhood and maturity, the animal kingdom (a "babbling...walrus," a "creaky bird," a "bunny rabbit") and technology ("a baby's rebooted brains," "Virgil's internet"). She gives new life to the prose poem. The Year of Yellow Butterflies is killer--not only Fuhrman's best book to date, but her most poignant. "--Noelle Kocot

"With the impish charm of an illusionist and the dazzling patter of a tummler in a Borscht Belt resort, Joanna Fuhrman suspends our expectations in The Year of Yellow Butterflies, sending us head over heels into zones of cosmic and technological bafflement and sudden parabolic grief....in this book full of brilliant predicaments and pleasures."—Rachel Loden
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