THE YEAR OF YELLOW BUTTERFLIES
The Year of Yellow butterflies (The Blog)
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"Terrible to dress in the clothes
of a period that must end."--Frank Bidart 

"You must remember that certain things die out for a while/ so they can be remembered with affection later on." --John Ashbery

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5/8/2015

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It was the year it was 104 degrees for 27 days. The skies were full of rain that never fell. One night there was a crumpled body on the floor. It was my mother’s. She came back to life, but I never forgave her. That year there were 81 days where I was only allowed to speak to the apple tree. Green, green, green. But sometimes sour. Here are 53 days where she is heavy-handed. But the back-hand is quick. Here are 66 days where I stood as still as I could. Like a rabbit in the eye of a hawk. And here is another. And another. Another. Here is the hundred days where my mother thought I was a ghost. Here are the 13 days she went away. This is the day she buried the St. Joseph statue upside down in the front yard, and I dug it back up in the darkness, dead clover crunching under my feet, the neighbor’s Doberman quieted with bologna. That is all my hair on the floor. It was the year no one ever spoke my name aloud.


--Donna Hunt


Donna Hunt is originally from Cleveland, which gave her a great love for large bodies of water and failing baseball teams, but she currently lives, writes, and teaches in Brooklyn. She is author of the chapbook The Coastline of Antarctica, and her poems have appeared in Tin House, Diagram, and South Dakota Review


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    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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