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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It was the year a dark moss grew over my pubic bone

5/3/2015

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and my legs became two chicken drumsticks.

There was no more running around the schoolyard faster than everyone. 

I had lost my aerodynamic advantage. Gone from eagle to chicken because my clutch needed expressing.

But I wanted only to hatch ideas.

A year later a dam broke and then something else. A little thread of what might have been tugged. 

Sometimes when I pulled the string of the tampon I imagined I was a magician trying to free a rabbit from my pink canal.

The rabbit would hop away to a magical land where there were no boys or girls, only creatures that could change their genitalia based upon how the sun hit the rocks near the pond.

Other times when I pulled the string it felt like I was pulling out a bit of a clotted dream. 

I was not flowering into anything.


--Jill Grunewald
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There is no need for clowns when everyone is a clown.

4/15/2015

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It was the year the clowns stopped wearing red rubber noses and packing into a tiny car.

The last smile in town had been turned upside down through an increasingly simple operation called a frownectomy performed in old photo booths.

There is no need for clowns when everyone is a clown.

The circus kept going, but the clowns sat on the bleachers and watched the pink poodles reenact civil war battles. Everyone liked the poodles’ glitter guns.


Sometimes the clowns stood on their heads and smiled because everyone looked sad. They could never stay that way long, because they had grown too fat from eating hallucinogenic cotton candy and would topple over.

In a dream the clowns all turned into blue balloons and popped in a purple sky and their tears squirted out of yellow orchids worn by nuns.

In real life the clowns all cashed in their 401ks and traded in their little car for a black Hybrid Escalade with vibrating rainbow hubcaps.

And then they sped away.


-- Jill Grunewald
Jill Grunewald is a second-year MFA student at Hamline University. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two dogs.
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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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