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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8/21/2014

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It was the year all the fashionistas wanted to be clowns. The stores were full of hooped polka-dot trousers and pink, horn lip-augmentation mechanisms. Bozo temporary tattoos blazed on the biceps of every teen girl in a tank top.

When we first heard about the trend, we assumed it would be a hit among the sleek big-breasted co-eds—a way they could be seen, without being sexualized, but in the end it was short, stubby girls who really made it cool.
Visiting a local high school, I passed one, a slightly iridescent African-American in a curly rainbow wig.
After glimpsing the rubber nose, hanging from my belt-loop, she looked straight at me and smiled.
She didn’t need to say a thing for me to know exactly what she meant.

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It was the year all the clouds resembled noses. Some were clean buttons, but others were dripping with cumulus snot.

We missed the variety of previous eras—clouds shaped like the Eiffel Tower or geodesic domes.

Once there was a cloud that resembled the schnozzle of a popular reality star—you could see the movement of the celebrity’s breath mirrored in its shifts.

I tried to stay awake all day and night, so I could record its trembles with my cellular phone.

I had hoped to post it online, but by the time I realized I had fallen asleep the nose-cloud had become two separate clouds, two unrelated nose-forms, neither of them famous at all.


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It was the year young women wore blue jeans with carefully ripped holes, holes revealing leggings, and in the knees of the leggings, little rips, glimpses of neon paisley tights.

In the paisley tights there were holes, and through these holes we could see little patches of perfect skin-colored knee-makeup.

In the knee-makeup, there would be always be a gap where the real skin would peek out, and in that gap would be another hole and in it a surgically implanted transparent window revealing veins, and under the veins there would be muscles, predictable bones.

Inside those bones, we could see little tubes, and inside those tubes, there was the beginning or the end of language. I didn’t know which, but I knew it was a kind of happiness like a crooked line is happy or like a million crooked lines are even happier.

I thought of it as a great yellow swooping, maybe the music of glaciers melting, or mislaid planets slowly re-adjusting their orbits.

--Joanna Fuhrman
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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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