THE YEAR OF YELLOW BUTTERFLIES
The Year of Yellow butterflies (The Blog)
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

"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

​

Button Text

It Was the Year I Divorced My Own Image

7/19/2015

3 Comments

 
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 .




3 Comments

    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
    SPD link
    Amazon link

    Categories

    All
    About Book
    Adeena Karasick
    Bob Kerr
    Boni Joi
    Cat Tyc
    Children's Poetry
    Christine Hamm
    Christine Reilly
    Danielle Adamowitz
    David Shapiro
    Diana Rickard
    Donna Hunt
    Eileen Tabios
    From Book
    Gina Inzunza
    Gregory Crosby
    James Harvey
    Jean-Paul Pecqueur
    Jill Grunewald
    Joanna Fuhrman
    Jodie Corngold
    Joe Pan
    Karen Hildebrand
    Kate Lutzner
    Lauren Russell
    Leah Umansky
    Liz Axelrod
    Maria Garcia Teutsch
    Martine Bellen
    Maureen Thorson
    Nada Gordon
    Nicole Callihan
    Olivia Grayson
    Rebecca Watkins
    Robert Thompson
    Ronna Lebo
    Ruth Lepson
    Sarah Sarai
    Sharon Mesmer
    Sheila Maldonado
    Shelley Marlow
    Susan Lewis
    Suzanne Osborne
    Toni Simon
    Vincent Katz

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.