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 of the erupting tenements 

5/21/2015

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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.
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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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