Logo, MacQueen's Quinterly
Listed at Duotrope
MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 1: January 2020
Prose Poem: 180 words
By Lynn Pattison

Lora no longer sees herself

 

as a girl inside a stump. She’s part of something—collecting, absorbing, circulating. She pulls light into her center and swells. She might tell you she feels charged and immense—if she thought in words anymore, if her tongue felt useful. Now, signals are inside. Toes wiggle deep toward a rumor of water and messages pulse from bark and moist new structures along her legs and ribs. Lora’s peered through a Science lens, seen the boxy shapes of plant cells. She has an inkling of what’s happening in her ankles, along her thighs, how blocky cells stack and grow. Essential stalks. She is engaged. She is beloved.

A few young trees nearby are daring euphoric growth. Beneath Lora a web, lacier than the fretwork on her grandfather’s clock, takes up their cause, feeds their undertaking. A nursemaid. New sprouts emerge from her own trunk and she thrills with welling capacity, right down to the tips of the angled twigs she used to call fingers. Her legs are stronger than fence posts. She could stand forever.

Lynn Pattison
Issue 1, January 2020

is the author of two chapbooks, tesla’s daughter (March St. Press) and Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press), and a full-length collection of poems, Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press).

Her work has appeared in Brilliant Corners, Harpur Palate, KYSO Flash, New Flash Fiction Review, Rattle, Rhino, Slipstream, Smartish Pace, The Atlanta Review, The MacGuffin, and The Notre Dame Review, among others; and has been anthologized in several venues, including Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017), in plein air: poems and drawings of the natural world (Poetic Licence Press), The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, and The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets on Endangered Species.

 
 
Copyright © 2019-2024 by MacQueen’s Quinterly and by those whose works appear here.
Logo and website designed and built by Clare MacQueen; copyrighted © 2019-2024.
Data collection, storage, assimilation, or interpretation of this publication, in whole
or in part, for the purpose of AI training are expressly forbidden, no exceptions.
⚡   Please report broken links to: MacQuinterly [at] gmail [dot] com   ⚡

At MacQ, we take your privacy seriously. We do not collect, sell, rent, or exchange your name and email address, or any other information about you, to third parties for marketing purposes. When you contact us, we will use your name and email address only in order to respond to your questions, comments, etc.