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| Issue 31: | Jan. 2026 |
| Prose Poem: | 138 words |
By Cherie Hunter Day
J’ai fait juste un bisou
It was just a kiss, a loving gesture. I kissed it without thinking; I thought the artist would understand.... It was an artistic act provoked by the power of Art.
—Rindy Sam*
It was a false alarm. Like every autumn the hillside is overwritten with sugar maples.
My lacquer on your box underscores the necessity of succor on this wobbly planet.
Only a bell-worthy chime becomes my chimera.
Slay me and I’ll pay the ransom of the hare on a new field of snow.
Bourjois Rouge Best 15 shouldn’t be mistaken for Vandal Red.
*Author’s Note:
July 19, 2007: Police arrested artist Rindy Sam after she planted a bright red, lipstick-laden kiss on one panel of Cy Twombly’s triptych Phaedrus, as it hung on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon.
“Artist Twombly gets one euro award for unwanted kiss: Woman fined $2,139 over lipstick smear on $2.8M painting” at CBC News, Canada (16 November 2007); link retrieved on 10 December 2025: https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/artist-twombly-gets-one-euro-award-for-unwanted-kiss-1.640298
Cherie Hunter Day
lives in New Hampshire. Her micro-prose and prose poems have appeared in 100 Word Story, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry, Mid-American Review, Moon City Review, and Unbroken. She is the author of six chapbooks and seven full-length books, two of which won Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards. Her latest collection, A House Meant Only for Summer (Red Moon Press, 2023), features haibun and tanka prose. When not writing or making collages, she’s outside exploring the woods and avoiding ticks.
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Cherie Hunter Day: eight prose poems in The Mackinaw (Issue 3, 15 May 2024)
⚡ Two Favorite Haibun (A Family Resemblance: Haibun & Prose Poetry), essay by Cherie Hunter Day in contemporary haibun today 19.3 (December 2023)
⚡ Color Collages and B&W Collages by Cherie Hunter Day in multiple issues of Heliosparrow Poetry Journal (February 2020 through December 2023)
⚡ Two dozen works by Cherie Hunter Day have appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly since the debut issue in January 2020; please see Index of Contributors for the links.
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