Lisa Flowers kills love & moves time
Lisa Flowers is a freelance writer residing in the Ghent section of Norfolk, Virginia. Her book “diatomhero: 40 Religious Poems” is forthcoming. She is the founder and editor of Vulgar Marsala Press, slated to debut in July of 2009.
4 Boxes For Houdini
It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions
TH Huxley
1)
Just before their suicide pact,
Lars & Lucia packed their love for one another
in bubble wrap
And vowed to
Unroll it, like fine China
upon arrival in the next incarnation.
But they waited until the parents they had chosen
had most definitely begun fornicating
with profligate intent to finish
before they fired the final shots.
2)
At Christmas 1897, Frau Mann
a stout German matron
put a fowl into the oven.
Reborn as a man 200 years later,
he opened the door of the same cooker
& everything smelled just decadent.
His passel of brats rattled their silverware
not realizing they were about to glut themselves
on an ancestor of what they had just fed down by the Tuileries.
3)
One evening,
after a fight,
Bertram came in
and found his mistress’ things gone
but for a terse note pinned to the balustrade:
“I have moved to the Elizabethan era. Goodbye.”
He caught the next multi-dimensional plane out after her
but only got as far as 1944,
where he got stuck in customs.
As there was no record of his birth or death
he was forced to remain in the war years,
while his erstwhile concubine fanned herself beneath the auspices of the Queen.
4)
In a peerless act of criminal ingenuity,
Madame X killed her husband in June of 2006
and buried him in 1813.
as everyone was busying themselves
dragging 21st century lakes,
a ripeish item under a cherry tree in the time of Napoleon
was lending something of itself to the foliage.
Lisa has been published in the Cortland Review and other magazines. Follow more of her work and musings in the Vulgar Marsala editor’s desk blog.