Assistant Editor Sakinah Hofler: When I read the first line of this piece, “For some time now I have been dating confetti,” I wanted to know more: Why would one date confetti? And: how is this relationship working out? Poyner’s protagonist answers my concerns through clear prose and beautiful images. By the end, not only do we understand why the protagonist opts to date confetti, we’re rooting for this couple to last a long, long time.
To hear Ken Poyner read “Compensation,” click below:
Compensation
For some time now I have been dating confetti. The hardest part is finding places to go. If we go somewhere windy, most of our time is spent collecting all her windblown pieces, stopping afterward for cardboard paper and shears to make up for fragments that will never be seen again. The pool is a disaster. I keep a net in the car, and after swimming, I dry her out on the sidewalk or spread her over other warm pavement or on the hood of the car. Traditional dating options, like movies, are much better. I can sprinkle her across one seat, hope that no one brushing past picks up any stray pieces, that most of her lasts through the entire viewing.
Long hours of the morning are spent weighing and sorting and hoping we have ended our date with all the slivers of her that we started with. We remake what we miss, we recomb our environment, we agree there should be a little less of that, a little more of this. We evolve.
All my friends ask if she is worth the work—the loss and replenishment, the chasing lone loose pieces, the accounting for the collected whole of her. It is a relationship they cannot, at first, find value in. I let them imagine the balance sheet between us, the strange accounting that is our companionship.
Then I tell them of those special long, dry nights: a small room, or even a closet, the two of us widened and electric, accompanied by the enrapturing hum of one slowly, sensuously oscillating fan. Think. Think of her impishly streaming, uncultured, unformed, untethered, endless edges scurrying and improvident in the air.
Ken Poyner’s poetry and fiction has appeared during the last fifty years in Café Irreal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Analog, and several hundred other places. His eighth book, Engaging Cattle (Barking Moose Press), bizarre minifictions, is coming out at the end of 2019. His other five books still in print—two poetry, three minifictions—are available from Amazon and many other places. Freshwater just provided him his seventh Pushcart nomination.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
