Assistant Editor Toni Judnitch: In Heather Sellers’s micromemoir/prose poem “Florida” we are transported to a wonderful strangeness—a setting that is both familiar and alien. The sharp images and pacing create a sense that we are out of time, in a passing dream that clings to the edges of memory after we wake. In the magical world Sellers describes, we are reminded of the transitory and beautiful nature of being.
To hear Heather read her piece, click below:
Florida
Johnny came down from Michigan and caught a little lemon shark, then a stingray. Maybe the wingspan was four feet—it was hard to tell with all the flying around.
The ray fought like a rattlesnake and bent around like a cat—his description. Which I liked so much I wrote it down. The strangeness of energy in our boat, the unholy action of trying to land a beast that does not belong to us.
I caught a puffer fish, tennis ball yellow, spined, see-through. Pulling the hook from her cheek was like taking a pin from paper. Gold light came through her strange, stretched-thin skin. She was transparent when I lobbed her back, globe & window into the unseeable galaxy of sea.
Boats decorated with Christmas lights and stuffed elves in striped stockings tied to their masts passed us, too fast, racing to some blessing on the horizon.
We walked back to my house, a long, long way. Toward the end I felt like a fish with feet.
Golf carts blinked bright strands of lights, wreaths on the front, grandchildren hanging off the back, thrilled and mute and bored, and tinny music, the kind called “festive,” all the major keys.
“We’re the Tipsy Elves,” women called from a red golf cart, proffering from their palms vials of liquor, small bottles of wine.
As I stepped across my lawn, the sprinklers burst on in great fans, dry season wet.
The deep green Saint Augustine grass sparkled with droplets of water in the late light, and the sky turned hot pink and red.
We live in stolen jewelry.
Heather Sellers is the author of You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead, 2011), a memoir, and The Practice of Creative Writing (MacMillan Learning, 2021), a textbook, now in its fourth edition. Field Notes from the Flood Zone, a collection of prose poems, is forthcoming from BOA Editions.
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