Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: Michelle Menting’s lyric microessay moves with the vibrations of haiku, tanka, epigrams, and other short and imagistic poems, laying out one image at a time. The compact sections show us natural scenes and family moments, which both culminate in the final, heartrending conclusion, a concrete example of Ezra Pound’s maxim that an image is “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instance of time.”
To hear Michelle read the essay, click here:
Of Precipice
1
The bobbled squawk of turkeys—juveniles full of pomp and bop, unsure why they do what they do, like teenagers grappling for stature.
2
We’d pounce. Pop up, then left, miss the volleyball, dented and dribbling, off the dock as it bounced into the water. And we’d dive, seven slip-skinned siblings, into the lake. Its body all crests: lip then dip, lip then dip.
3
That fox, puffed-fur in full red, prance-charming: a stuffed toy come alive on whispering paws. Tail tip straight, tail tip low. Neighbor’s hen limp in his mouth.
4
Brambled ditch of raspberries growing along our road years ago. My sisters and I sprouting stigmata-like blossoms from pricks of thorns, all of us picking, picking, filling colanders with baubles seeping red.
5
The last cut of devil’s food cake layered to a decadent notch. But dry. Crumbling. Chocolate icing black as death.
6
Mason jars simmering, the ones our mother sets in the pot, readying for raspberry jam. Me, small wiry child, learning, but too slowly. Moving too quickly. By my teenage years, our mother will be gone.
7
Skis above snow above ice above dormant lake that waits, waits for waves.
8
Breath stuck in the thick of June humidity. Siblings at a funeral. A density of sisters. All words choked in the throat. Swallowed, heat-sealed. Their hearts: like baubles seeping red.
Michelle Menting‘s flash prose appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Fourth River, New South, Bellingham Review, and others. She grew up the youngest of twelve siblings in a ramshackle cabin in the Great Lakes region and now lives in Maine where she teaches at the University of Southern Maine.
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