robertoqs

Now I'm crossposting from Lemmy to Mastodon, by tagging myself, @robertoqs@writing.exchange. Lemmy's “Title” field produces, conversely, an initial separated line in the resulting toot.

Edit: But only a link to Lemmy is displayed in said toot, and not the post's “Body” field.

She didn't look forward to going out to meet her friend for lunch. It was two degrees, and wasn't the fire inviting?

She went, though, out of a sense of social duty, out of the knowledge that she should have friends of her own, out of the memory of a day last winter, when she had canceled the lunch, because of the cold, because of the fire. Her friend had not been amused, nor had the friend's co-worker been amused; abused, perhaps, they had felt abused in the lawyer's office, where there was no fire, and no lover reading it.

Over lunch they talked about her friend's project, a one-woman play using only selections of Emily Dickinson's letters. The question of a title came up: Emily Unplugged; A Taste of Emily (they laughed for the connotations of it). Papers. Emily's Papers. The friend said, “Vellum”, and she said, “That's it!” The friend said, “What?” “Vellum, Emily, that's it, Velemily, something. It's the word, it's the right word, better than Emily Verso and Recto — Vellum.”

The table erupted into textures. The napkins, suddenly, were thick and writable. It was a question of the bite of the paper; how lovely it seemed that paper should have teeth, that Vellum may have the strongest teeth to go with the sword of a pen. It was better than tongues of fire.

— From The Prose Poem: An International Journal, vol. 8.

One word is busy constructing the others. It is a carpenter creating props for a play. It takes a rock and makes it a hat. Thus there is now a rock-hat. This stuff becomes real. All that is real becomes props while all that's not becomes the play. And somewhere in the performance the words start whispering back to us a permutation we hadn't planned. Strangely, as we, the actors, speak our parts, we grow another body. It is suggested our other body is living under the stage, reciting words of another play which we are simultaneously enacting. And we can feel the floor of the stage about to collapse.

— Douglas Blazek, “The Metaphor”, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, vol. 8 (1999).