Unstrung Pearls

all flesh burned shall peel
in due, sanctimonious time.

a family practitioner provides advice, while the nation's best hospital mails you their annual book. you know the maladies that keep you in bed, and you know, honey and lukewarm water are enough to keep you out of trouble. for one more week. better than a day, you would think.

I was the kid
finding hope in cough drops.

a hefty mortgage two blocks away and a crying lover on an unpainted porch await me every day, and the only words said are illegible, sleepily falling through dozens of gaps we see in a rusted chain-link fence.

today, no one reads cursive.
not the girl who grieves.

On the weekends, Kristine Brown frequently wanders through historic neighborhoods, saying "Hello" to most any cat she encounters. Some of these cats are found on her blog, Crumpled Paper Cranes (https://crumpledpapercranes.com). Her creative work can be found in Hobart, Sea Foam Mag, Burning House Press, The Pangolin Review, Philosophical Idiot, among others, and a collection of flash prose and poetry, Scraped Knees, was released in 2017 by Ugly Sapling.