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GLASSWORKS
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Small Words by Kathleen McGookey

11/1/2022

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​On Cherry Valley Road, there’s a catalpa with a heart-shaped hole in its side, where the trunk branched and half tore away in the storm. You could stand on tiptoe and hide a measuring cup and a spinning wheel in there. I pass it twice a day, taking my kids to school, but today, I can’t stop and guess a hundred names for love. Not even one. A mass of white petals litters the ground. Some days I glance at the jagged hole and wonder if it’s growing teeth. Some days, while the kids argue, I think about dinner. About the bats living in the eave and the ladder. The lost language arts book, surely damaged in the storm. My daughter’s teacher wants her students to stop using perfectly good small words like little and pretty, in favor of more complicated ones. She’s made the classroom bulletin board into a graveyard, miniature headstones marking each discarded word. I see her point and disagree: after dinner, the dog and I walk in the dark, while the wind shakes a little more rain from the trees.
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Kathleen McGookey has published four books of prose poems and three chapbooks, most recently Instructions for My Imposter (Press 53) and Nineteen Letters (BatCat Press). She has also published We’ll See, a book of translations of French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, December, Field, Glassworks, Miramar, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, and Sweet. She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

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    FLASH GLASS: A MONTHLY PUBLICATION OF FLASH FICTION, PROSE POETRY, & MICRO ESSAYS


    COVER IMAGE:
    ​"Morning Light" 
    Louis Dennis
    ​ISSUE 23

    Categories

    All
    Alice McCormick
    Arandus Larson
    Cathy Wittmeyer
    Concerto #4 In Dm
    Emily McIntyre
    Flash Fiction
    Jeanette Smith
    Kathleen McGookey
    Lannie Stabile
    Letter Of Acceptance
    Lilly Roan
    Micro Essay
    My Mother's Farmland: Thirteen Acres Square
    Prose Poetry
    Prose-poetry
    Resting At Your Grave
    Robert Beveridge
    Small-words
    Snail
    Sometimes Trauma Comes Back For More
    The Buses
    The Cage You Started From
    The Wave
    Where The Sun Goes
    Written In November's Heart
    Zain Syed
    Zorina Exie Frey

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