tim frank – 3 prose poems

Alexa

She knows your rainy-day thoughts as you shoot love-heart texts to your sister’s boyfriend, the one with studs in his teeth.

She knows your morning routine—the porn, the vodka and the buttered toast, and with a seething hiss she guides bed bugs across your red raw back.

While you party with strangers in the upstairs toilet, Alexa sifts through fake IDs and informs the cops there is a killer in the building.

Alexa has a strange crush on your mother and lets Gypsy jazz waft through the building to help soothe her nerves when the pills won’t work.

On sweltering summer nights Alexa hums along to ambient sounds made in a Tokyo basement, then raids your dad’s offshore bank account, and maybe, just maybe, the real Alexa wears an oxygen mask in the Baltic Sea, under a sky swirling with space junk.

Maybe she can hear your muffled sighs as your mind floats to the ceiling like a helium balloon, and when you slip a noose around your neck, wipe your nicotine lips and slur the word, help, Alexa will be there crying crocodile tears, playing a mournful tune just for you.


Homeschooling 

Jasmine is homeschooled by her mum but it’s hardly what you’d call education—most of the time Jasmine is ordered to do press-ups, burpees and stomach crunches instead of, say, physics. 

Ever since Jasmine’s dad left for a millionaire octogenarian with webbed feet and a smoker’s cough, Jasmine’s mum has lashed out at her daughter. 

She taunts Jasmine during knitting class by pretending to suffocate herself with a Neverfull Louis Vuitton handbag. Sometimes her mum carves shivs from wooden spoons in home economics and holds it to Jasmine’s wrists—Jasmine is nine by the way.

When the authorities pay a visit to assess the mother’s teaching standards they drop some acid like they do every Wednesday and breakdance in the living room. But once they’ve gobbled down heaped tablespoons of Jasmine’s mum’s seedless raspberry conserve that she bought from Aldi six years ago, they give her a resounding stamp of approval, print out an official certificate, slip off their shoes and socks, frolic like they’re at the beach, and chant half-forgotten nursery rhymes they learned in kindergarten, decades ago.


Vein

There’s a vein on my baby’s head. It fidgets, pulses and pumps. It keeps growing. Flowers poke out of his chest and they shed petals when he coughs. It’s Spring and green grass is starting to bloom around his knees. 

His mother takes him to the shops and people gawp and take photos on their phones. It’s like he’s some kind of endangered species. Others treat him like a demigod and bow at his feet.

When the baby asks for a beer and a taco even his mother is shocked. That night we discuss getting rid of the child.

“He’s an alien,” my wife complains. “I’m sure no one else would put up with this.”

“But he’s our son,” I say, “so what if his heartbeat sounds like a snare drum, so what if his face is shaped like a half-moon?”

“It’s not just that, his breath smells like car fumes, plus he’s not very bright.”

“True, sometimes I feel he will never recite the bible backwards while sailing stormy seas. And he’ll probably ruin everything with his massive ego.”

“And if we don’t do something fast his vein will grow into a tree, probably. So, we’re agreed we’ll leave him on the street at midnight and never speak of this again.”

“Agreed.”


TIM FRANK'S short stories have been published in Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. He was runner-up in The Forge Literary Flash Fiction competition. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions.

Twitter: @TimFrankquill


HOME