Jeff Friedman
After the Eclipse
After the eclipse, my sister, grew large beautiful white wings, and her face became moon shaped. She admired herself in the mirror for hours turning around to look at herself from all angles. She would often go outside to practice flying, but to her dismay, she couldn’t get off the ground no matter how fast she ran, flapping her wings with the wind behind her. She’d imitate how crows and bluejays leap into flight from the grass. She’d jump but her feet barely lifted as if some invisible weight pressed on her shoulders. Sometimes she’d fall, but would quickly gather herself for another flight attempt. Her feathers lay on the lawn until the wind scattered them. Even though she couldn’t fly, my sister loved her wings and was constantly fluffing them up like her hair. But as she grew older, the wings lost their feathers and then their slender bones, and over time, there was only the memory of wings and all the flights that never happened.
Fluffy Cloud
Mildred is drunk again in the garden, drinking her cognac-laced tea and weaving a net of bad breath around us. Her pet frog, Slimy, is drunk too, leaping about as though he’d eaten a hot pepper and then dropping into the grass, immobile. Mildred stumbles about and almost falls on Slimy, but we catch her, and Slimy doesn’t seem to notice the danger he is in. “Let’s freshen up,” we say and lead her toward the house, but she resists. She turns and again sees her dead husband,
who she says has returned in the form of a fluffy cloud hovering over the yard. There is no cloud, and her husband left her for another woman long before he died. If he’s hovering anywhere, it’s as a rain cloud over that woman somewhere in Missouri. Nonetheless, we hug Mildred tightly as her tears begin to fall. “He really loved you,” we say again and again, and then Slimy begins croaking and won’t stop.
JEFF FRIEDMAN is the author of eleven collections of poetry and prose, including Broken Signals (Bamboo Dart Press, 2024), Ashes in Paradise (Madhat Press, November 2023), The House of Grana Padano (Pelekinesis Press, April 2022, cowritten with Meg Pokrass), The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), and Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017). Friedman’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, 101 Jewish Poets for the Third Millennium, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Hotel Amerika, Antioch Review, Poetry International, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, two individual Artist Grants from New Hampshire Arts Council. and numerous other awards and prizes.
Website:
poetjefffriedman.com/
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Banner Art:
from Bird and Frog, Kawanabe Kyōsai, ca. 1887
