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Sunday Micro: In Your Head

Stephen King, methinks, likened writing to telepathy, the writer transferring what's in his/her head to the reader's. Think of all the micro fiction you've read. What sticks in your head? Why?

I'm going to work on figuring that out. These are some things that recently got stuck in my head. Maybe there's an answer among these things.

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.


My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.


He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.


The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

From Anne Sexton's "The Witch's Life"

...my heart
is a kitten of butter

The opening of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy"

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

I guess it's words for me and sounds and images & lyrics I can't quite figure out. It's stuck not because I get it, but because I can't quite grasp something of it: the foreign words of "The Cat in the Hat," the "I'm not unfaithful but I'll stray" of Tegan Sara, the "dark and deep" thing in Frost, the heart as a "kitten of butter" in Sexton, Plath's soothing "oo" sounds set against "barely daring to breathe."

So write, today or another, a micro that sticks in a reader's head.

 

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