FlashFiction.Net

First, you gotta listen to this. Then, you can read it here. 

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If you are like me (and for your sake I hope that's not the case), then you tire of the discussions about the lines that divide the prose poem and the flash, and you could, in the end, care less about why someone breaks lines or doesn't, why singular paragraphs tend to be called prose poems, and the more paragraphs one creates, the more likely one is writing flash. All you know is that breaking your lines creates something not very good.

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James Tate's work makes me want to write, and since the line break eludes me, what I write won't have them. Here, I grasp that half-asleep reach for the phone, the desire in his answering the "wrong number" with "I miss you, too. I wish you were here with me right now." Desire, I've learned somewhere, drives narrative into existence, and that desire will create action that will be thwarted again and again until the final resolution becomes hard-earned and meaningful. But desire might create other things, might create something of a sound like that woman's voice, a lion's roar, a sound like distant thunder.

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I love the way this piece begins and ends with sleep, and that TV and its images flickering throughout. "I hated not knowing her name"—and I think of all the things in the world that arouse desire and all the things that desire drives into existence. "I love you," he tells the woman and thinks he means it. I think he does, too, love her and mean it. It isn't the hard-earned, action-created love of the narrative formula. It's the waiting kind, arising not from the external forces that thwart desire, but from elsewhere.

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She is elsewhere, too, in Australia. Did I mention how funny it is, also? "I felt like a Howie," he tells us, "I really did." If indeed there is some inciting incident that changes the ho-hum of everyday life into a need for something for characters, then for us, the piece's readers, there is also an inciting incident, our encountering this character and what desire, I wonder, arises in us? The desire to laugh, yes. And that is something, of course, to go from quietude to laughter, but there's more, much more, and it is that mix of compression/brevity and more that fills me with wonder. It is fine for love to develop after being tested again and again by the world whose desire might be to destroy it, but it a wonder (too) for love to arise (in a flash) as if summoned. Love that didn't need to be driven into existence. Elsewhere, a monster eats someone, a lion roars, a woman in Australia dreams of Howie. And a shoe gets tied.