Flash
Paul Hetherington

Photo Credit: Scott Davies/Flickr (CC-by-nc)

1.
In a room that overlooked a busy road they ate pasta with egg. Night was thick with traffic, strands of connection joined their bodies. Possibilities reached the quotidian; the real was said and held. Pasta on a fork. Time slipping through the tines. Words sticky in their believing mouths.

2.
A window looked onto a bent roadway, next to which a child stood staring at a black sky. Cars streamed towards suburbs distant as midday; a lightning strike burnt an outhouse. The child looked into her book, seeing the Milky Way, beginning to recite parables.

Paul Hetherington is a professor of writing at the University of Canberra, Australia, head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) there and a founding editor of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations. He has published nine poetry collections, most recently Six Different Windows. Email: Paul.Hetherington[at]canberra.edu.au