Happy New Year!

A couple quick updates to start off 2019.

Challenge of the Month

We're working our way through the entries for November and December's Challenge of the Month. Due to the holiday, giving every entry a fair read and determining a winner is taking a bit longer than anticipated. Keep an eye out for an winner announcement in the next couple of days, as well as January's prompt.

New Feature - Email Notifications

We've added email notifications. You'll now receive an email when somebody likes, reposts, or comments on one of your posts. You'll also receive a notification when somebody follows or messages you. If you don't want to receive email notifications, you can disable them here: https://theprose.com/settings/notifications. We're now working to restore functionality for mobile push notifications on iOS. Stay tuned!

We wish you all a fantastic 2019. Great things ahead.

Prose.

Improvement: Under the Hood

We’ve made a lot of changes under the hood to improve the performance and reliability of the website. The site will now be much smarter about remembering and saving the pages you’ve recently viewed. In the short term, there may be a few bugs, so please let us know if you run into anything.

Improvement: Cacheing

Everything you view will now be locally cached. For example, after publishing a post, you won’t have to wait for the post to load to view it. If you click a challenge in the challenge feed, it’ll load instantly. You should notice these effects across the site.

Improvement: Messaging

Clicking different messaging conversations and messaging multiple users at once should now be much faster and more responsive. A bug has also been fixed that prevented the messaging window from automatically scrolling as you send and receive messages.

Improvement: Feed Loading

When visiting new pages or new post feeds, the previous feed will no longer linger while the new feed loads. This caused some confusion when loading a new feed failed or took longer than usual.

Bug Fix: Facebook Share

The Facebook Share button now works as intended.

Bug Fix: Read Count

The read count indicator will no longer increment when editing a post.

Are there any other bugs, difficulties, or inconsistencies you’d like to see fixed? Let us know in the comments below.

I went to see Picasso

At the Modern

On a day we lost the sun.

We had to wait too long

So browsed the other galleries

To make time run quicker.

In a darkened room

Filled with power

Were monumental canvases

That played with colour.

One reminded me of

An opening storm

Behind the grey;

A lightning’s flicker.

While staring at the streaks

And lines and flakes

Looking for meaning

Or even form

In the abstract sweeps

I heard the soft scrape

Of the creator’s brush

Painting silence

In place of speech.

Dancing on the hardwood feeling good,

I snap my fingers. Listen.

At a horse track in Hot Springs my father bet all his life savings on a palomino Quarter Horse named Diamonds Sparkle.

When my grandfather peppered

his seed across the alluvial floodplain,

cotton cropped up like a southern snow

in September. My grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts lopped like gongs on the washing line. Blighted youth, blackspot

on roses, butterfly milkweed, I murmur

as I tumble ass-backwards—headlong,

my blithe youth behind me. I’ve come this far, barefoot and mean, out of the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta. Dipped in Southern drawl and mud-stained fervor—

a water splintered levee—it doesn’t ask why first. It has a rhythm to it,

a gentle pulsing—

like my grandmother’s spider-veined hands

in the biscuit dough. Her food, thickened

all her toothpick-limbed children,

and my grandfather, mellow like smooth corn whiskey. Under a setting sun,

his bourbon-boozed breath

came in small spurts.

Most folks talk too much,

he’d say, aiming chewing tobacco

into an old coke can.

He never murmured.

Sometimes he’d look

out across at the tar-tinged night

and talk nonsense with the invisible choir

of cicadas.

My innocence clucks

like a chicken hauled off to the chopping block. Goodbye fruit flies cruising

the heirlooms. Goodbye pecan pie

and homemade vanilla bean.

Goodbye my cover of coots that grandmother fattened every morning with slivers of leftovers.

Where the word holler was both

a verb and a place—where ramshackle

little mud huts were made.

Some words are rickety doors creaking

open, and I walk on— through another lost summer,

a red-stained road

never coming

to an end. The cicadas still sing.

One of these days,

I’ll be gone.

The only part of your mother that you own,

that your cheeks can still root for when hungry

for her flesh, that reminds you of those pureed

peas, those nostrils caked in cocaine, those

boning knives, your mother. Your mother, a boning knife,

cutting myofilaments, your empty plasma,

you leech, you blood-sucker. You can almost

feel your umbilical cord tether. She can’t see

your face, can’t understand your babble. Oh,

Anna O., is this how you speak to your mother,

spitting alien syllables even you can’t say twice?

Chimney sweeping ashes off your eyelids,

really seeing. Is this how you die?

Look, brain: see what stories we can twist

without anyone else’s tongue? How powerful

we are on our own. Isn’t it funny how

we can build gods and demons in one body

and kiss both of their foreheads goodnight?

We stand upon the edge of tomorrow, as time rushes headlong over the falls and yesterday fades moment by moment into obscurity. The future lies forever upstream and the past is bound for mist; all we truly have is now, living upon the precipice, experiencing life as it happens. Do not let anticipation of what the river may bring you, nor the recall of water gone by, take from you the beauty and joy found in the swirling eddies of each passing moment.

upon time's river

memories fade into haze

leaving only now

© 2017 - dustygrein

*** The haibun is one of my favorite oriental poetry styles, as it combines both tightly written prose, and a summary haiku/senryu.

Kings and 

queens

magnificent

personages

bedight 

with silver 

and gold.

Idols,

for themselves,

are God.

your judgement

they bear

in open arms,

and though 

treacherously they

deal,

they've harvested

praise 

in lieu of spite,

for every 

blunder they 

thus commit, 

they've somehow

embellished it

precisely,

camouflaged

their wickedness

with soft speeches

veneering 

golden fables,

masters and

mistresses of 

persuasion,

their bogus

grins and feeble waves

benumb 

our veins,

so that,

our 

last shillings

are spent

indulging them

with fairy tale

abodes,

castles, 

palaces,

apartments

replete

with butlers 

and footmen,

when we,

ourselves,

dwell in 

utter ruin!