The Body Ate Breakfast
For words the body searched Rachel’s vanilla yogurt. For more than Omega-3
DHA and five live cultures. Where were the long thin pods rising from the
blood of Princess Xanat and her mortal lover? Heads rolled into vines of
tropical orchids, earth the color of heat. Before dawn the body spooned
Titian’s Venus. Legs muscular and tight held the body till it slid off into a pool
of salt and sweet gum. No hand covered lips. Black flower, it called, swimming upstream.
—
This selection comes from Chella Courington’s chapbook Girls & Women, available from Burning River. Contact Chella to purchase your own copy!
Chella Courington is a poet, fiction writer and educator. She’s the author of six chapbooks: Love Letter to Biology 250 (forthcoming from Porkbelly Press), Girls & Women, Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana, Southern Girl Goes Wrong, Paper Covers Rock, and Flying South (forthcoming from A Kind of Hurricane Press). Her flash fiction has appeared in several anthologies including Up, Do Flash Fiction by Women Writers. Poetry and stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including SmokeLong, Nano Fiction, The Collagist, and Fourteen Hills. She lives in Santa Barbara, CA, with another writer and two cats and teaches at Santa Barbara City College
Andrew Koch’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bluestem, Connotation Press, Mojo, Rust + Moth, and others. Although a Tennessee-native, Andrew presently lives in Spokane, Washington with his wife and cat while teaching literature and pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University.
