This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).
Silly Putty
When she went to the bathroom, someone replaced her with a pod of Silly Putty. The hands looked normal enough when she came back, idle on the dinner table, but were clearly unset clay when they tried to lift the bowl of beans. It was a darned good likeness, but they didn’t get the hair quite right, more scalp than I remembered, and overall, too much of everything, ears suddenly long and flat, eyelids not quite fit to the sockets, sour mouth that could eat a table whole. And the skin—smudged and gray, imprinted backward with every insult she thought I’d said, so later she could look in a mirror and relive them.
Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.
Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.
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