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  Praise for SPECULATE: A COLLECTION OF MICROLIT

  “Rich and entrancing. This collection is not only a conversation between two literary impressionists—it is a narrative of art. With their words, Eugen Bacon and Dominique Hecq paint landscapes, both inner and outer, and all in stunning detail. In this book I delighted in finding messages and warnings relevant to the questions of today. Earth in existential crisis. Reefs formed within a human body. A Martian’s dialogue reflected in its public art. Eugen and Dominique riff delightfully off each other as they offer up a speculative fiction smorgasbord of thoughtful insight—small dishes served with literary flavor. This is a highly recommended read for those who love language and find delight in morsel-sized fiction and prose poetry.”

  —Pamela Jeffs, author of Saloons & Stardust and Five Dragons

  “A witty collection of dialoguing microfictions, Speculate associates the best of two of the most original voices of the moment. Highly intriguing and enjoyable, and as sharp as a dangerous kitchen knife.”

  —Seb Doubinsky, award-winning author of the City-States Cycle

  “In Speculate, Bacon and Hecq fence with fragments of fiction, and parry with paragraphs of prose poetry, in an elegant to-and-fro that slashes language into surprising patterns with each progressive action. Without winners or losers, and without beginning, middle, or end, this is collaborative writing that doesn’t score points, but exalts in the honed reflex of feint and riposte. Allez!”

  —Oz Hardwick, award-winning poet and academic

  “Bacon and Hecq’s call and response collaborative approach creates prose poems that echo and inform, entwine and correlate. Speculate is a pervasive pattern of democratic participation.”

  —Andrew Hook, award-winning editor and author of Frequencies of Existence

  SPECULATE: A COLLECTION OF MICROLIT.

  Copyright © 2021 by Dominique Hecq & Eugen Bacon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at [email protected].

  “Evridiki” by Dominique Hecq first published in Meniscus (August/September 2018)

  “Letter to a Bride to Be” by Dominique Hecq first published in Not Very Quiet (March 2019)

  “History lesson” by Dominique Hecq first published in Western Humanities Review (March 2019)

  “Today’s word is fire” by Dominique Hecq first published in Western Humanities Review (March 2019)

  “A Short History of Books” by Dominique Hecq first published in Tiny Spoon (June 2019)

  “Dark energy” by Dominique Hecq first published in An Anthology of Microlit (January 2020)

  “Blood and sweat” by Eugen Bacon first published in Other Terrain (December 2018)

  “The bury ball” by Eugen Bacon first published in Other Terrain (December 2018)

  “Unprecedented” by Eugen Bacon first published in Other Terrain (December 2018)

  “Neither a kitchen nor a sky” by Eugen Bacon first published in Other Terrain (December 2018)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946154-74-3 (Case Laminate)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946154-55-2 (Paperback)

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-56-9 (eBook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Book cover design and interior design by Tricia Reeks

  Book cover artwork by Jr Korpa

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in the United States of America by

  Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia

  www.meerkatpress.com

  in lieu of a preface

  by Dominique Hecq and Eugen Bacon

  This book began as a dialogue between two adventurous writers curious about the shapeshifter we call a prose poem, that can be the hybrid of a poem and a flash fiction. Aware of our penchants and differentiations, we pushed ourselves to detach from each of our safe zones—for one, it was speculative fiction, for the other, poetry.

  Our goal? To disrupt our writing practice by snatching in foreignness, seizing the uncanny in all its strangeness.

  But why?

  Though it may be true that, as writers, we think we inhabit language, there are times when we feel language is not ours. And, of course, it is not. How exhilarating, we thought, to expand our horizons! And so, like two lovers in a provocation game, teasing and pulling while thrumming antiphons in a pulse of jouissance, much playfulness in the enfold of intensity, we chased after the impossible nonrule of emancipated association in reacting to each other.

  We hope that in reading these prose poems you will make your own connections and draw, if you wish, your own conclusions and associations without working too hard, without trying to detect patterns or contexts that might decipher the covert intentions of uncapturable text. There is nothing homocentric to find here, no preferred way of reading that is key to opening some academic or other discourse. Touch the text, taste it, feel it—do not try to contain its abstract language.

  We invite you to be part of a spontaneous conversation that comes along with no headings of love or childhood or death or dissolution . . . Each prose and its response is an echo or a divergence of an element that one author’s text stirred in the other.

  As award-winning poet and academic Prof. Oz Hardwick said in a radio interview with East Leeds FM, prose poetry trusts its own momentum—the rules of verse do not dictate it. Prose poetry is not for people who are afraid of language. It’s start, off you go—musicality in the verse.

  One might describe some pieces as complex, relentless, but above all, speculating or crossing borders in the fantastic playground of language. We invite you to leap onto the stage of your own imaginings, plunge into what Henry James called the house of fiction.

  This is how we envision ours:

  A single detached house tossed out of Speculate settles across your dreams. Skin, paper-thin, desiccated and scripted like a collage, covers the absence of doors, thresholds, verandas, stairways and footpaths. But there are windows and louvers that look out to rain-licked grasslands. This is a house unsealed, with the sky art and earth art washed or rolled into each other on adjacent floors and walls. The roof, unlettered, is made of two sliding suns of creamed panels, foundation-like. Round the back is a rope ladder that will win you over. Up, up you go. Enter with care as you would any fiction that blurs the boundaries of genre, mode or form, that goes beyond the written and borrows from the unwritten. Together we can interweave art with language and watch it shape itself anew in an endless process of spontaneity and play because we can be here and there and away, all at once.

  It is our hope that perhaps you may allow Speculate to be interactive, that you may find your own deep pleasure in engaging with speculative dialogue and playing with fluid text unencumbered by logic.

  Part I

  Eugen Bacon & Dominique Hecq

  [Hecq’s italicized responses to Bacon’s prose poetry]

  Evridiki

  Friends are not important—like plagues, they come and go, even blood is not thicker. But fate is another matter. Some fool in autumn had a drink in the dark, sought a taste of heaven in a street named Bagh Nakh. Found it in the hands of a runaway who raised a hand and plunged a dagger that clung to the idiot’s heart.

  * * *

 
You were born in autumn and so, naturally, hate spring. The scent of blackwood showering pollen. The air licked with gold where the buzzing of the bees deepens. The sudden opacity of it all. You run. Run away. Away from the visible and from the invisible. With the pollen clinging to your skin, the sun striking and the darkness beneath your feet settling, you are a living phobia. A fear of no consequence. Yet as eons pass in one beat of the heart, you hear the rustle under the trees. Taste the bite of death.

  She steals at dawn

  to a place of memory, a beloved place she can enter her stories. The way her fingers pad on the keyboard. The rush that sweeps through her body arrives her at an intersection where mind and fingertip are one. She needs practice sleeping in a little, her lover’s breath heartfelt on her earlobe. But she runs when she can, to a play-filled memory enriched with mannequins she can chase, surreal encounters on red rock bicycles, oh, how she soars.

  * * *

  She feels adrift, like an autumn moth flapping its dusty wings until it rests on your windowpane on the far side of the world. Says there is no rhyme nor reason nor even any explanation for being. Sky pied, almost as perfect as the horse she used to ride. As for turbulence, the sky is cloudless; the writing not exactly cloudy, but cloud-gathering. Now it’s raining streams of light on red rock bicycles.

  Let it play out

  She wonders at the misjudgment of facts, the hybrid of the unknowing and the uncanny. Looking at the artist and his painting of the death mask, there is notable difference between a brief and a summons. In, out, who commissioned the sketch and to what detail of artwork? Out, in, beyond interrogating the plastic cast disunited from the corpse, how to discern confidence in an artist’s perception? The plan is to keep silent, let it canvas out. Or perhaps to issue a bordering statement that is a responsible thing, or to conclude it’s an illustration that is simply a hoax.

  * * *

  It is a hoax. All art is. We deceive ourselves, sometimes all the better to tell the truth, but deep down we fabulate, fabricate, counterfeit—lie about our deepest desires. As should be. I’ve just picked figs from the tree and painted them, knowing full well it’s plagiarism in the history of art. Now I’m going to stew them, French style: Flambé Figs. Peel them carefully (12 of them). Put them in a heavy-based frying pan. Add 3 tablespoons of curaçao and the same amount of brandy. Sauté them over low heat until the figs take on the color of the painting. Prick them gently. Set them alight and shake the pan until your flame dies. Serve them warm with whipped cream. Sprinkle them with hoax dream powder. Enjoy!

  Overrated

  She returns home each day, ten hours in the office. She steps through the door, man, he’s got the look. It’s like Here doggy!, tail going wag, waiting for a ball. Just the gleam in his eyes . . . Work’s so hard, bitches everywhere, she says. Let me love you until you feel right, he croons. He steals candles, makes her promises. Pricks her fingers, sucks her blood. It’s a balance of costs, risks and benefits.

  * * *

  Returning to Australia after four weeks in Europe is a shock. It’s not just that everything looks rougher, brighter, wilder, harsher in the morning light. No. Scary dreams overflow the days. I ride a Harley on the Monash Highway. Climb Mount Kosciuszko. Build space shuttles complete with orbiter, external tanks and solid-rocket boosters. Repair cassette tape recorders and telephones with curly handset cords. I steal candle snuffers, make wax candles and tallow tapers that are supposed to be dripless. But are not. I knock down burners, tip over charred candle wicks, snuff, snot. Prick my fingers on the candlestick’s pricket. Dream of devotionals, the obliteration of the word phobia, and coins on my eyes.

  Outward declarations of inner decisions

  Today’s word is jazz. You can hear her nimble feet gyrating in your head to no effed-up beat. She leaps and twirls to a place of memory, but it is full of compost and she regrets nothing. The motionless CCTV monitor captures her arms and feet as they pirouette in and out of the gaze’s focus. The world keeps turning. Frolicking grounds full of water gardens connect the nerves that travel through the body, as balloons with eyes go sway, sway to the pitapat, rat-a-tat, pitter-patter pat . . . The sound is a love offering. She only wants to conquer herself in a trail of plummeting sand and too much poetry burning into a bard’s cross-genre lyrics jousting with thought.

  * * *

  Rain burning the idea of love. The moon weathers the heart in haloes that tell of life unlived as though it knows desires given up for dead. It spooks me as I put the rubbish out, all the while focusing on promises we know we can’t keep. Look! The moon exfoliates its light skin. Turns blue, blood, black. And now you will ask yourself why the chambers of your heart are patched, not lined, as if some invisible hand had undertaken to paint the pain over before it could be ciphered, named, encrypted. And you do ask yourself as you throw artichoke leaves into the compost, and run inside to the sound of jazz.

  Neither a kitchen nor a sky

  Her heart is a room full of photographs and pillows wafting around rehearsing melancholy and reinstating torment. But there is still no word, just somber silence in the floating photographs and neglected pillows cartwheeling like burnt toast past the IKEA blender and microwave in a fairy tale of space that does not involve breathing.

  * * *

  His heart smells of burnt toast. If you look closely, you will see a paisley design—the sort found as all-over design for an IKEA bedspread. The main motif and the background of ferns are done with pure (that is unmixed) colors: just red (turkey) and black (jet) to conjure up the marriage of blood and vegemite, the staples of his diet, as well as his sign in the Chinese horoscope. Yes: he is a tiger. Enter the chambers of his heart at your peril. Don’t say you were not warned. He grinds his teeth.

  The traveler

  Her heart is a free tram zone, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, wheelchair access, all hand-drawn. It’s a labeled platform full of ads by a twaddle of writers saying glance at this, glance at that, and oh look! Free Wi-Fi. DO NOT OBSTRUCT. It’s the yellow and black caution for passengers about a station upgrade, valid tickets, feet on seats, offensive language and taking rubbish with you. If there were words, she would follow the golden line at the platform, speak to it as the train pulled in. She would ask why she’s not experiencing metamorphosis, just optical illusions about power operating doors gliding open and then shut, the train now departing. As she moves up the escalator past the cop shop with its blue and white squares all dirty as bootlegs, no help at a glance, she finds the subway, and then a great big owl fully concrete in the landscape, directing its gaze at the flat crowns of metropolis high-rises that defy or define the city. Like an authorized officer she knows that she must adopt a role that makes sure anyone with access to her toppled heart, delicate but still beating, pays their way. She walks past a teen sat cross-legged on the pavement with a ring on her lip and holding up a sign that says homeless, hungry and three months pregnant, but she keeps walking lest her heart staggers and stops.

  * * *

  Hey, you! You could be me. Life does go upanddown upanddown upanddown. This is why I dust the streets in your city, uncrease your creeks, polish your floors and occasionally collect your dog’s droppings. I know there’ll be spilled wine, broken glass, words curling from the fire in your mouth. A shudder. A pause. A da capo. I know that all too well. I peer through your window, and the pane reflects my shape making for the open road where our shoulders retain the weight of expectancy. Don’t underestimate the virtues of polishing, especially in the Loire Valley where vineyards are doing well in the global village. There I looked after body armor adorned with intricate inlays. I preserved plumes and strengthened holders. I wiped visors, scrubbed chin pieces and gorgets. Straightened cuirasses. I polished breastplates and lance guards and backplates and codpieces and gauntlets and fan plates. And much more, my dear, as the word fan intimates. My nickname was chain mail, then chain fume. Try shackling me now.

  From the l
ookout

  The town is a bit of a has-been, any explorer can see from the wreckage of street signs and broken parks as you approach it. One fraying post says Pigs on a Boat, its arrow a crooked north, as another sighs windward and exposes a torn woman and remnants of what was once a domestication warning to roving fingers: Ten seconds on the hips, ten years—and then some—of a ring and much lip. A blistering sand guides away from dilapidation, from the pulled down town and broken job center, and races all the way into the sea where an adolescent siren draped in tidewash awaits to lure strays with her luminescent tail and fragmented song.

  * * *

  It’s all a has been. A symphony of cloud puffs across the sky like the spirits of children failing to climb the chain of dreams rising higher and higher than the moon disrobing large and yellow among wing-beating shadows, its stilled tongue tied to forests, waterfalls and chariot-charged winter. Lies we tell until we hear gods laughing so hard the universe splits its sides and music falls from the stars.

  A wail of sirens

  It’s late morning and dusk is drawing nearer, rushing up your personal preference for the man on the radio hammering nails a hundred ways at the stroke of midnight. In the valley of sirens, all dirges uncertain, they exploit the dark and wail rrrr rrr through the night. Playlists just for you pound into blocks filled with rage, bash around a bit longer but you try and put the question rolled up in a ditty unaffected by the impotence of language or holes on Light FM. It’s the rules.