Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Two New Prose Poems by Jason Heroux










It was night…

It was night. The streetlamp lit a match, the sky leaned in with its cigarette, and an old man wandered around searching for his lost tooth. “It looks like the moon, but smaller, with a chip.” I said I hadn’t seen it. But how could I be so sure? Millions of items are lost in the world, over a thousand things a minute, and most of them look like the moon, but smaller, with a chip.


The circus came…

The circus came to town. A trapeze artist took a death-defying stroll through the park, an elderly fire-eating sword-swallower smoked in the rain. The human cannonball sat on a café patio and worked on a crossword puzzle. Homeless clowns slept in the doorways of abandoned storefronts. I watched blindfolded knife-throwers bump into each another on busy streets and apologize profusely at the top of their lungs.


- © Jason Heroux 2021


Jason Heroux is grateful to live as an uninvited guest upon the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Anishinabek Nation where he is currently the Poet Laureate for the City of Kingston, Ontario. His most recent book is Amusement Park of Constant Sorrow (Mansfield Press, 2018).

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