Micro Prose: Lessons in Intimacy by Afton Montgomery – NEW SOUTH

Search for:

NEW SOUTH
A JOURNAL OF ART + LITERATURE

Current Issue
Online Content

Micro Prose
Mini-Issues
Reviews

Archives
Submissions

Submissions
Annual New South Writing Contest

About

Open Search

Micro Prose: Lessons in Intimacy by Afton Montgomery

Cover image courtesy of unsplash.com
LESSONS IN INTIMACY
In the dark: I catch her hand on the windowlip of one of the panes in my body (hard to say whichbecause there’s no light pollution here and I lose my flank from my thighs in the night). It couldbe the left calf, where lately there’s been an ingrown hair in the corner of the sill; the right chest,where the ribs are like expensive blinds I keep tilted always-not-at-all so I can look out. It couldbe the large kidney window in the back or the smaller single-panes in the left eye-socket orovertop the intestines, which can trick someone into thinking they’re seeing brain from anintimate enough distance. I see her long fingerbones for just a second (a film still!) and it’simpossible, too, to tell whether she’s scooting the glass of me shut (safety!) or cascading it opento entrails or G spot. I’ve been keeping the windows cracked lately: a summering; and their neattattersall cubes have been overlapping in sinister or artful ways, depending on the light and timeof day.
The girl with the hands is the little self that lives behind myself, Kaveh Akbar’s tiny heart sewnbehind the one that beats1. In the dark, she makes glass creak against dust in its frame. Last 1summer at the lakes, I sat reading with my feet in the ever-blooding water while a man fromSiberia gutted his fishes and lined them up in a row down his arm, which went in the mouths andout the abdomens (if you like to think the Rio Grande trout were mouthing his flesh withfishteeth) or in the abdomens and out the mouths (if you’d rather think of a systemic rejection—a vomiting (a scream!)). I jolt when a flashlight somewhere in the knee flicks on and lights mybody from below: all 17 windows flung open in a chorus of ghostgirl hands— a unison vacuumsound after the knife enters all of my holes and I fall out. A rushing in.
1 “Exciting the Canvas” (American Poetry Review, vol. 45, no. 2)

AFTON MONTGOMERY is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Idaho, where she is the managing editor for Fugue. She was selected by Vi Khi Nao as the prose winner of the 2021 Mountain West Writers’ Contest at Western Humanities Review and was a finalist for the Pinch Literary Awards in nonfiction in 2018. Afton was formerly the frontlist buyer at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver. She calls Colorado home.
Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:Like Loading…

Published by newsouthjournal

View all posts by newsouthjournal

December 13, 2021
Micro Prose
micro prose

Post navigation
Micro Prose: How I Discovered the World is Flat by Roger D’Agostin

Related Posts

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply