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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #199
This week on the ABR Podcast, we continue to celebrate the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize with the second of three episodes featuring the shortlist. This week’s story is ‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse. The judges had this to say about ‘M.’: ‘Wittily told, this rollicking tale set in New York City is at once a character study of the garrulous oddball M and a tragicomic portrait of the narrator herself, whose compulsions and choices see her avoiding the everyday joys of her life as a mother.’ Shelley Stenhouse, a New York City-based poet and fiction writer, recently won the Palette Poetry Prize. Listen to ‘M.’, published in the August issue of ABR.
This cactus looks as if, on a reef,
it could be neighbour to sponge, equally at ease
under the sea – or strange as some tentacled hydra
on the window ledge, free
of quickening leaves.
Digging in the garden I found a moth
albinoed on a piece of bark by the fence.
Those were my radiation days; it was good
to lay down the spade and kneel in the soil.
He has his medley nearly ready. He has pieced together
his own fantasia, even if just from the sound of an owl
regurgitating a pellet of bat fur, a park ranger’s
jangling keys, the creak of cable strain when bored,
Does the for lease sign speak of anything
else than the failure of something; just as
the desert required the lake to dry. Each
dark window waiting to be turned yellow
Wisps of smoke, lamplight on manuscripts.
Pages fanned across an oak stool.
The hearth absorbs the stain of living.
In my dream I was surrounded by seraphs
wearing morning suits, looking at me
quizzically in the crowded Parliament. Then I was being chased
by a Russian mountain lion who drooled a lot
your passport is out of depth keep a code in a quadruplicate place
drop it into a box or a cloud to renew your password enter
answers only you know the questions to family secrets