My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie   We crafted the android to be the perfect political candidate. It had one flaw: It always told the truth. When asked about its opinion of gay marriage, it said it wanted a partner with red hair and a buck-toothed smile. When told to defend pro-lifers, it started telling us the situation was a gray one. When it met with the president of Iran, it said war was not necessary. We took a hammer to its metal skull and hacked its arms off, destroying the circuits that made it honest. With its last words, it explained to us how we violated the U.S. Constitution. This week's prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.

No OneWord today. I missed it. I was in Santa Cruz. Yaaaaay, Santa Cruz.

I am the enigma of a society that is so carefully un-fantastical that it's a wonder that I'm even thriving in this box where I've carved out each and every paranoia as tiny tally notches in a speck of wood and stone labeling all my insecurities. We tend to, as a species, fear the unknown and mysterious - from mad cow disease to spider bites to necrosis and tropical illness - that in an attempt to gain control of the uncontrollable, we forget to manage the things we can control, and we suffer for it, greatly. One out of every three Americans will endure, maybe die of heart disease. One out of every four hundred or so women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. But we try not to think about the things we can manage, because since we understand them, they're so wildly un-mysterious that we try to make the whole world the same way. Even Christians use their Bibles to explain what is meant to be viewed with awe, to be viewed with marvel and magnitude. Yes, we can lea...

Myth and Roses by Belinda Roddie Roll, onward roll, King Midas’s soul, You’ve turned your flesh to solid gold, And it rolls, rolls while she tolls, tolls Your daughter tolls the bells brass cold While the spiders spin a web, as if in a pirouette Across your nose while you roll, roll Into the yellow roses Fall, slowly fall, Pan, autumn’s call Your pipe makes you the best of all And you fall, fall while it calls, calls The heralds here and the leaves in reddish pall While the satyrs glare like lights in the crisp breeze of the night On forest’s walls as you fall, fall Into the yellow roses Stay, forever stay, Lord Hades gray On frosty throne each winter’s day And you stay, stay while she prays, prays Persephone, her flowery hair in waves Priceless souls you both shall never save They do not wait, nor hold their breath with bate No, they go their separate ways And it is he who pays, O’ Hades, When shall we see sun on winter’s day? Your love has passion tender, but your heart is rende...

The balloons, for the third time, lifted into the air like great red bubbles willing to burst into light froth. As the children tossed the water bombs at each other's skulls, I sat with a lemonade and sucked it through a straw, my shades protecting me from the sun's toothless grin. Fortunately, my skin was able to get a rather nice tan most days, enough to get the handsome gym teacher to notice me as he walked across the blacktop.

Ambitious Little Boys by Belinda Roddie Ambitious little boys took up writing to score a chance to see Miss Texas read their works of poetry to a large crowd between Corpus Christi and Houston. They wanted to see her big, red lips and her hair all curled up in little balls of gold and auburn bouncing all along her neck as she displayed her "bounteous delights." They wrote lewd limericks, haiku, even long, flowery ballads for the pageant dame to recite. But in the end, it was an old lady's sonnet that was picked as the poem of choice. The boys all moaned and frowned, but you can't always get the girls in town.

Johnny was the poster boy for Transcendent Cologne - a product that attempted to be Zen while still catering to the bloated market of overhyped aromas. As he strutted around the shoot with his abs glistening with sweat, he watched as his photographers confided with his manager, juggling a bottle of the stuff between them. They couldn't decide between his holding a fat bottle or a small flask.