Like the WW Flash Fiction groups, FuseLit offers one word as a prompt, suggesting its contributors start off with the word in mind and just see what happens. Wonderful things can – freshness, wit, poetry and non-prosaic prose.

FuseLit’s eighth outing is Battery. It’s very small (4x6in). Reading it yesterday, I went two stops past my tube station. The only niggle I have about the design is that sometimes the author’s name appears (in a large egg) half-way through their poem or prose piece, rather than at the end, which can be confusing.

I loved Jon Stone’s reflections on the battery as human being, foraging for power sources –

The punge of exhausts, the rising sun downloading directly into my eye-holes. The electric shock of potholes, the three pallors of a traffic light, the narrow crevice between a white van and a badly parked car that I, like a caver, crawl between.

And later, running out of storage capacity –

The cup overfloweth. The cheeks bulge. The swagbag tinkles with silverware... I tend to feel denser. I ache more. I forget things, and find it harder to concentrate. Sometimes I try to ignore these indicators and stuff a little more in.

Other pieces I really liked – John Osbourne’s poem Drum and Bass –

He asked me to turn my music down he could see the music notes dance out of my headphones. He asked again, louder, adjusting an imaginary volume button in the air. I said I could do but that music was the only positive thing in my life...

– also R. Lee’s Battery Boy and Rebecca Tordoff’s Battery (‘My dad has a hole in his trousers the car wouldn’t start...’)

Cornish sonnets and Pleiadic verse are explained – the latter form, devised by Vera Rich, has seven stanzas and over the course of the poem the whole first stanza is repeated in fragments. Amazing! Jon Stone (again) provides engaging examples. I see from the contributor bios that he’s poetry editor of the roundtable review.

I could not decode the Stenopoetry (anonymous). It seemed to involve the EU, pharaohs, bags and dizziness.


Frances