HOOT Online, Issue 15, December 2012 – Micro Fiction, Poetry, Memoir, Book Reviews

SECRETARY RECEPTIONIST

by Priya Keefe

Artwork by Andrea J. Bernard

[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Secretary.mp3]

Avis draws a bath in the chipped claw foot tub, bobs like a grape

in sangria. Typical day at the office: answer phone, fix printer,

suck off up to the boss. First to arrive and last to leave, she was

the only one to hear the cleaning lady housekeeper tell the

handyman facilities manager: Don’t try to stuff me into the cracks

of your life.

VIENNA THROUGH THE WINDOW

Nonfiction by Laura Story Johnson

Artwork, “mädchen in roten kleid reworked”, by Shawn Ketchum Johnson

I’d been watching my unknown neighbor on and off, sometimes on purpose, sometimes accidentally, for months. Just by looking out the window we could climb into the pictures of each other’s lives. Then one sunny afternoon I found her on a postcard. The name on the back told me that I lived in the apartment across from Austria’s most important contemporary poet. I read her poems and peered into the loneliness of our shared humanity. I couldn’t see her any more. Instead I saw myself, my soul, reflected in the window. There weren’t words. There were words. They were her words. “I live in pictures. I see everything in pictures, my complete past, memories are pictures. I transform pictures into language by climbing into the picture. I walk into it until it becomes language.” – Friederike Mayröcker, 2007. To see her again, I keep walking.

BOOP

by Amanda Lynn

Artwork by Jennifer Ashcom

[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/BOOP.mp3]



This is a test of

the haiku broadcast system.

This is just a test.

—

Priya Keefe has had work published on a Dublin lamppost and in Seattle buses. Also, CounterPunch and The Nervous Breakdown. Her love of owls began in 1993 in Yellow Springs, OH.



Laura Story Johnson (

http://www.laurastoryjohnson. com ) is an attorney working in human rights. Raised in Iowa, she has lived in New York City, bush Alaska, Mongolia, Boston, west of the Zambezi River in Zambia, Austria, and Chicago.