Why Do You Ask?
My days are numbered, just like yours,
So, can we agree to point our camera-questions
carefully and only as needed.
When I tell you I bought the scarf you like
at a store, please don’t ask which one, and
When I tell you my first husband’s fists left
holes in the wall, assume that beer was involved.
One question always leads to another, the what
to why to how. By this time in our lives we should
know that one door opens to another door. Every
entrance leads to an exit. Every time you sit
upright leads to lying back down, and so on
until that final time, you don’t get up, which
you would think would end all the questions,
but only leads to a thousand more.
Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton) Her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction, and her full-length collection of flash fiction, Dressed All Wrong for This was recently published by Blue Light Press. She lives in New York City.
Emerge Literary Journal 