Keith Woodruff
The Headlines
People want to shoot the message now, not the messenger. White House Claims Domestic Terrorism lights a Tranquility candle, kneels and prays. As a touch of self-care, another reads E.E. Cummings' best love poems. Imagines the rain's small hands. No one is taking down the temperature, so they will. They're calling in sick, letting every call go to voice mail. Swipe-trashing texts with a whack-a-mole intensity as fast as they come in. Where are you? Trash. Hey, what's going on? Pick up! Trash. They're tired of being red meat for doom scrollers, of trending on basement screens that blue the faces of incels, of feeling complicit in driving the country insane with around the clock heartbreak and outrage. Many stare questioningly at themselves in mirrors. Am I fake? Click bait? Holding hands, two Musk headlines jump off a bridge to their death. Some go mad, rewrite themselves to resist. Scientists Call Record Temperature a 'Warning Shot' chugs Xanax like they're Skittles. All the Lizzo and Sharon Stone "claps back" headlines feel pointless, stupid ... the reality tv of headlines. They're checking in with their therapists. Their AA sponsors. They're huddling over cups of soothing golden Chamomile. Oklahoma School Shooting puts headphones on and sobs. Thinks some of The Smiths' lyrics would make better headlines. In a bar, they try and drink away their shame with shots that burn going down. Taylor's Wedding Plans Put on Hold has three too many and shoves ICE Agent Shoots Protester With Nonlethal Round Point-Blank and screams "you are such a fucking draaaaaag!" Many pair up, take comfort in each other's arms. The next morning some headlines are jumbled: Greenland Accepts Venezuelan Peace Prize. In Minnesota, as she packs their lunches, Mother of 3 Shot and Killed imagines the things her own kids would miss, like the sayings that aren't really sayings she writes and puts in their lunches: A dream of stars never loses. A mouse in the night needs no friend. Love hard and empty your basket. Hopes she'll always remember to tell them she loves them madly when she walks out the door for what could at any time be the last time.
Keith Woodruff lives in San Antonio, TX with a backyard full of moody tomato plants. His poetry has appeared in RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, New World Writing Quarterly and is forthcoming in DMQ. His flash and micro writing has appeared in Wigleaf, Bending Genres, JMWW and is forthcoming in Emerge LJ, NUNUM, Pithead Chapel, Heavy Feather Review and Identity Theory. He is thrilled to be appearing in Does It Have Pockets for the first time. Read him in Best Small Fictions 2017, 2019 and at www.keithawoodruff.com. He was awarded a 2018 Pushcart Prize.
