“Hunches” by Angela Townsend
Photo Credit: Junior Reis
If my calculations are correct, dear life is holding onto us tighter than we can return the favor. People who keep Santa Claus up all year will always insist that you take the last mozzarella stick. No one has yet died from overexposure to exclamation points. Under-eye cream does not do anything except make under-eyes creamy. People whose favorite Beatle is Ringo will not hurt you on purpose. You cannot age fast enough to reach “too old” to need your mother. All forms of headgear, civilian and military, are improved by animal ears. It is a sin against the Holy Ghost to mock someone’s favorite song. Poetry is a genre of courage. High school clarinet players make superior cat sitters. If you offer to pray for someone, that telegram ships even if you forget later. Waiters who call you “boss” do not need to write down your order. Pole vault is not for everyone. Pizza bagels facilitate negotiations. No one has yet exited adolescence. Golden raisins were God’s concept sketch for human freckles. Walruses have no chromosome for shame. Every great civilization lauds its grandparents with titles that sound like little biscuits. Purgatory is an eighth-grade pool party. Curiosity is a multivitamin. Siamese cats are shamans at the molecular level. Petting someone’s head while they cry is the 151st Psalm. Banana bread is a time machine steered by Meemaws. Some yam farmer in the Trobriand Islands just saved us all with one drowsy prayer. Everyone wants things to be and stay okay. God doodled secrets on our foreheads so we would have to read them to each other.
Artist Statement
"Hunches" is a fistful of wildflowers from my garden of convictions that, in fact, goodness and mercy run through all of our lives. The longer I live in this weepy ragamuffin world, the more I see the small and stubborn miracles that bear us across the valleys. Love will always be the underdog, but it advances down rivers of the innocent and the ordinary. As a writer I am duty bound to bear witness to the light and the kiss of God on every forehead. The purpose of hunches is to pass them on.
Angela Townsend works for a cat sanctuary. She is an eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, twenty-one time Best of the Net nominee, and the winner of The Iowa Review’s Tim McGinnis Award and West Trade Review's 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, Fourth Genre, JMWW, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and Witness. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for over 30 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning.