Barrie Cole ~ Two Prose Poems

Ghost Petting Zoo

Some say, Wake up and smell the cof­fee, but I say, Go to sleep and smell the night. Take a whiff of night’s musty cocoon, replete with mag­no­lia petals, yarn,  pen­cil shav­ings and bro­ken heir­looms. Do you know you can touch the night? It’s thick and lay­ered. I know you’ll find this shock­ing, but night is a cake. Chocolate, always, with­out sug­ar, with­out flour. It’s not meant to eat. It’s meant to be expe­ri­enced. Also, with­in the cor­ners of night, if you bring a mag­ni­fy­ing glass ( Tip: I keep one under my pil­low) you’ll find clocks—vintage always, some watch faces with­out bands, in a set­ting of gar­nets and some large with heavy pen­du­lums that swing through night’s hours. If you like you can attach  a bit of fab­ric or net­ting onto the pen­du­lums for makeshift ham­mocks. If you have insom­nia, sneak over, try not to breathe and you may see an iri­des­cent baby bee­tle being rocked. In oth­er cor­ners you may come across desk clocks which snap open like clams. Some are in the shapes of books, but of course the pages are invis­i­ble because that’s how time works. In anoth­er cor­ner is the ghost pet­ting zoo. You can pet right through them. Make swoop­ing motions with your hands. Pantomime piano play­ing. The ghosts will love it. If your ears are open, you will hear them sigh like dogs when they are rest­ing near a fire­place in winter.

~

Feeling Club

At the feel­ing club we talk about one feel­ing per meet­ing and also notice if we feel the feel­ing we are talk­ing about, or if we can’t feel it, or if we have ever felt it. We talk about how the feel­ing feels inside us, and how famil­iar we are with the feel­ing, and how far back it goes in us, and in our lives, and through time. We try not to cov­er too many hap­py feel­ings in a row or too many sad feel­ings in a row. Instead we mix it up. Although, some­times when we meet, one of the mem­bers of our club is real­ly in a feel­ing–  just in it-inside it, as if the feel­ing were a locked room. When this hap­pens we aban­don the planned for feel­ing and go into the big feel­ing and in hold­ing space, we become the space. Sometimes feel­ing club can get pret­ty intense. The feel­ing club has been meet­ing for sev­er­al years or months or weeks as no one can remem­ber when we start­ed the club exact­ly. It seems both long ago and recent­ly. It’s uncer­tain and we know uncer­tain­ty is also feel­ing as is cer­tain­ty. The first is loose and blur­ry, and the lat­ter is tight and hard. Some peo­ple who’ve heard about The Feeling Club think it’s some­thing like Fight Club. It’s not. Sometimes peo­ple get freaked out when we work on a feel­ing they are afraid of. When this  hap­pens they don’t want to be with a feel­ing at all. They want to change the feel­ing into anoth­er feel­ing. They will begin cam­paign­ing for chang­ing the feel­ing, but then the peo­ple who want­ed to explore the orig­i­nal feel­ing might get frus­trat­ed, and then every­one remem­bers frus­tra­tion is a feel­ing too. This hap­pened the last time we met with the feel­ing of excite­ment. It was a boun­cy feel­ing and Barb was against it. She said it felt like jump­ing and she just want­ed it to stop. She offered numb­ness as a replace­ment feel­ing. The rest of the group said “numb” wasn’t a feel­ing, but the lack of one. We vot­ed it down.

~

Barrie Cole has pub­lished poems and sto­ries in Molecule, South Florida Poetry Journal, Red Ogre, Odd Pocket, Cagibi, and oth­ers. She holds an MFA from Columbia College and her book, Lacquer is a Thrilling Word, was released in May 2026 through FLP.