This Is Not a Poem/Story: 100-Word Stories (PB) (2023)

"Cotton Candy"

She loved cotton candy, the feel of the sugar tufts brushing against her skin, even the coarseness of the wet pieces that hardened into tiny bricks of sugar. The colors, pink and blue and yellow, all colors and flavors competing for attention on her palate, aroused more than her hunger.

She wondered what it would feel like to wear it, to sleep on it, to have it as hair she could style. She relished this idea until she realized that people would one day want to touch and pull and squeeze her cotton candy, and she could never allow that.

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Ran Walker continues to blur the fine line between microfiction and prose poetry in this new collection of 100-word stories, spanning many different genres, yet filtered through a lens of Afrosurrealism, Afrofuturism, Afro Gothicism, satire, and humor.