The Plumber’s Anger
by Jessica Purdy
The plumber woke up to find his anger fit in his pocket. His finger grazed it when he reached for his car key. His anger was too big to fall through the hole in the fabric. Last night his anger had been as big as a chunk of chainsawed tree trunk. This morning it was a nugget the size of a sickly green crabapple. It’s not hard to love anger, he thought, but when it feels so weighty and cumbersome you can’t haul it very far. Coming outside after a workday of forcing food and poop through stuck pipes he thought to raise his fist to the wind. It was making him cold. The wind was an affront. Birds kept landing around him. He didn’t notice a single one. The duck even slid into the river from the sky as if to call attention to its own drama. Some of the birds carried their colors as torches, but still he never saw. The plumber threw his anger into the wind as if that would dislodge respect. Anger that hard made a splash and left on his hand a residue of poison that mixed with the day’s grime. At home, he placed infected towels into an empty birdcage after drying his fingers. Filled the water dish. Put more food pellets in. By morning a curious toxic bird will love him with its little red nugget of a heart.
Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry from Emerson College. She teaches Poetry Workshops and Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University and through the EXCEL program in North Berwick Maine’s Middle and High Schools. Her poems have been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Her poems, flash fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Radar, The Night Heron Barks, SoFloPoJo, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Lily Poetry Review, One Art, Hole in the Head, and Museum of Americana, among others. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate Books consecutively, in 2017 and 2018. Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. Her poetry manuscript Lung Hours was a finalist in both the Codhill Press’ Guest Editor Poetry Series and The Dryden-Vreeland Prize in 2023. Her two recent chapbooks are: The Adorable Knife poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Grey Book Press), and You’re Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press).
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Plumber’s Anger”? I conjured this plumber (who could really be anyone at all who is feeling a loss of control in their life) when someone I know came back from a particularly uncomfortable, bitterly cold and windy run. It made me think how fruitless anger can be when it’s directed at the most innocent and indifferent of elements. Writing this tiny story taught me how anger in particular, can poison all those it touches. I love birds and this story has free birds and a caged one.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD