Yayoi Kusama’s Yellow Pumpkin Swept Away By Typhoon Lupit by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

your obsession fills me in with dots, not dipping dots, the pastel ice cream of the future, but black circles lining edges and curves, holes like lotus flowers, seeds, fruit, blackheads on skin, on pore strips ripped off in satisfactory grunts, dark hives of sebum, emptied, and we drive to the inland sea, ferries filled with eager sightseers, their own obsessions, dotted across their skins, my own obsession hidden in the depths of those black periods, end stops stopping me from escaping, a gravity well spinning, yellow, black, yellow, black, a yellowjacket, stinging me over and over, sweeping us both across the dock, floating out and away, the yellow pumpkin like James’ peach, a haven or a hell

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has work published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gigantic Sequins, Cream City Review, Indiana Review and Craft. She is in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua from Alien Buddha. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.