Everyday Canvas

The Difference between a Short-Short Story and a Prose Poem

Prompt: What do you think is the difference between a short-short story and a prose poem? This question is because some people are mixing up the two.

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One difference is time. A prose poem can ignore time, but fiction depends a lot on time, as to what happened when.

Another difference is that a prose poem is composed of densely situated words, their subject being a description or the expression of feelings, sometimes regardless of grammar and good sentence construction. While it lacks the line breaks of regular poetry, the prose poem often uses poetic tools such as fragmentation, compression, rhyme. and repetition. A short-short story, since it has to tell a story, is more of a narrative, even if some of its sentences could be sentence fragments.

Although the prose poem appears as prose, it reads like a poem. A prose poem need not be about a character. Fiction, in any genre and length, is always about characters because a short-short story always tells a story since any fiction, short or long, depends on its characters, setting, plot, conflict, and theme.

A short-short story is limited as to the number of words, possibly 300 to 500, while a prose poem can be in any length from a few lines to several pages long and it can use numerous subjects and styles.

In essence, while a prose poem is the more relaxed form of poetry, a short-short story, also called flash fiction, has special challenges for introducing the characters and situation and making something happen.

Off the top of my head, here are two examples:

Prose poem:

Rain comes in shimmering waves like the tide to erase the distances between winter and spring and washes away the leftover snow in watery drip-drip-drip-drips that waltz on the eaves. Mud and slosh instead of the fish bones on the beach. Bulbs of trumpet daffodils showing up their heads through the softened soil, as if waking up groggily in surprise. In the city, birds are beginning to chirp to the traffic, but in the woods, silence…and my unending loneliness.

A short-short story:

He left me in the cabin for three weeks, saying not to step out of the place for it could be dangerous and he’d be all mine when he returned. He made sure I understood that he had serious business to take care of in the city. Monkey business for sure, I thought, as I perused the fridge that he had filled to the brim.

This place with unreliable wiring definitely needed a dependable handyman. Even the drywall was coming apart in some places. Still, I stayed in and constantly listened to the radio playing the oldies. On the last day, tired of my predicament, I burst into tears, but reason took over, and I ventured outside to find him. I thought maybe I could hitch a ride to the city, regardless of his possible anger and macho friends with dirty dealings.

I few steps on the driveway, I spotted a wheelbarrow piled with rotting leaves. An envelope inside a plastic bag was attached to its handle. It read: “He’s all yours, now!”

I swooshed off the leaves from the top and saw him, neatly folded inside the wheelbarrow. His eyes, though scratched by twigs, were still open, staring at me, as if saying, “I told you I’d be back!”