I have seen the work 'Girl' by Jamaica Kincaid described in different places both as a poem and as a short story, so I guess it's down to individual opinion although critics usually tend to be able to unite on elements such as this. Different people bring different sets of experiences to each piece of writing and that affects how the piece is interpreted.
To me, the work is more like a poem because although writers experiment with brave innovations nowadays, in the style of flash fiction for example, most 'stories' -however short -have a narrative or storyline that is very clearly defined running through them. This piece is very visual, full of vivid decriptions and paints an overall picture rather than telling a story. The punctuation and run-on lines are poetic and adventurous and the non-stop list of demands makes it difficult to read as a story although the modern technique of micro-fiction and short fiction is changing all that.
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