Ed’s Trip

Ed read
while burning bags of trash infested the daylight.

The bags reminded him of the fall of 1989.
Eighteen, loud heavy metal music, pizza delivery.

The bags triggered a memory or
maybe a flashback.

He went to a kegger, took acid, and vomited in a Koi pond.
Met a girl named Michelle. She showed him into the

darkness of a nearby apple orchard
lined with gargoyles,
a haunted arboreal uterus.

It’s growth rotting under the moon after

the sun’s ripeness.

Michelle peed next to an electric fence.
Ed watched the gargoyles,
their concrete eyes kept vigilant watch over

the dead orchard. Expired apples sink to the moist,
tar-like ground.

The two returned to the party,
black plastic bags, full of deadly trash,
lined the street.

Nature, gasoline, plastic
rushed Ed’s nose. They ran towards
the house’s sliding glass doors and
ended up in front of a pool table. A girl with

curly red hair yells into a Karaoke microphone,
“Michelle, find the fish.”

Michelle found the fish, asleep, in a side pocket.
It didn’t need water to survive. Just the blue chalk
dusting the billiard’s room.

Ed wondered if it was the little things of one’s mind that
was caged in the outer layers of tiresome feelings,
the pressure of a new way of living life that
kept people from smiling.

It was like a waywardly mother figure.
An image of a shadow that made fetal gestures,
a ghostly presence eating souls whole.

Michelle crawled on to the torn green felt.
She laid down,
breasts pressured against the slate surface,

alone like an abandoned baby as the tide pulled closer.