Reminder

I.

Scorching steam
screams,
let’s known a disconnection notice
has fallen from the comforts of bed.
The way the day slips past like

fishing boats caught in the wake of speed cruisers,
a plane falling from the skyline.

Get up slowly.
Try like a ninja’s stealth to make it somewhere without
the sleepers bumping into you. A tumble through
the mistakes and misgivings shot your questions to the face of
a conical coffin.

It appears to cry, Welcome!

Your heart beats rapidly like a parakeet’s
as it dies, sportingly, under
the cat’s paw.

II.

On the job, it’s no better.
You know the deal. Understand how
it all works.

The questions never repeated.

Not everyone’s together, a virus
stretched,
rejuvenated,
bred with incomplete genes.

Withered balloons
stricken with content. Fluxion from being to machine
was inputted at the front door.

Not robotic, but
systematic.

Abiotic dynamics struggle for internal wealth.
The fiery afterglow of satisfaction that
keeps the human spirit resuscitated,
just long enough,
can brave out anticipation until

all is confirmed lost.

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.

Submission Accepted

Margie Review took Hot Air Balloon. It will be in this Fall's edition.

Similarities

1.

The sludge meanders,
an old man trapped in

defeat.

Chronically wretched. A
cat with no tail.

Ignorance fuels a further
criticizing of what’s not
to be recognized. Though there’s been several
hundred years of growth, the weak
still try to harness their hate. They’re like

yelping wolf pups with no bite,

the rabies never set in.


2.

I look towards the new moon for a reminiscent figure, the one that
crouched, for a little while, in tiny soupspoon. A lone harp strummer

amongst the alligators and crocodiles. A
fawn trapped, bloodied, in the Everglades.

the sweetest smile of a random lady,
or better yet,
the forgotten woman of everyday dreams.

After Sunday

I.

My new neighbors are from rural Indiana. Their
license plates tell me so.

They’re always having weird,
construction-type men over;

single mothers,

six
crying
children getting knocked over by
a Chow-mix,
wrapped up in
the apple tree.


II.

On President’s Day, one of the older kids living
in the house,
say 14 or so,
decided to walk into a small,
white shed;

the kind for skinning fish.

He closed the door and begins to
urinate on the tiny window,
framed between
the door and nature.

As the window remained cracked,
his urine drifted North. Implicating

Catholic priests
that reek of
scandal and comfort through

discomfortingly times.

No more laughter from children.
Just the lonesome cries as
dreams die.

Notion

The summer squirt guns, in the hands of tiny children
makes me reminiscent of
the loving woman that floods my mind.

Our life seems to hop over each other like
Chinese checkers, up and down,
an emotional heartbeat knocking the self unconscious.

It’s the innocence of youth that keeps us apart,
whether it is in
an age, the start of a new relationship, or the lack of knowledge

we still stand still, quiet, unable to open vaults that lead one another
into the safety of trust.

Although issues scream of precedence, a desperate prayer for
temptation and suspect feelings to guide us to depths of defeat.

We’re like ghost orchids, deep in the swamps of devotion.

Summer Wedding

Another wedding cursed,
ended as it begun.

Fights between the maid of honor,
the best man’s wife, and the deejay.

The deejay shouldn’t have got involved. His simple
actions were like urine pumped onto an electrical socket,
positive and negative particles of drunken drama
swirling in the highball of life.

The bride and groom left out the back door,
through the kitchen,

as police sirens circled the hall.