Glib Apple Conveyor

The devil tried fiercely to run from government agents, but he's living under limited information. The Palm Reader is a world-famous boxer whose praise and worship accidentally reveals tortured bounty hunters. Now they're both taken to jail on national television and they'll either have to sabotage an implacable curse or, through a dream, die in the traps of the wizard!

Ruthless Civic Lawn

I knew of a boogey man in my neighborhood, a crooked little frozen mouse-eyed gentleman if you believed the accounts and reenactments of the older boys in Judas Priest tees. Once, this subdivision was a farm, and once the dead tree just past the border was a good tree for climbing, but a boy fell. Slowly died, so slow he still had life in his eyes when the scavengers arrived.

One night I would visit dead tree and piously wait, and if the clouds were just right the boogey man would announce his real-life identity with a cracking shuffle in the shadows. 

I would clutch the knife in my hand to defend myself and vanquish his hell from the cul-de-sac and when he came for me 

I would bargain for reflex and observation but the knife is a comb

it's the one my older cousin put in my stocking last year

he's in the air force now

the boogey man's quick sharp feet dance all up and down my skin and he knows how to grab the moon

he brings the moon crashing down

on my head shattering like a fluorescent tube shatters

the shrapnel hits me

enters me there's no pain at all

a sort of fleeting rush 

I'd chase it forever, my fumbling adulthood

There I'd meet it and fall into the fir tree in the median the neighbor family dresses up yearly in multi-colored strands of lights.

Linguine Rumble

Dog bark morning, the photographed man carried off a wrist-thick scarf of horse. He knew the teacher, swindled as he was. Felt reined and loose, a thing that fits wickedly in one's lap.

The man spoke of accidents, dyed memories of false rogues banned from boats. No friends, not the kind one speaks of at the holiday table. 

Horse wrist trees climbed by students in the criminal's graveyard, the hounds' playground. Punctuated by masts repurposed.

Astride My Goiter

How does this fixative strike you? My partner in suspicion disappears with mist and low held intelligence. The way in is the extinguished wound, but it is a dead end. The duct tape residue holds whisper rags, a kind of evidence of doubt.

Progressive Car Insurance

Pinch the streetwise tea kettle in the glass display box, come alive in the ecstasy of the transgression. Twist your jelly bean toes in their sockets as you glide away, an otter through this dissected throng. Emerge like an embolism in the starlit avenue where the inflations of powdered bards hang: they collect themselves into the breath of invented megafauna. In the overturned wash basin you'll find me and the things you covet.

Otis Saw the Mouth Slats

Trombone head, please come back to the booth. I've wiped clean the old menu. Apologies, but they haven't any newer ones. So the best we could do was to tape that flappy old laminated corner. It's functional, if admittedly below your standards in "visual victual communication media."

Trombone head, pass the framed bacon and hard gum globe to rejoin me. The humbled staff will surely acquit themselves with admirable diligence and tidy cordiality.

Trombone head, we can mourn our agency together over a mediocre repast. The tableware will at least be clean. The sky will at least carry on its chromatic duties and we'll exit into a comforting dishospitality.