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You have learned to honor the chieftain with sprigs of dill behind the ears, bearing eggs of swallowtails. Jellied jewels of possibility. Behind the scaffolding of your waking ambitions, a stuttering mist in the vague form of a child projects an unheard song. It's picked up by keener instruments than yours, and you'll mistake the hunters it beckons for half-mothers.

Hi We're Flotsam

Big Buck kicks a brown ball to Kyle Gray. Rye bread morning breaks into platinum blonde afternoon. Kyle Gray, generous sniper, architect of misfortune.

Aunt Rosalee lifts the oblong trunk, leaves grease fingerprints on the lacquer. Leaves footprints in the dust. She's been pranked by cotton faced Big Buck. There are no vintage costumes in the trunk, but she will find a dead crab for the Christmas wreath.

Kyle Gray pumps a bubble of groovy scrap talk in the side yard when he sees the great crab in Aunt R's brown basket. Pilfering tiptoe titty skips, she laughs like a plain scrambler on her way to the wreath barn.

Raggedy Harmonica Sack

In the rock and roll graveyard, she learns the astronomy of insects. The great motorcycle sculpture, looming above the troubled population of this town, her birthplace, ignites its headlamp for the first time in a generation. Bandanas and fairy shawls drift to the ground, crystals of frost reaching up to catch them and pull them into the organic substrate.

Cherub with Goals

A fifty year old bachelor will give you plenty of ideas for a singles weekend, and serving a healthy realization of those traditional flavors. Teenaged boys of his interesting and unique conspiracy will want to turn to tough guys, and deceive him with sometimes decadent brunch recipes. He defies them with a quick breakfast. Whether you are looking for a powerful photographer or not telling his wife what they were looking for, his pipe collection is your source for what they were looking for.

Diagonal Nicotine Park

married to a dentist

graduated from the New Age

the first wedding, thus   

took one of the ribs

the same word used of a potter

after divorcing she practiced

years of seclusion, being

his gratification or his flesh

the first use of anesthesia

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.

Falsehoods of Spiked Misery

If only I wasn't required to raise my arms, speaking servitude in this room upholstered with a woman's mischief. If only the heart in my chest was a fully synthetic thing, a petrochemical invention which, if discarded and buried, could conceivably be found by future scavengers — or, more optimistically, archaeologists of high ethical standards and unfamiliar colloquialisms.

Also conceivable is that such a fine cardiac instrument, once invented, will find its way into my chest like an intruder. And these desperate diggers or scholars of distant cultures will find such a thing in a bone lattice, in a box dripping with velvet like tattered flesh.

Roses of the Infirmary

Epic red banners in a good boy's bedroom drip rehydrated dream-cum into the pillow, fermenting acrid visions of tennis court massacres, detailed spreadsheet forensics, fisted eel parties, wholly rejected careers. Tooth gray sea songs from the gazebo outside promise something else, an alternative doom. But everything hinges on the half-life of gratitude, undetermined.

The Wife's Mantis Puppet

Help to make equal the arrangements of the festivities. Your eye for relative quantity, trained by years in the retail killing fields, is as renowned as it is a curse. A soda-colored burden pressing stiff knuckle hands into your each day's efforts in the realm of enjoyment.

Quick, various measurement, fatigued convenience. Steady dependence upon the judgment of temporary shepherds. A rinsed and scraped mind, an abraded sense of pleasure. Tilted back on your heels by this imaginary wind.

Raid Pinch Rush

Mold breath couch beside kneecap indentations, and Stereolab, maybe Sonic Youth. Probably Sonic Youth. The tunings twisted, improper, like my ambitions here — I'd like to say — but I can't claim that intention. Someone else monkeyed with my guitar. If only I could keep the steady synth throb in my chest, if I could capture that and implant it I'd avoid so much of what's coming.

Most of the land is industrial, but an above-ground pool is a pretty good luxury to pick. Acting like a cable installer, because I lack the foresight to aim for the wine repository.

In 12 years, Thurston two-times Kim. Lee seems alright though, stick with Lee.

Against the Snake Truck

A green fabric swatch holds a single egg representing fertility or imagination (perhaps fragility or refrigerated psychosis). Advertisement-grade models parade themselves around it with phone lenses trained on the vertex. The gathered footage is collected thus by sheepfaced women and men who edit it together, intercutting and splicing to find evidence of the marginal viewer. And their sheepfaced offspring are charged with the task of sweeping up the chitinous rubbish left behind, the exoskeleton shards and dismembered elytra once belonging to involuntary invertebrate participants in this dance of futility.

Gumbo with Young Red Cheese

Glen raises goats at Gas Pot Downs. Willie, age 8, scoops licked bead mix from the trench into a converted PVC violin pool. When summers are wet, you might see Clara and Hettie hugging in the makeshift alley where the blight cannot see.

Bracketed by musk jars, the goat bone tower tells the date and time to Willie's potential guardians. Goat skull pavement shines in a drenched musical kinda way.

In drought months, Clara cakes goat tummy drums with Glen's stashed bills, floating baskets made of bead mix scoops lashed together with goat rope in the cistern, as a way to celebrate fungus nutrition and distant goat vision.

Handsome Guitar Mermaid

Below the neon barrel, where eel men strangle their fears, a golden weaseled friendship reaches its final curtain. Greasy streaking blue white clouds spread sickly in a second sky.

At last, intimate operations deliver a satisfying fullness to the gathered participants.

I sweep the blue streak from brow to nipple, iron teeth harnessing ambush tongue. A stomach full of rags. A throat lit up with static.

Cranky Ol Possum

Spilled into the heart shaped tray, mother's pearls melt into goo, entering the next state. I squeeze the oblong utensils in each of my hands, vibrating with rediscovered glee — reborn, unborn, reborn and on and on. 

The seeds in my hair will remain dormant until I pack my head into fresh compost. The flavored lotions I applied to my calloused feet, made from said seeds' place of origin (fruit from XXXXXXXX trees), leave prints on the floor; though the manufacturer of said necessary plane counsel hasty remediation of such blemishes, I will leave them. I appreciate a well-discolored floor.

She Saw Me Bite the Tail

Longtime ambassadors of the opportunity church walk into the square diner on the corner of streets named for exotic plants. Hair like ultraviolet phone cord, the sandwich person hangs on the metal tool rod and coughs a cordial greeting.

Under the maple table, a crowned child stuffs banned materials into the void cushion. The ambassadors ponder their parental surveys, increasing my understated glamour.

Reflected Poop Ball

Ice colored like cloudy fish soup squeaks between the garden orbs. There's a dead patch where a chair faded into clammy mist last September. When the neighbor smokes long on the step, I effortlessly ignore him, his orange blaze, his knife hat.

Your hair lingers in the drain.

Foggy Scissor Bottle

One mascot crimps the cosmetics while a second winds a line of dog ornaments around a synthetic column.

Watching, eating Oreo cookies, Mrs. Pool pranks haughty ass air on the stained porch. Old planks of shredded dough crack like dung boards invented accidentally. This is how an afternoon's leisures are forgiven.

Extra Powdered Sauce

A couple under a castle (or a bridge?) stoops down for hand cup water. Eyes to the worm cloud, he feels the same as a decaying vine lost to its roots. She forgets the only trap she ever fell for. They look through small tubes to find a communication from the contractors they hired to bend the incantations of their legal advisors.

Slash Cloud Gumbo

Flush like drizzling breakfast sauce, we climb deliberately up the limestone face, wind from the north wasting us one by one. As the crystal sap sings subsonic instructions to the sun, tattooed languages of hunger fade, with resurrected ache. Drained of desire, we submit and drop. We find a place of stasis.

Cola Pratfall

Cranky comic book brat curls her hair with dreadful creamed potion, sulking over the loss of another delicate companion. Her eyes braided, she swaps relics with a neighboring slipper-soled stick figure. Soon, the uncanny twitch will begin again and she will ooze into the office, knowledgeable but not sure. Not yet.

It's Tuesday in the Hot Barn

Soaked and poked with the tar prod, you conjure a sensation of shriveled lust. How glorious were the slappy twistings and livid palpitations of your years in service. Diagonal shadows on the tiles, wheezing whispers from under the door.

You are chapped here, stepping gingerly between the cardboard-shaped plant stumps in the courtyard. You think you can hear the rustle grind of bean parasites, but it may only be the ceiling fan.

Spring-tail Honda Car

Our neighborhood was a clam's breath in an old pot, houses like unpopular candies tasted once and discarded. The gourd shaped rock in the middle of the cul-de-sac stole ambitions and curiosities from us.

My neighbors owned wagons and boots, hoses and saws, blades for flesh and turf. We read each other's diaries.

I was sent away in a cold carriage with a tissue scan drive under my seat. I had a little bit of everyone. 

Knife Puck

I found my chin in the seaweed pile on the corrugated metal. It was poked by spare wristwatch hands and looked good for its age, but gnawed and corroded all the same. A priest gave me a trifold brochure for a clinic where I could have it replaced with a hungry man's heel.

The sea bird cried about its pretzel. Still, the towers of crates in the warm light made everyone feel easy, chosen. I strummed the ocean membrane and ate the seeds I bought. 

A Chap with a Tape Measure

A turtle ate an entire tree in one meal this weekend. Everything went in, lichens and railroad spikes and kites and baby owls and old empty nests. A turtle in the weather of the weekend made one whole tree its meal. 

The guy watching the turtle eat the tree sat atop a gold Ford Bronco with a towel under his butt. His girlfriend Laura arrived at night with bags of jingling spice wafers.

Laura opened a bottle factory with a large inheritance when she was a college undergrad. The bottles full of soap spill premium good liquid on the blue fake shoes her boyfriend wears at work. 

Laura taught positive attitude to dancing parents, stifled in linoleum crust and hidden like digital fly wings. Now she can relax while a turtle devours a whole tree.

Shadow of the Crinkle-Cut Fries Bag

None can see the junkyard in this olive colored light.

Only three former mayors of this city have been divorced. And they dine together, weekly, at the Momentary Summit Family Restaurant.

From there, they see the chooglin sprawl of the trashplanes. They see it just fine.

The big guy with the tray of prepared meats has been paid for this work for seven years and he spends that money on corn colored pants. Corn is cooked by the chef too.

The chef wears fake blue shoes and has been doused in zigzag condiments — part of his education, you know.

A fading airman loses his lunch and the control panel lights up like Independence Day seen from a high drone. The sky loses its grip on the fine homemade plane.

Now the fields of rubbish suck in the doomed vehicle and its addled pilot, smack of aluminum slap rot in the milky humid night.

Up in the two star restaurant the gathered mayors and the big meat tray man in maize trousers watch the desperate descent and the ensuing fluctuation's easy glow, but feel that it is theirs alone — their private tragedy, their delightful pocket death.