Pickles
Borders
A porcupine
Compost
I was trying to think of something better than pickles.
The shortlist includes: time, whatever we'll put
in salads now that lettuce is poison, prison, the nervousness
that comes when there aren't enough pickles
and you're too far back in line, ham in loaf form,
equatorial weather patterns and their potential effects
on fowl migration, the snap of consciousness
when you’ve stepped into the room of waking
after having slept like Rip Vanderslice for half
the time of Van Winkle. What all this says about our
potential to be forgiven. Note the man who walks
from room to room, telling different people to gather
the same things. He knows there is only one of each.
This is how the GNP grows, or else it’s how we’ll lose.
When the world
ended, I was in bed.
You had your running
shoes in one hand
and someone else's face
smeared on. There were
three dozen names
for the dark and none
of them considered
our shadows commingled
in the shower or spilling
out on the concrete.
The sirens whispered
from the sheets, saying,
"Forget me."
They corralled us
with their pitches, walls
fragmented, and I failed
to secure my body's
weak borders.
arguing with strangers
on the internet, shattered
glass and a dartboard
If you lie still
in the moss long enough,
the fungi will start
gossiping about you
and nobody likes
a mouthy shroom.
But the alt-right seems
down about something
again - the whiteness
of the snow, the dragnet
of their wallets They can
only explain the world
in one shade of gray,
and it's on sale
at Hobby Lobby. The porcupine
wishes it had a pillow fort,
but winds up puking
into the glass shards
after some bad sardines
and a many months old
chardonnay. Someday,
they'll sell this stuff
in pill form. It will taste
like a memory you paid
too much to forget. After
you've shelled out so much,
the blanks will begin
to refill themselves, saying
have a nice never.
In the same way a belly button
is just an old mouth, you are all
the tree rings in the circus of time
you've careened through. This is a bad
symbol, but it says something
about why the termites keep asking
you for change, hanging around outside
711. To put it another way, when you dip
someone else also dips and then
there's sauce everywhere. Terminus
and hollowsides be damned. The thing
about compost is you can never put
the things you'd like to in it. The love
you've carried in your chest like an old
wound long after the weapon is gone.
The way nights linger but mornings
crash in. I'm trying to clean this porcelain,
but my hands shake and my reflection
is not an easy jury - the tape in the cassette
can be pencil-wound back to the day before
last Tuesday when everything changed.
Sheila was there, and Pam, and all
the Hendersons. If you lean in close
to the speaker, you can hear them smiling,
right before David said the thing Sheila
will never forgive him for. It doesn't matter
that it's right. Or maybe that's why she left.
And the hiss in the air afterwards
is just the room deflating.
Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks. He lives with his wife Shannon and three yappy cats in Colorado and serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse.
CL Bledsoe is the author of twenty books, most recently the poetry collection King of Loneliness and the novel The Funny Thing About… He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at https://medium.com/@howtoeven (with Michael Gushue).
