My daughter’s mother
drowned her & now
she is my mother, too. I let
her nurse, whiskers
to me & from her strength
a wilderness
watching the boys whiz past, skating into
each other like awkward buffalo; wanting
to talk about the boys; pretending you don’t
want to talk about the boys; double checking
your makeup; going to the snack bar for nachos
Man, woman, child. We are not sent, we come. Some are brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, but all are poor. Just like the founders of this nation, we come, holding on to a promise. Un día, we say. One day we will have a better life, or at least die trying.
Gabriel Ricard with an all-Mystery Science Theater Edition of Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo.
Yellow now and higher
on this straight stretch,
it moves as strangely
as you -- wheeled home
the last time, your left hand
grasping for my right.
I have no control over my mouth as it yells and shouts. All I want him to do is hear. To wake up and listen.
My glass house is shattering and the little girl in a blue dress runs out chasing a rabbit.
I am the girl. She is the rabbit. But I run circles around her
and I cannot pause.
Most of the time, the chick eats. Then
grows. Eventually flies to another’s
nest, still incapable of affection.
Like she knows she is adopted.
And the Soviet Union sent a probe
the length of a broom handle
to greet her, held together with sugar,
like our intentions
could be a candied-coated,
our banishment licked clean
I can state with confidence that I’d never kick a robot. But then again, I’m the kind of soft-hearted fool who relocates spiders and bugs instead of killing them. (I once decided not to spray a cockroach because it turned and looked at me. It saw me, we shared a moment, and I balked.)
Every few rotations of the bicycle’s pedals, the front gear clicks and the chain jumps a link. Slow drums fill your head as you roll down the asphalt hill. Soon you’re rapping along. I just wanna race the Lambo’. Let’s roll the dice and gamble. Concentrate on the scarred concrete in front of you, be sure to dodge the cracks and potholes; to fall into one, you’ve decided, is to tumble into and beneath the earth’s crust, through the mantle, and melt into the core.
I was almost certain that the neighbor was a serial killer. The small doubt came from the fact that we both watched Game 6 of the 2011 World Series together – the same night the neighbor’s television broke – and got along famously. That doubt was erased, when, on that same night, I was bludgeoned to death with a remote right as David Freese hit that game-winning home run in the bottom of the 11th inning.
somewhere closer a storm
brews my colicky
gut.
i am all nerves
in my nightgown
of marrow.
COMICSMr. ButterchipsAlex SchumacherSeptember 2018
Mr. Butterchips takes on Comicsgate in the latest strip from Alex Schumacher
I shouldn’t talk about the throbbing, finger condoms,
the high of pain relief.
Like, as a married woman,
I shouldn’t talk about my first love’s.
backseat overdose. The droplets
on the window, the smell, his bloated body.
i am nursing a body
that is only a seed
i am chitting a membrane
in pine
dresser drawers
my log
This is my chance. I place my blazer over her shoulders. At the end of the song, I let her wear it back to her seat. When all eyes have returned to me, no one notices her take eight metal rods, a roll of duct tape, and some wire cutters (all smuggled into the prison inside a specially made electric guitar) from the pockets and hide them in various parts of her tracksuit.
the tin bowl is kept
between floorboards, full
of sticky dimes, full of paper cranes – full. these girls
talk of death like they know it
When she handed it to me, brown and bulbous like an onion, I didn’t expect it to juice with perfume at first taste. A kiss from the pink mouth of a flower grown inward.
The Happytime Murders is Meet the Feebles-lite, and while it's obvious scenes have been scrapped for whatever reason (I'm guessing time), it's still a worthwhile movie to watch if you're not in the mood to think too much while having a few guilty laughs. Melissa McCarthy delivers as Edwards and Bill Barretta once again shows his puppetry mastery as Phil, her curmudgeonly ex-partner. Come for the murder mystery, stay for the copious amounts of puppet ejaculate.