Five Per Page
Autobiography of a Lazy Boy Recliner
Yard sticks and shards are kept in a jar shaped as a cowboy boot. Snapped hours stand in a drywall bucket along with a nineteen inch glare in a hot attic. Can you guess how many errors this jar contains? How many agnostic gumballs? How many tangerine parking garages? Does it contain at least one broom closet for diminishing mascots? Suddenly I’m calling the name of my childhood best friend. Rachelerika! Rachelerika! In an evaporated place, the dotted lines scatter.
The Sears Painting That Hangs Over the Recliner
I am made from many stanzas put together, blank stanzas, canvases stapled. With ellipsis.
Braided Rug
Swirl vortex whorl made by a grandparent of silence is placed under a Sears art thrift store painting, smiley face yellow.
The School Project
Volcano on cushion of kitchen chair is paper mȃché. Pistol on paper plate under cash register is real.
A Book Report, “Growing Up in a Convenience Store”
Your job is to open that which is delivered with a box cutter. Offer includes Jubilat Agno, the Care-free, Payless, Payday, Pop Rocks, the whatchamacallit, the 100 Grand, Charleston Chew, Swedish fish for a penny, chewable astronauts, Can eat the spoon, Lik-A-Stix. Offer excludes the yellow slide of childhoodhoodchild along with the doors of perception. Limit of 2 Haiku per box, per customer:
A frog covered with dust
emerging from the candy rack
scares a bitter customer.
Title covered in flies
Flies that in a previous life were horses in a field,
work horses, winking and flicking their tails
under an omniscient horse chestnut tree
so close in those green hallways to the next
appointment of strong reactions. Full circle
what I dislike, even despise, at some point
I was, I did, and the tree’s rope swing untethers,
sways in small expanding circles, hypnotizing
tobacco-stained slats of a barn, aligning needles of hay.
Green fires that were fly-covered horses in a field.
We reject ourselves
beside the ruins of a farm house
not ready to burn itself down.
