Issue #54


Authors

LITANY FOR NASTY CONTAINERS

After Andrea Abi–Karam

I wish for muck, flour, sweaty shirts threaded with dry angry needles of grass and green fog growing like glue along rooves, I wish for dust and carmine gunk ground into the bridge of a sludging steelstring river. I wish and I call for death        !        to the corporate set dresser, to the biography, to the well-meaning manager. I wish for the glossframed mirrors to bisect each other and splinter under the weight. I wish for our happiness on a slimed yellow petri dish, pulled out from beneath a microscope and thrown away, left alone, I want the microscope to mold orange and crack beneath a boot I want our mason jars to blacken under heat. I want every gloss-blue balloon and airbrushed metal canister to pop under pressure and maim a manicured finger with the gristle showing. I want to drag a thick plastic shard down a senator’s sternum, stick a peach stone through his eye socket to scrape like screwdrivers against the bone. Mutilate him as he fears will be done to his straw child, leave her to live, let wheat grow small and palegreen from her haybale shoulders in the sun.

DRIFTWOOD

MY GRANDMOTHER SINGS TO THE GRASSHOPPERS