Inspired By Tetka

There in your underpants, bra,

belly like I wish mine were,

floating in what must be Dreamland.

All obstacles are without

harmful corners, so tumble by—

 

meeting bubble after floating bubble—

until—in the final entrapment—you’re

caught for eternity in a resplendent

half-split (unless I nudge you loose

with my trusty mouse, and you

 

continue on).  Who are you, Tetka?

George W. Bush floats amid the bubbles, too,

the bendy-bones in an alternate version.

Looks like his brains would fall out,

as he bumbles through spheres.

first published in Adagio Verse Quarterly 

Tetka  and George Bush Tetka

A Milk Jug Birdhouse

My mind rejects

what my eyes can see.  A girl—

using a phone book for a booster seat—

sits at a table in the yard, beside

 

an abandoned clothes dryer.  She’s

carving a birdhouse from an empty milk carton.

A suit of armor and a plastic pineapple

are under a longleaf pine, where drops of rosin

 

glue sword to fruit.  The fields lie fallow, nearby

and in the distance, as far as I can see.  There’s

a station that used to sell gas, where two roads

make a T.   The road that terminates is

 

full of potholes.  Someone painted one pothole

the same blue as the unclouded sky here.

And on the roof of a rust-red barn—

just past the fallen pile of broken yellow bricks,

 

the world’s largest CB antenna, (homemade),

and next to the smashed brown dog-igloo—

Jesus Saves / S & H Green Stamps

is faded but legible.

 

first published in Adagio Verse Quarterly