indulgences

watching tv, my roommate says she doesn’t believe
in fibromyalgia. “well i don’t believe in karma,”
i tell her, “or helen keller.” we mute the next few
commercials.

Unspeakable Fun

If I can't say blank, blank, and blank

how long will it take for you to say

Walter Cronkite? Oops, your point.

At least that buzzer's broken. 

eight poems from wine wednesday poetry battle

amanda and i had a poetry battle with the aid of a bottle of second-try yellowtail. words were chosen at random by moderators b. grossman and s. holt from "twinkie, deconstructed," a nonfiction text by steve ettlinger. these words then became titles of three-line poems we had roughly one minute to write. here are manda's. here are mine.

tremendous
my stegosaurus ate your stegosaurus
then ate your grandmother
and coughed up her nightgown

powders
she knew her fair share of toilet bowl rims
splatterpainted in earth shades
and the tiny icon chillingly akin to a swastika

vanilla
burnished bottle of venom sting
juggle blades wait
too much salt

antiseptic
once i waited too long to cut the papaya
it was teeming with tumors, tar-filled potholes
stuck in my teeth like voodoo amoebae

gums
the only thing weirder than toenails
are the chiclet-bones above the tongue
and the way, in their absence, your mouth caves in like a pirate's

indescribably fluffy
today i shook hands with halitosis
he wore a mohair sweater bummed off a cadaver
and a thorned crown of expired gefiltefish fins

a familiar and tasty raw material-- milk
a baby snake does not suckle
only slithers away to swallow a gerbil whole:
poor centipede, poor mammary-glandless frog

blair, nebraska
whoever drew this map wore rollerskates
with crayons tacked to the ankles,
pinned tail on the donkey down the hill

DeLuca's for Dinner

My grocery bill seems justified
when my feet are a foot underwater.

thanks for the oatmeal, but you're trembling in those boots

here and there, really
is that all there is

sheets of ice and fireball spaghetti
brimstone, brimstone

The Tapir

The tapir is Brazilian, Malayan,

not Scotch. Opaque, not adhesive.

And he'll have you know, 

it just goes to show you, 

pronunciation is key. 

beauty pageant paradox

in every other species
the males parade their plumage