ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Poem
by Erin Martin


In Which I Take Randy on a Road Trip and Watch Him on a WebCam


I.

Enough of microbiology, I decide.       Shall eschew the magnifying lens and make an atlas, one with a sidecar.    I will not be lonely again.

I make a skin suit from my old lover. I give it his name. Dressed in it as a costume, I can’t bring myself to fuck the oracular bohemian.     Instead, I let her pee and I catch the plane, knowing the entire time the taxi driver is talking about me over his microphone. To my face, he tells me I’m beautiful. He says I’ll laugh but there’s good money in raising monkeys.


II.

Skin suit as a flint I invent a caricature. Me in a Joan Jett mirror. Me in a Speed Racer fast car gogo bar, Gogol spacesuit decked out for elegiac hoochie coochie.    I am thirsty and bored and ugly and fat.   Laundry accrues. Decoupage and Nyquil I listen to the Rosebuds all night.    I pretend one lyric is crack is novocaine is the kiss of the boy I’ve been crushing on ever since the second grade when he told me what a lagoon was, how blue it was. How blue his eyes could be like oleander or corduroy or apologies.


III.

In the video game I play, I am depicted as a gigantic flashing arrow. I follow it through pixels of space.        I wonder why aliens come in such enormous colors.     Still there is speaker wire and a limerick, and I am standing with a fistful of dimes and salted lime of margaritas and hornrimmed playbills.      In the aftermath of the rescue, the magazine falls open to a centerfold. The pin up model in devil horns and a sequined bustier is showing pink, spreadeagle on a ruby motorcycle. Vroom vroom, I think.


IV.

Too late, I begin to hate myself.      I wonder about the usefulness of concocting ways to skin a cat. Skinless kitten: journey or destination? The billboards sing. And the jukebox goes like this.   And the sunlight falls like this.  And the wine uncorks like this.

Look in the box, they say. Check out that kitten I gave you for Christmas. Untie the ripchord and the vocal chords and the yowling squeezebox in the larynx of the lynx and let us know if it’s alive or dead or if you’d prefer a candy apple red.

Thanks, I say. Dead kitten as s thong.


V.

You know what sticks in my craw? I’ll tell you what sticks in my craw. Knowing I’d be standing at the lighthouse, and expecting someone I didn’t know, don’t know, never met, can’t be seen with me in public, really never actually wore that dress or bought those ugly ass shoes. Only I have taken a picture of this already and there is the gondolier in his striped shirt like a garter clipped underneath this skirt.

I will fuck him if it will make this better.
I will get too drunk to fuck him.
I will absently forget my manners
and send the legal student home unfucked.

For you, for you, this car this car
this parking lot this speeding ticket
this Australian with enormous balls
on the telephone, of course I am your cumslut,
of course I am running off to this cemetery
with my lungs all full of pot and I am wishing
that I remembered how the cask of amontillado
ends, and I think there is a reason for this:


VI.

Thunderstorms, tornadoes,
small apocrypha and enormous
pornographies of plot jut the landscape,
crosshatched with machine guns, fish tears
and cheese blintzes to be craved only
when especially drunk.

Sarah Winchester said the spirits
told her how to build the house.
She could not stop building
not even when she was tired and sore
as the mechanical horses outside
of Kmart on which you could take
a ride for fifty cents.


VII.

All of this happens for a reason.


VIII.

Raison d’etre, I think. Then sui generis.
Stop into the comic book shop to be reminded
of red hair and décolletage.        Don’t you see,
I’m supposed to say.        I am in disguise
as a rolling pin full of tnt.  I am glowing radioactive
green.       Hush.