Three Poems

  IN THUNDERATION Sandwiched between trailer and movie, a comet heads for earth while field phones in the front lines muddy meadow grasses. How about some tongue before magma reaches the beaches of Normandy and I’ll score you popcorn with extra butter oil, maybe a bottomless soda. Thursday’s flying now. The photogenic couple behind us bought their tix online, they’ve a two-year-old with cystic fibrosis in a house made of gold tinfoil. Backstory porn— hell, nobody makes out in theatres anymore. U-boat in scale with a child’s monster hand, the shutter bags the money shot, bubbles fly past portholes like blonde locks in Ken’s convertible. Quite a pair on our hometown sheriff! Or subaltern, whatever Hanoi Jane stitched atop a gun turret insignifies. Buddy from Arkansas under full moon, dog tag as crucifix, billet-doux in bloody paws. Soldiers glide through cornfields. One row back they’re going at it like D-listers making for shore. We munch in unison, invested in her muffled cries. As she crests, he dies.   SIX EXES IN A SILO, PT. 1

Does anybody love anybody anyway?                                     — Howard Jones

She reclines in a high-backed seat bunkered deep on the Pilates Coast. Launch button a clown nose on the pope. From your porch swing you watch a frog leap towards a mosquito. It winks... the mosquito winks. Frog’s tongue a jet of ink tagging its rear end. Remember the tailor who took in her slacks? The neighbour’s Corgi rolling in the grass. It was just you and her, in underthings, feeling for silver cuff links in the dark. After the punch bowl knuckled into the dirt. After she swore, you swooned. Whose limo driver with the crystal ear? Whose rhumb line ends in a shopping cart? Her polarizing effect on city lights left you a hillbilly tossing pearl onions like shurikens. The hillbilly was, understand. She passed on the franks n’ beans. Printed her own currency. Had a fortress built on Skype Island and lived with a cherry orchard growing in one hemisphere or the other— Because it’s never anybody’s fault. The smoothest stones for skipping still sink. Because every episode ends with burnt toast. Anyway, now she wants you to see her in her daughter. You’ve never really learned how to properly pack a parachute. Just who does she think she is, the daughter? Smiling into the surveillance camera, rainbow-coloured braces the final word on badminton in the Olympics. Absence redresses the excluded middle. After every birth, somebody pauses wrist deep in suds. Field after field of hoof beats. Phosphorescent mobile over the drumlin, horns in the offing. Anybody deserves scattered applause. You go about the day, you must, adjusting your bearing as necessary whenever you hear an errant shuttlecock hiss like happiness into Mandolin Lake.   INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE ‘Flyboy, toss over that ratchet wrench,’ said the chronobiologist to the relief pilot who’d spend all day tomorrow on the couch after a second hissy fit threw his back out. Lubricant pooled sheen on the concrete. Happy couples flocked to its coastline, set up umbrellas, fed each other crudités, and wantonly flouted the seatbelt sign. ‘Honest, yesterday it worked just perfect,’ the pilot moaned to the gals, straps undone, backsides up following a frolic in the surf. He’d forgotten to turn on the intercom. The chronobiologist tapped the armature with a hammer the pilot had handed him: ‘This here’s your problem. It’s crepuscular, naturally the gloomiest light for a solo man.’ Lurching upright, the pilot rocked the cockpit: ‘I won’t land her till I catch the setting sun!’ It wasn’t intended to be a factual statement. He tried once again and slipped on the ocean.