The Day The Clown Cried
the snails impregnated their love
darts with silicosis
the slugs set fire to hygroscopy
the hornets traded their paper
for masonite the bees ended
their millenia-long apartheid
the red monkey swinging
from the cypresses
howled and howled until his mercury
eyes ripened into persimmons
the stigmata afflicting ingots in Zürich
and George Town flowed with
a rejuvenated scumble
my whiskers parachuted
from my chin with a mortifyingly
audible snap
my anus mutated
into a nostril
I catapulted my elation into
the briar patch only to see
it’s pudgy weaning sink
beneath marshmallowy waves of
tissue paper irises
the incumbents were seized and
lined up upwards of the state line
then pelted with laurels plaited
from pre-cut twist
ties and wedding rice
I wasn’t there
I was smoking neoprene with the equestrians
shackled I was ordered
to sing pornographic telegrams before
the performers reenacting
my pubescent infractions
life was found guilty on all
counts of being beautiful
Trips and Ticks
air eats rubber and other elastomers
explaining that black ring around
your household’s most cherished
fittings plated as they are
with chrome
“on” congests a basin
“off” turns on the embouchure
a drain must form to make
a euphony of gurgling
an object-oriented neuropathy
vapes on the the trap
under the bathroom sink
exhaling petrichor’s evil twin
the process is obscenely
complex and involves several intermediates
unlike carbon monoxide its odorlessness
is a menace you can send flinching
store and restore
in cold dark and dry
perpendiculars
or an overview of electron donating
groups where available -philias
get to know the devil
that is chain scission
try a little rubbing alcohol
cut with a thick paste of baking
soda about the consistency
of the sinuses you would wish away
soluble fatty acid salts
of metal ions
Cu Mn Ni Co Fe
act as catalysts for oxidation
thus greatly accelerating
the caloric degradation of products
whose lifecycle begins as soon
as we render them molten
besides embrittlement
visible changes such as cracking
charring and color fading are observed
if you remember the last time
you saw a U-Haul trailing
a hearse please share
not to be abject
or anything in all
honesty it would mean
the world to us to
hear from
you in the comments below
Retrograde Suminagashi
three disposable chopsticks
blonde on the brackish marbling
of the kitchen counter
are they to be rinsed then room
for them found alongside the good
silver in the second drawer
from the right
as many guests as have guessed
correctly that our forks domicile there
have pried into every other cupboard
first without knocking
compost of
avocado and ponzu
a kind of gesso applied in wisps
that hardened lays laminations
where the ends taper
when did manufacturers begin switching
out green match heads for red
each piece of take-out sushi
remembered now
engrossed with analogy
potters dipping their earthenware
in buckets of glaze
its lactescent thickness dissembles a colloid
the concentration with which the potters wipe
the bases of their pots
it’s the lever they pull to heave themselves
out of themselves
into the absolute clarity of a single-minded anxiety
the pots must not cling to the kiln
shelf during the glost firing
if they wish to become vessels
analogy tends to shoot its subjects
from a high angle
apprehending the small kindnesses
shown by the helpless as they compose
themselves with gentle retractions
skewing the round of their knees to open
up more passage to the center seats where
the viewing is first-class
keeping an odd number of chopsticks
on hand is the kind
of worst-case scenario you can plan
for but routinely
confront ad hoc
you’d think we’d tire of this trope
Joe Milazzo (MFA, Creative Writing, CalArts) is a writer, editor, educator, and designer. He is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and three full-length poetry collections: The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books), Of All Places In This Place Of All Places (Spuyten Duyvil), and, in collaboration with Eric Lindley and Miwa Matreyek, Words In Danger Of Falling Out Of The Vocabulary (Galileo Press).