Joseph Victor Milford

a few things that happened that summer

A three-legged raccoon

A knife flew across the kitchen

The trial of the woman who killed her child with ether

A swarm of Japanese beetles

A rowboat fell from the sky and landed on the bowling alley

A Rodan attack with action figure casualties

A pollen fall consisting of millions of exploded Golden Fleeces

The insurgents hoarding jars of fireflies

A feral child found inside a hallowed ancient oak

A theme park built over a mineshaft where a Freemasonry lodge once stood

A clan lodge burned down upon its own swastikas

A boy born with a tail cured with donations

An American leprosy scare

A winged man washed up upon a shore with his foreign currency

A man drowned in a shallow pool with a backpack full of William Blake

A ghost was walked on a superstition leash to the courthouse

A shortage of Nilla wafers destroyed all of the banana puddings

A tornado of divorces, DUI’s, sprung ankles, boating accidents, and coyotes eating housepets…

Meanwhile, I pulled the coffin nails out of my flesh–supposedly, they were moles

I drank the brackish piss of this town’s regret (most neighbors had traded their souls for

bandwidth)

The pawn shop started selling and re-selling my doppelgangers

They named another lake after a murderer of the Cherokee

The local priest died in a crystal meth lab explosion

A screech owl was found dead in the elementary school principal’s office

The church bells rang armageddon across the manicured lawns and I

            nestled safely in your Latina Sargasso mane.

solstice sketches

You eat at

The foot of the tower

Because it is the only

Place in the city

Where you can’t see the tower

I eat at the
Top of the tower

Because it is the only place

In the city where

I can’t see you

*

In your fairy tale

You longed to yoke

The moon to your canoe

As the alarms sounded

And you were surrounded

You could not remember

What the string

Around your finger

Was supposed to

Help you remember

*

Why is the sharpest knife

Suddenly missing

*

Tend your demon stable

Until there can be

An angel auction

*

The end of the world

Somewhere in this gumball machine

And your pocket full of quarters

*

moved into the new duplex

Broken bottles by the swingsets

Set of teeth on the sink

Shadows sinking into the dark park

Parking lot is full of the debris

Of the bottle rocket launches

And the funereal lacerations abound

This neighborhood and its open

Kitchen windows spilling Spanglish

The demons in the media indiscernible

From the actual shell casings the lawns

Wear as jewelry–a slow leak of acid

Creates bubbling goose bumps across

Our shoulders like trauma maps of

Our childhoods and the coffee table

Still has that thing hiding insidiously

Under it that we need in order to get to

Grad school where we can either forget

Or figure each other out and remember

With conversations like pliers and

Soldering equipment in our old age

With our tired adages tatted upon

Us and we use our seachests simultaneously

As coffins, luggage, and furniture

Drinking cheap beer and bad Vodka

After surviving a million jagged things

Awakening tomorrow to our problems as

Paper tigers and calling those UFOS

We saw harmless weather balloons.

Joseph Victor Milford has two collections of poetry out: Cracked Altimeter (BlazeVox Press, 2010) and Tattered Scrolls and Postulates (Backlash Press, 2017). He teaches literature online full time and resides in Alabama by the Chattahoochee River.