Calisthenics: Sonic Translation

Per each seat, vain cities dole out,
for me, Shiva never sent colored letters.
Perms, if gone, try per duty, gentle.
Geosticking moss ills my alto fatigue:
for shimmy divvying pedestals,
winsome sap in Zales prime amore.
Dining a mean fury costs Cree tea.
Seen turning, better not Duracell.
Lash late cogs nests, walking nitrates.

---------------------

Each city doled out seats.
She never sent colored letters or
postcards of gentle perms.
Her altitude fatigue stuck like the ill
color of moss. She was a winsome sap
for Cree tea and Zales prime amore in
velvet boxes. Wasps nests seemed filled
with cogs turning in twitching Duracell ekes.

Free Write, Week 10

Girl Talk

I lie in the bunk, listening.
They share chatter like childhood
toys: XL hoodies and their boyish smells,
soap operas, country singers' hometowns,
always stories heated over in the microwave.

My shirt drips outside with lake water.
My shoes are breaking, holing up
in strange places. Tucking into my sheets,
I avoid a whiff of coconut passion. Mike
is carved into my bedpost with Lauren
Loves Davie. The firewood still burns
under my fingernails, sticky like smores.

Calsisthenics: Odd Job

The Scrappler

I hang on with the last tailgaters, streetlamps glaring impatiently off our Ford F-whatevers.
The subject will come up soon enough with the shatter of my third-to-last Bud: Whatchya do ennyway?
My answer's always the same. I stir stews of pig guts. Aortas, gallbladders, glottises. That's it.

I smell the bubbling spleens and livers even when I pick out Hot Pockets or try
not to step on the Bible molding on the floor of my cousin's pickup. I'm always pulling
the lever that shoots pork slosh down the chutes. The backs of my eyelids
have been stamped with the curling edges of intestines.