Airplane
The captain doesn't like it when you brush
the other passengers' hair. Everybody gets to
cooing and telling very funny jokes and secrets,
and drawing moons and stars on the flight crew.
If we were in love on the airplane, we could say
fuselage to each other in big loamy voices,
couldn't we? And gulp things up? And what else.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Happy Birthday Zena Greer
Forget about cauliflower. Zena Greer thinks
it tastes like Houston, Texas. Boy, something
nasty happened to old Zena Greer in old Tejas,
something that went down like old wooden spoons
and cauliflower. You can forget about wooden
spoons, too, honey. That dry wooden spoon
between your teeth, oh baby, forget it. Zena
Greer could play a Neil Young song on her guitar.
She said, "Neil Young has a beautiful face."
She said, "Sugar help me paint Neil Young's
face on this mixing bowl." And boy if I didn't.
Fucking Zena Greer. Happy birthday, baby.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Voyage
He made yellow squash and fell down.
What a gentleman, she thought, making
yellow squash and falling down. Excuse me,
she said, I mean to live in this place with you.
She'd been having a bad spell, crawling
around the yard and looking for breadfruit,
dictionary open to breadfruit. She sat down
beside him on the floor, idly searching
his hair for breadfruit. She said Wait,
She said, we could get a breadfruit tree
all the way from India, on a boat. He made
a move to quiet her, his hands like new bread.
He was breathing. Boats are easy, he said.
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Shannon Burns is the author of Preserving The Old Way Of Life (Factory Hollow Press). She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.