Posterior Cruciate Sonnet:
You empty the contents of the vacuum
cleaner bag into two separate smaller bags
that we put around our mouths and huff until
one of us passes out. I never see you
fall out of your crutches, but that’s because
very quickly I’m on the tile floor, drooling
my teeth over the small carpet squares we keep piled
in front of the refrigerator. When I stand
up, you ask me to participate in various
competitions of skill and agility to prove
considerable brain function and also that
I’m not a pussy. For an hour, I carry duffle
bags full of your sanitary waste to the river
with flashlights stapled to my shoulders and
a bullhorn rallying my breath. After that,
I sleep with the neighbor while you show her
kid a hot functioning menorah. When the cops
come, I give everybody gifts I purchased in the
beauty of unheralded economic decline. Your present
is by far the most anticipated. You don’t open it right
away, but it’s clear by morning you figured out
how to put it all together. If the jetpack works, get
to the city and buy in to a co-op. I will only
come looking for you once I’ve found a way
to steal a mobile house and family. Look at
me in these white gloves. I am a terrible thief
and yet.
Emergent Occasion Sonnet:
You put a red-winged black
bird inside the exhaust
manifold of my 1985 Buick
Skylark, and when I start
the engine, the bird has
babies. We receive similar
results using a three-legged
rabbit, but when you place
large amounts of cash against the
hollow metal carriage, our arms are
suddenly broken and you encourage
further experimentation. Using my
mouth to roll the ignition, for the next
fifteen minutes we experience
transitive decay. Teeth are
lost. You swallow
your tongue. I see my kneecaps
stack along the gear shift, but at your
insistence, I keep turning the
key. Later that afternoon, when we
are just salivating box-fans
offending the neighbors, you
ask what it feels like to irrigate a
village using plastic animal ribs. The only time
I’ve done it, I say, it felt like a theatre. A
theatre? you say. Like a theatre with
a tunnel leading to a crime.
Oscillating Disturbance Sonnet
When it’s dark, you lie under
the carcass of a half-deer we
find on the highway and wait
in a ditch for my parents’ maroon
minivan to get close. Every few
minutes, I hear you vomit from the
smell of bug ridden intestines, but this
was your idea, and I’ve learned not
to stand in the way during matters
of extreme conditioned examples. Twice
I crawl up next to you and ask if we
can change the subject and you respond both
times with sighs, repeating a line about having read enough
psychical research to understand the basic human
response to young Christian women claiming to be
apparitions. But you’re not
a ghost, I say, and then we see the head-
lights. Judging by the hicks and
flats of your back, you appear to
be laughing as you walk to the center
of the road. It’s difficult to hear everything
you’re saying, but when you stop to
face the traffic, I see you are holding
the deer’s front right hoof with your
teeth. This is disgusting, I say. Mmhmmm, you
say. We’re out of water, I say, but you don’t respond, the
animal tongue resting on your forehead like an avenue of tables.
