BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Paula Cisewski and art by Michael Marcelle.

If you’re in on the laughter, you know it’s serious. Cisewski’s brisk but personable poems dig into an unconscious lexicon.

The Anvil Chorus

The teen forgets to steer. The car rolls.
The news goes straight to that broken
place where broken things go.
We remain small monuments
to breathing, temporary ones, while

our neighborhood arsonist keeps getting drunk
and torching the same foreclosed home.
The president interrupts Celebrity Apprentice
to announce the Terrorist’s death.
The cartoon coyote walks off the cliff but doesn’t notice,

and so, he keeps going. We shake hands pleasantly, our faces
sedately repeating a reference to the same punch line.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Darcie Dennigan and art by Carl Dimitri.

In the midst of revolution, the prospect of an after lies down and dreams. Dennigan’s redacted, shuddering testimonies, in tandem with Dimitri’s sketches, work verse into a precinct where generation unwinds.

Because Nazi venom had seeped into our very thoughts … every true thought was a victory …

Speaking of seepage … Something had gotten into the water … some kind of chemical … poison … or just the sun … just the sun had got in and dried it all to bone … The point was … There was very little water… Thus, not the time … to bring a baby into … it all … but I did … and it was triplets … three new babies … and tribal fights over clean liquid … well, what do I do now … well, I wanted to continue to be optimistic … But was that true optimism … or residue … leftover … from …

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Dorothea Lasky and art by Adam Grossi.

These poems delve into sinister realms with the tricky whimsy of full-grown fairy tales. Tracing a renegade color theory along lines of lyric agony, Lasky’s verse delights in the juncture between sense and sentiment, what you see and what you get.

The Green Secret

I was five when I learned the green secret

I was five but I was very precocious and I knew the green secret
Which I held to my chest

And went running through the fields in winter
Slightly glowing green snow on my face and brow

And on my horse would pour from the skies the mint ice cream
Which tasted so delicious when I licked his back

I was twenty when I gave away the green secret
To a friend who was not really a friend
But a person who needed to know

And when I whispered the secret
My friend’s eyes rolled back in his head

And when I saw only the whites of his eyes the whole room went green
And my horse who was long dead came to the window and gave me a wink

And instead of real colored eyes anymore
My friend’s eyes became the magic green forever

Two solid buttons of chrysophase eternally positioned
Somewhere in the vast forever between the mouth and the bound

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction and art by Matty Byloos.

This was the time that came directly before the rains.

A man whose life was a treadmill, built out of sidewalks. Another man who never apologized for anything to anyone within three feet. A girl, aged seven, with knots in her hair and a crush on her older brother, who is a kite hanger, now in prison. A conversation on a telephone overheard by a boy who liked to hide in the pantry, smelling the opened sack of flour. A woman standing on the roof of her house, trying not to fall off or to fall over, trying to see into her neighbor’s backyard. A couple and their baby and four sturdy crows who belonged to the zebra in the smallish backyard. A textbook on the sidewalk, left there by a stranger. A story discarded. A Bible salesman, going door to door, when everybody already had a Bible and no one bothered reading anymore. A tortoise, a former pet, something moving slowly down the street, walking right . . . down . . . the . . . middle, unnoticed.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Heather Christle and art by Clayton F. Merrell.

Heather Christle executes a sublime and shining lowliness. Fusing an arch jocularity to epiphanic neurosis, her poems take their panting repose within nexuses of concession and censure, volition and void, the aha and the blah-blah, laying forth drop-dead visions of the living’s gritty triumph of and over nothing, of and over our whatever, this weirdo here and now.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Megan Moriarty and art by Marci Washington.

In these epistolary poems, taken from Megan Moriarty’s adventurous collaboration with fellow poet Brian Trimboli, the dark night of the soul takes on new dimensions of eccentricity and horror. Marked by their own twisted pulchritude, these missives from the edge of existence grapple with the grotesqueries of loneliness and longing, with fates more dire than death.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Brian Trimboli and art by Marci Washington.

In these epistolary poems, taken from Brian Trimboli’s adventurous collaboration with fellow poet Megan Moriarty, the dark night of the soul takes on new dimensions of eccentricity and horror. Marked by their own twisted pulchritude, these missives from the edge of existence grapple with the grotesqueries of loneliness and longing, with fates more dire than death.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Matthea Harvey and art by Eric Yahnker.

Worried and fabulous. Funny and weary. Matthea Harvey’s damaged mermaids would rather not but will. These poems don’t drag, they drift.

The Tired Mermaid

The Tired Mermaid wishes for once her horoscope would just read: hungover today, stay in bed. Instead it feeds her false futures and she starts each new day expecting to finally shine up her trident or compose a ship-sinking shanty. Too much Chianti and none of these things get done. The sun is a blade in the eye that hurts her seaweedy head and doesn’t help her stomach, roiling with bits of broken reef. While she’s contemplating brushing her teeth, the other mermaids go swishing off to Watercolor Class. The trick is to use a primer of crushed pearls for a spectacular under-sheen when the drawing’s dry. Later they’ll hold the paintings underwater and see which one fish try to swim into. Fish are efficient judges that way and no one holds it against them. If they’re fooled, they’re fooled. There’s always another day. The Tired Mermaid grimaces, then sneezes. Another day is precisely the problem. It’s time to get up. For a jolt of caffeine, she bites an electric eel, and the chill in her molars isn’t much, but it’s something.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Anthony McCann and art by Cara Judea Alhadeff.

Reckless though restrained, McCann’s poems shock themselves with their own rapt vigor. They trill, they seethe. They swoon and conjure. They’re what their spirit asks for.

Tremor

Behind the door the brains shook
And the door just stayed
I had no inclination
            towards opening
the back of my own head
I was surprising myself there
in the mirror the cabinet
I was gone like a moment
but then shutting the cabinet
when the earth trembled
my brains just stayed
The eyelids locked   unlocked
there was hair
there and skin and
a roof and a plant
there   The kitchen
sprawled out away
toward a window
and the light
flared on the white
on the empty
voices there     Real heat
touched the rocks
What is meaning if not always
            Life shook
but the earth just stayed

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Jon Woodward and art by Gregory Euclide.

These poems reel forth with equal parts sorcery and science—their power, their art, such that what fractures so accretes—revealing within a scenery a scene within a scenery within a scene.

The Tree That Has No Reference to the Horizon

They wrap their model of the universe around
Until the water overflows the horizon

The tree doesn’t fit that and stays put.
They walk on it but never discover it.
One of the suits of armor from the boat
Falls empty, clanging, and a rabbit hops out.
It is an imperceptible event

One of the suits of armor from the boat
Is clasped around a different tree trunk all of a sudden & the men laugh

And in the morning they find the horizon
And run along it, laughing and singing in Spanish.

–––––––

Lodged in a tree of smile teeth
Ensnared in the branches of teeth
With legs kicking laughing trying
To get free, a rabbit
Scrambling to get free.

The tree that casts no shadow
The tree that preys upon parasites

No one is content to tell the right joke
No people is happy where they are.
No tree hosts nothing

Or, this tree hosts only a simple smile not its own smile
A laugh that casts no laugher’s shadow

It’s as always night
As it is always day
And the discoverers row over from the old this world
To the sky-filling laughter of this tree

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Leah Umansky and art by Andrew Schoultz.

“The tragic and the timeless; / the gestural lines: all a sheet of modern music. The pit; the war paint; the blackened / eyes. The wilderness is brackened. We are on the edge of something.” And so the poet makes the page flex, has her words unpack their maps. Trekking routes the verse hews, we find ourselves not lost or alone, but beside ourselves, beyond each other.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Robert Lopez and art by Rachel Hulin.

There is probably an office building, a compact car, a woman who works for a modest living. She is most probably an honest woman, so let’s not assume anything about her because she is left-handed and cross-eyed. That she wears blue eye shadow shouldn’t bother us either. This is how she was raised, so we can forgive her more than this. If she has a family she is probably good to them. She probably wakes up early to cook them breakfast, usually scrambled eggs, though sometimes it’s waffles. If she has a son it’s probably the son who begs her to make them every morning, guilts her into it about twice a week, although there’s never time for this. This is what she says to him, she says, I don’t have time for this.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Elizabeth Ellen and art by Kelly Tadge.

Elizabeth Ellen’s lovesick vignettes assemble from derailed desire a pert new obsession. These stories are intent on busting boundaries, hounding the self down lost roads of foreign interiors, tracking an intimacy so thorough it keeps shrinking.

This Was Not Normally How She Opened a Door

The doorbell rang. Her hair was wet and her skin was wet. This was not normally how she opened a door.
            The man said: You have not told me anything.
            She said: Okay. And: I’m sorry. And: Thank you.
            She waited for the man to take a step. There was all this openness! She was a woman who preferred confined spaces. She had an affinity for elevators and tunnels, the crawl spaces of her house.
            The man said: In the future authorities will be alerted.
            She said: Yes. And: I understand. She moved her head on an agreed-upon matter. There was so little fabric surrounding.
            The man was not undersized by any measure! The porch was of questionable proportions. She considered the space underneath. Leaves and debris would attach themselves. She would spread out lengthwise, watch the wood distend beneath the man’s feet. She would breathe comfortably, take in mouthfuls of sediment.
            The man was still talking. His was a prepared speech. She crouched unassumingly, premeditated her next move. There was the instinct to burrow and she compacted her body accordingly. If the man noticed her absence, she could not detect his distraction. His words filtered through steadily. She settled her head into the soil. She prepared herself for a long rest.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Michael Kimball and art by Conor Lamb.

Michael Kimball makes of autobiography a compound fiction in which the confusions of youth underscore the caprice of human systems. As entertaining as it is intelligent as it is irreverent, Kimball’s prose is that rare creature that devours while being devoured.

[Here]

Learning to spell was difficult for me. Even after I realized that certain sounds went with certain letters, I didn’t understand why my name was spelled the way that it was spelled. I couldn’t figure out why Michael had to be spelled with those seven letters. I couldn’t figure out why the letter m had to sound like em or why the letter i could sound like a long-eye or a short-ih. I didn’t understand why the em-sound couldn’t be the letter e or the letter r or some other letter that I didn’t even know about yet. I didn’t understand why Michael couldn’t be spelled with seven other letters or ten other letters and still sound like the same name. I didn’t understand that almost everybody who used English had come to some kind of agreement long before I was born. Even after I knew that, I didn’t understand how that could have happened. The idea of nearly everybody agreeing seemed really complicated.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Rob Cook and art by Dan Estabrook.

“No one notices the two people leaning now / without faces in the framed wedding photos, // the ambergris smell of the couch, the leaking pillows, // the television that’s gone blind.” Populated with exuberant oddities and cryptic premonitions, Rob Cook’s poems are haunted by death and haunted by life, deranged elegies in which sickness spawns a baffling salvation.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Fani Papageorgiou and art by Lauren Volo.

“It wouldn’t rain. I knew because the swallows were flying too high. I was feeding birds in the garden staring at the sky, my bicycle propped against the fence. The cliffs nearby were falling into the sea. The future wouldn’t happen.”

Simple in principle, enormous in scope—Papageorgiou’s declarative lines drift through the berth between trance and testimony, and by an exalted tedium the terror of final reckonings is staved in.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry—text and read aloud—by Dave Cole and art by Emily Hildebrand.

Dave Cole’s verse runs on a hunch—”First let me say I feel like I’m making this up”—but will admit that “if you think something in your story / happened either on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, / this is worth taking some time to debate with yourself / while your audience waits.” This is talk made to tread the lost borders of singable incertitude and stiff-lipped fabulism. There’s a brand of fearlessness to the ramble that only sinks in after one tries to trail it. This isn’t story. Maybe it isn’t poetry. Maybe it isn’t even Dave Cole. But maybe, maybe, it simply is.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Christina Yu and art by Kathleen Henderson.

Less action, more motive—Yu’s stories hone their stylish logic against hunks of incident and potentiality, locating a lexical statuary in place of shiftless chronicle.

Strange Noises in the Night

His sons wake to find him thrashing his sheets and making strange noises in the night. They whisper about waking him, but just as they are about to tap him on the shoulder, he lets out another whimper, and the two of them laugh softly. A second later, they feel guilty for laughing at him while he is not awake to realize it or respond. There is something inappropriate about the two of them watching him like this. But they cannot return to sleep. They are concerned that he is troubled during the day and too afraid to admit it. Perhaps the trouble is only coming out now, in his sleep. For a few minutes more, they decide to observe him and see if he will continue to make noises. Just as expected, their father continues to whimper and move spasmodically. His sons begin to laugh again, despite their attempt to restrict themselves. Should they wake him? Do they have the right to disturb what may or may not be a nightmare? They both know their insomniac father values his sleep and has a big day ahead of him in the morning. There is only one solution: they must go back to sleep themselves and bear no more witness to these strange noises in the night. Even if they do witness a great deal of whimpering, it will never amount to anything. Their father will not remember why he was whimpering in his sleep—and even if he does remember his own dreams and nightmares, he will never reveal them. Still, they cannot sleep. And there is nowhere else they can go right now. What, then, will they do with the knowledge?

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Jason Jordan and art by Amy Casey.

We leave the back door open even though we ain’t supposed to. It gets hot as hell in here with the machines runnin’ all day and night. What we’re doin’ is makin’ brake hoses for hogs, so I’m runnin’ one machine while Terry’s to my left, only a few inches away, runnin’ another. He does his thing, passes the part to me, I do my thing, and pass the part to Sam, who’s behind me at the next machine. From where I am, I can see the back door perfectly. It’s only about 30 feet away.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Erica Wright and art by Angela Fraleigh.

Erica Wright drags an elegant trauma from the shade of everyday devoir, and the shape of what’s salvaged describes a new debt.

Hollow

Never the water so much
as the persistence, how even
a trickle, even a drop

can cause the forehead
to blister, then burst,
leaving only what’s raw.

This wound never gangrenes—
always washed, always clean—
but we must walk around

with the gape, must speak
to the bank teller and later
the grocer or at least the girl

who bags our oranges.
She isn’t yet troubled
by Bactin or meteorology.

Today the girl, Clara or Bess,
will save twenty dollars
and eight cents in a Band-Aid tin

she keeps in her toilet tank.
If we follow her home
to Bayside where the bridges

speak revolt with their mortar
and expanses, Clara will cut us,
but not where we want,

and on the ride home,
the relief will only
swell the coming sting.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Shane Jones and art by Mitch Dobrowner.

Through a series of stories that flash like omens, Shane Jones pushes his fiction past the precincts of poetry or prose, beyond the wilds of testament and fable, achieving a vision to outlast the view.

Hurricane with Neon-Colored Rocks

Daniel closed his eyes and imagined a hawk tearing apart the throat of a Hurricane, himself a giant who lifted up a leaf of sky to peek inside. He saw himself as a mongoose holding a rope in his teeth, running circles around the Hurricane, and, then, he was in a deep sleep with Iamso against him, dreaming of a group of men as tall and thin as trees. They threw neon-colored rocks into the ocean. When the rocks were gone, they found a large dial on the beach. They bent over and moved the dial to the right. The Hurricane buzzed, the clouds vibrated, and the wind slapped the ocean like a puddle into the sky. Everyone screamed, pointed at the sky. The tall men running through the forest, bumping their heads on tree branches, and Daniel could hear Helena behind him, whimpering, but when he turned he saw a little boy, his face scrunched up, wielding a green pipe over his head at the sea-sky ready to break.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Matthew Dickman and art by Soy Panday.

“I wonder if I’m bad for not caring / or for forgetting or for only loving myself so long it’s become hard / to imagine the letters of her name.” Matthew Dickman brings the body of the poem to bear on the mass of the immaterial. By the energy of casual elegy, his verse strings a noose from its forgetfulness, and what cannot return departs again.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by M.A. Vizsolyi and art by Lisa M. Robinson.

Vizsolyi injects new blood into the dramatic monologue, and his case studies navigate the obscurities of self with such Romantic abandon as our age may abide.

The Case of Jeffrey 5

The problem is the treasure’s

in what’s expressed and suspicion. Others have it.

The man who told me not to say a word

laughed and ran off with the bearded woman.

I still think he may have been a prophet of the present.

If not, then he was just another crazy-guy.

Austin said, “Many dispositions produce a habit.”

He was saying better to be dead

than ugly in any way. I don’t know.

Maybe he said that too. Though

I’m referring to two different Austins.

The one whose hips are roses when he holds them

and the one who moves with the pretty season.

He, too, will leave a ghost when he goes.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Sean Lovelace and art by Sandy Litchfield.

She is a living squirrel. I mean to say she darts into streets, amid hissing tires, pauses, crouches where she was never meant to be, but makes it. The suckling rain, listen. Holding hands a type of fist. Open your mouth. Because love elbowed the day she wore another (a prosecutor?) and I am now hobbled of belief. So cruel to speak the obvious. This might be the day, or stay of execution, you slop of bones. A can of beer toppled off a balcony. An overhead shot of us fucking in the kitchen: we look like pale thawing grasshoppers and in my throe I grip the oven burner and can still suck this scar. The skin tastes like leftover television. I can’t see what you see, so cut my own hair. The mirror an idiot watching mutely.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Glenn Shaheen and art by Cleon Peterson.

Glenn Shaheen gets absurd and deadly. Who says our laughter isn’t weeping?

On Our Destroyed Cities

There wasn’t ever a real secret buried
under all that rubble. We paid
them to spread that rumor. When they brought

those innocent people
to the gas chamber we changed
the channel. In some far off cultures,
the losers are the winners. The major interstate junctions

are works of art. Sometimes, when we look up, we think
we see our God. Other times

it’s someone else’s God. Tube tops
are back in fashion. The new mayoral candidate plays
a twenty-minute guitar solo

on local access. We never stop asking the young girls
when they will be married. And when the next extinction-level event

happens, we have the best cave murals. Our descendents
will know there was never
a scenario we didn’t consider in madness.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Kim Chinquee and art by Brian Adam Douglas, aka ELBOW-TOE.

Kim Chinquee tracks uneasy trajectories of life on the brink, a deliberate faltering.

Roam

I live in an apartment not far. A neighborhood known for its architecture. A Frank Lloyd Wright home that’s kind of like a secret, but not to anyone who’s from here. I took a walk with a man there, once, and he knew this person, that, but he was old and longed for me for other reasons than I felt the two of us were meant for.

I think of him, walking. Of how he pointed things to me. Of his careful thought. Of his fear, and safety. How I just wanted to bust out, sometimes, when I saw him. How, when I tried to talk to him about my father, he seemed like it was just a passing of the sunrise. How, after I came back from the cremation, he went about us like everything was normal. I wished I could just fall. We’d been at a restaurant, and I ordered salmon. I don’t remember what he got. It had taken a while for me to get him to stop ordering for me, as if he thought he knew me.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Mike Young and art by Peter Feigenbaum.

Mike Young makes fun seem like work, makes work seem like love, makes love seem like slogan, makes slogan seem like poem, makes poem seem like loss, makes loss seem like more.

America Is America’s Most Prominent Homosexual Sci-Fi Author

It is America in KFC tonight. They are out of corn cobs.
Many of Samuel Delaney’s protagonists are missing a
shoe or foot. In KFC tonight, America is embarrassed over
sandwich promotions that America herself invented. To improve
my social skills, what I do is I buy pancake mix. Every stranger
is an opportunity to get mugged or host a sing-along. Many car
commercials feature Highway 1, and if I were Highway 1, I would
sue their asses. Why do ukulele players have the deepest voices?
In KFC tonight, mysteries live forever, such as why did order 283
come after 281? When strangers talk about their relationships,
I always feel like they’re lying, but once I get to know them I feel
the same. It is America in America tonight, and everyone is
camped inside their own music video, by which I mean they’re
orbited by playlists. Knowing I’ll turn to pixie dust makes me
no less ashamed about participating in an endorsement of KFC’s
coops. Aw, who am I kidding? Not you, that’s for sure. Can’t fool
me is a thing my heart says while it’s chasing me with voter
registration information for a place I refuse to believe I live in.
What I like to do is walk on train tracks and feel things I
shouldn’t. Where I like to walk is past the houses of friends
without visiting. It is America in KFC tonight and only Mark L.
knows I’m here because I keep texting him IT IS AMERICA IN
you get the idea. Oh not me, you say. I didn’t get an idea. I am
order 282. I ordered this strange thing I think is a potato.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features a collaboration between author J. Robert Lennon and artist Lou Beach.

He came to our town around April, I guess. I was ten. Nobody knew who he was—he was just some guy who appeared one day, juggling in the park in his tuxedo. I don’t think anybody in our town even owned a tuxedo. I mean, you could rent one in Litchburg, but that was ten miles away.

Anyway, he cut quite a profile, I must say. The adults all hated him immediately. They thought he was some kind of agitator. But the kids adored him. He told them to call him “The Great Zombini,” but pretty soon that got shortened to Zom. He didn’t mind. You called him Zom, he kind of smiled this small, tight smile, and kind of took a little bow. We loved it! Nobody bowed to a child, in those days. Or now, either, come to think of it.

It was birthday season, starting in May. All of us had birthdays in May, June, July, at least everyone I knew. So we all asked for Zom to perform at our parties. And since we were all friends, you know, all of us went to every party. So we got to see him perform over and over. The parents, well, they just stood in the back of the room with their arms folded over their chests. You know. Disapproving. But even a few of them had to admit, afterward, that he was pretty good.

He did the usual stuff, you know. Doves turning into smoke, card tricks, rabbits out of hats, what have you. It wasn’t that he was original. He just had that special something. You know, the patter. The way he moved. He was a funny looking fellow—his face was strange, like an inverted triangle, he had a sharp chin and dark eyes and thick pomaded hair that looked like a toupee. Maybe it was a toupee. Anyhow, he was so smooth, it looked effortless, it was mesmerizing. He created this trust. That’s the only way I can explain what happened later. Or how it was allowed to keep happening.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Ryan Flaherty and art by William Steinman.

Flaherty’s “I” cruises an alien airspace in which incident collapses into incident and the final armature of voice equals non-response.

Questions of Apropos

Engine drone jostles the darkness in this hollow
of fuselage where I am carving the shapes of what shapes,

my ears popping from what changes in pressure?
The corkscrewed metal filings and gouges I am making,

are they more like razorwire or entropy? As the curtains
pull back, what curtains, as the mechanical arms

of the bay doors push into what light, I step back against
the walls that are like the rind of what fruit, a thin metal

between me and what cloud? Where there is no longer
metal (and since when can this belly open?), what view—

a curved, gelatinous sheen of land and atmosphere, shaking
with enginedrone, under the starpocked spigot of space?

Is it a basis of intelligence or just a molecular quirk
drawing me to the edge, my fingers going numb

from holding this “thing” over the opened cargo doors,
and I am holding what, exactly, bombardier?

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Michael Aird and art by Corey Corcoran.

Aird’s verse somersaults through quavering concepts of identity and reason, a metaphysical exercise that shrugs off truth in favor of feeling.

Place-Names: Displaced

spooling through detachment machines
in stark contrast

                          the curriculum
graffitied across your chest cavity
breathes in starts
actually the greatest congestion only feels
authentic

                always under way
that is, a partial thigh, feet, the real word
for your hesitation migrates
between your memory and face

stretches of recess just never
along the whole body, huddled in groups
barely audible but if

cheaply spoken for once
the slow rotation processing debt
its drainage

we needed to provoke a test
where finally

you come home to one response
paddling through your mind, bold filament
lit correctly over this patch & yes

being abandoned is a frequency
even the trees on set might hum
depended as they are
                         on a disorder of threads

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