The Disclaimers by Salvatore Difalco

 

Blooshed by Erich Ferdinand from Flickr

People with tiny souls controlled the peace.
“We are professionally rational,” they argued.

War is irrational in some respects.
As is art.

And yet we practice it,
flicking blood around like paint

or flicking paint around like blood.
Some of us, the catatonic, watch these goings on

with muted interest. “You catching flies, Joe?”
Joe shuts his mouth with a clack.

The real thing is more than word association.
No fake blood on set, the director

forbade it. He visited an abattoir.
That’s why he smells of excrement.

Let’s go on a date
with another kind of animal.

This one’s into pharmacology.
Later, we trip balls.

But the commingle mutually
disturbs and thus is hauled off to the archives.

In another life
chivalry will return and piccolo trumpets will blow

when you spill onto the podium
dreading a natural death.

Everyone is guilty of something here.
Their beetle brows and overbites don’t go

over nicely with the Guineveres of the kingdom.
An ideal situation would make us fear

the asylum escapees, rather than embrace them,
though yes, we live not far from the asylum.  

*****

Sicilian Canadian poet Salvatore Difalco lives up in Toronto, Canada.

Lethe’s Banks by Frederick Frankenberg

 

The Inferno, Canto 32
Gustave Dore

I died. Cupid bashed my brains
with a club of hearts.

I awoke near a rivulet
churning up nacreous secretion.
The skies were mauve
and the blue grass had not one
diffident daffodil ruining it.
I sat underneath the
burning sycamore tree.

There stood a placid man’s granddaughter
in lingerie so small,
it had to be custom ordered.
A little girl of destructive desire
with a russet armpit
and a patch of tender hair
where her legs and hips met.
Her nipples in full bloom
in virile pollinated spring air.
Like mercury marinating in my meat,
there’s that poison inside me.

My Civic drove over
on its own self will.
I snatched up my target, the
little eye catcher, and
pushed her into the
passenger side.
She gave me a
vacant lascivious grin.

Lewd kids ran from over
the hazy hillock and
made obscene gestures
and degrading requests.
“Bring me, too!” they said.
“There’s not enough room
in the inner circle of Hell!”
I ejaculated.

***

Frederick Frankenberg lives in Highland, NY. @FredIsAWriter 

Lightning by Thomas Zimmerman

Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935

The streaks of gray like lightning in your mother’s

hair: like Elsa Lanchester, The Bride 

of Frankenstein. You’ve stomped around like Karloff

all your life, a magpie of a man,

an animated corpse. You think you died 

again, mid-2010s, imagined price 

of childlessness. Your introspection’s garnered 

little. You’ve had stitches in your head,

you’ve stood in lightning–Texas, Iowa,

and North Dakota–screaming It’s alive!

Some friends of yours got drunk one night, burned down

a farmer’s barn. Imagine fire reaching

heaven, Zeus in anger hurling it

back down some night as summer lightning. Almost

half a century ago, you and

your red-haired girlfriend loved beneath a massive

oak tree later struck by lightning. Lost

a limb. These branches, bolts, and veins: in skies,

in breasts, in backs of parents’ hands. Now yours.

And something quickens in you. Pray for rain.

***

Thomas Zimmerman teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. His latest book is Dead Man's Quintet (Cyberwit, 2023).  https://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/