Brian Henry

Audition

Somewhere we dropped the illusion

that there was an illusion

and issued citations to everyone

pretending to be emotion.

The paranoia was catching.

The short fiction was anything

but. Lucklessly we drifted

until we washed up

on an orgy-occupied shore

to be given stern yet well-meaning

looks. Our Stanza out of gas,

we scouted for other means,

considered ourselves fucking

fortunate when the warm

engine of a lesser vehicle

signaled a keys-in-the-ignition

situation. Stanzaless, we drove

through the sand, off the sand

and up a switchbacking path

to the spot where the grass drops.

It’s there we stopped to regroup.

Was it you who saw him first,

the man-boy at the cliff’s edge

grabbing the children as they tried,

or seemed to try, to go over,

as if in leaps, their smiles so large

they ate the air their faces displaced?

Was it you who kneeled

behind him and nodded to me

to push? Who pushed

and sent him, and hence the children,

to the debris below? He sank quickly,

but they, with the buoyancy

afforded by youth, didn’t they almost float

as they screamed their way down?

Tink

Nothing rhymes with ‘pizza’ here.

The girl is walking up my leg and back

to jump over (not on) my head.

She rhymes what she is with ‘floral.’

The blood on the carpet from my

bloody bloody nose will come out

if I attend to it vite vite!

A yucky cricket, a lot of ladybugs.

He was not a bad hat, just bored.

Did not burn the beasts in his menagerie.

It does not occur to the girl to skin me.

To wonder if I’m rabid, behaving

erratically. At least the wallpaper

is not florid. Stripes asserting order

and direction. I color the mermaid’s bikini

top silver, her crotch and the tail beneath it

silver. Of course I linger. There,

and where the fairy’s cleavage.

The other princesses are all human.

They do not interest me.

At least when I get out of here

I will have a family to go home to.

While it might be more than I deserve,

it is more than you can say.