YARETA GREEN ZETTAFLARE, OR, MEN USED TO GO TO WAR
-after jack vance’s Dying Earth
ever in their wizware era
scent of vinegar X school glue
coagulating ‘neath half-plate
scorch wound from glance
of chain lightning
wish you could unyodel that particular toasted strudel, ungunk that gaping gut wound with some unguent
sparkly and cosmic as the lip balm you lost at the roller rink in the ninth era, when the scales balanced and you
got a gunmetal blue barrette instead
ever in their vat-stare yearning, knowing no ease, no more than anhedonist T’Sais
wishing what you’re sayin’ sang like a tuning fork, like the heart the centered T’Sain
ever in their caring, needy being needed era, driving every perf patterned afab out the vat lab and into the arms of
any lad clad in a Cape of Sad Remembrance, or some uncommon lace abjurative arcane caul, or even just a
thigh-bruising carabiner bearing tchotchke dy/ke/ychain with yer misspelled name on it, bland but for you, all
the way from The Land of the Falling Wall, unlearned lads lying thru their teeth to the tune of Yo La Tengo’s
take on You Can Have It All
1603 KM VERTIGO GO GO GO CATCHES UP TO THEE AT THE ESSO SO SO SO
-after e. bishop’s filling station
Bacchus the dog’s dewy paws expressing successive weaker prints like an ill ellipsis as we trot from marsh thru
mire to metaphysical tarmac to take farewell selfies. Our chrome compacts pitted with rear view spores of
memory. Departure in 5 4 3 2 (cinnamon bun).
*
Iced Capp sweat wicks slick the clammy frontmost cupholder’s cache of small coins. The $4 Highway
Toll. Bacchus kneads my mother’s bladder one paw then the other. Slow and steady like a bicycle pump oozing
air into an air mattress. She does not succumb to pre-pee, not even a wee.
Tuna interpretive center. “Too bad id wadent tuba,” I say to sleeping passenger and sleeping dog on’r lap.
*
Three men in an ouroboros triangle of lawnmower: Kubota / New Holland / JD.
Feet up and on their tractor hoods: Orange / Blue / Green.
Green’s rubber boot and pant leg part, and in brief slip Green’s calf licks smokestack. Green’s fresh blister splits
quick. Outside the curling rink, in the last gulp of golden hour: the grass so mustard. The burn ooze so earwax,
so very N.S. dealer license plate yellow. Highway red so very fresh nape sunburn.
*
Humes rear east loop. Café’s Hines root beer screen-door pushbar in perf like-new nick.
*
Ferry godbother. Mean lookin’ tweetybird tattoo. Not seasick, just my heartburn, resplendent in the rhythm. All
the men are on the floor on neck pillows. All the women in recliners with their feet on the backs of the men. All
rocking just shy of true sleep. Just about just about just aboat
*
Detained in detail, blown tractor tire a tarred blue heron. We abide and swerve ‘round such bad omens. Shylock
Lady Luck looking you up in the tamarack pulp phonebook, calls you up to call you ‘sook’.
Now who gone and gussied up that gas pump?
*
Your search for “what is the decibel of the average mother snorer” returned zero results.
Other. Wonder. Remember? I hardly know her.
Emulator. Court jester. I—
“YOU ARE IN CONTROL. PULL OVER TO TALK.”
Yard Sard (but not Yale Sale) sign, slats with black text:
“BENCH OR BIN NQUIRE WITHIN”
*
What even was fidelity? Fealty, or store credit? This madman’s math bruised into feeling.
I do not permit you to cross the city limits of this bruise I brewed.
I do not permit you this purple pleasure. Here is notice. Read it.
And sleep, please come for me, do not make me garland thee and barb these fences so tyrannically, squee
chokeglee out in dollops o’sickly ivory melancholy, sicklesome swinging fists at every-none and heavenly things,
oscillate great wide snide things from sea-burnt nostrils.
Yr my honeybee by permit only, grown manly and monochrome in zoot-suit soot,
zipped behind the moot-case’s trap door.
*
up above the corkboard, several successive bled-out oilcans,
PENN-LUBE IRVING—ING—ING—ING uglily ringing
*
My squeaking U-joint iterating more and more ‘til I pull in to gas up ‘gain, open the door, and joint’s seizure
passes, and I hear the too-many of the birdmob in the 150year-old apple tree, the tree dropping thousands of
apples in throuple’d bundles onto the gas station’s canopy, G.O.A.T. Serena Williams thwacking endless TBs
into tin timpani, rhythm mother-hen’ing me, hemming me into the muggy moment and its heat; the birds and
apples waking me from the drowsy lure of the heat, feet planted but felt momentum drumming, that boiling
dribble and that winged polyphonic peanut-gallery teasing poor baby backseat Bacchus with their raucous
ballwhomp fracas, and I am the manliest of the varicose veins staining my mother’s thighs, thighs on the car
hood waiting for me to go and get back from the bathroom already, waiting for me to get something over with
and get back on the road, mother ornamenting the hot hood, sober as a garden hose.
bonnyCD lives and works in rural Alberta (Treaty 7 territory), Canada, where they’re currently taking a slackjawed selfie in a pitted mirror. Their most recent trade, The Repoetic: After-Saint-Pol-Roux, is available from Gordon Hill Press. They’re a proud founder of Feud Court, the online reading series for poets who feud, and are currently at work on a small book of nonfiction advocating for wage transparency amongst writers. Yell at them on IG: @feudcourt