Junkyard 1 (week 3)

My soles flip-flop
in the backyard blues
watching chicken wings crackle and dance
in liquid heat while my right-hand beer
swigs today away.

Improv 1 (Week 3)

Wheels of Steel
Adrian Matejka

I got me two songs instead of eyes—
all swollen and blacked out

like the day after a lost fight. Two
jigsaws spinning, buzzing the backdrop

for woodshop or emcee, bar mitzvah
or afterset. It’s DJ Run, DMC rocking

without a band, but not without me.
I make it rain. I make it rain on these

shined up rims still spinning after the car
stops. Dubs kind of grind like me

in their perpetuity. I’m the Wizard
of Oz if Oz was a fish fry in July.

Call me Master of the Cracked Fingers.
One song spins forward, the other

back to repeat itself: Every day I’m
hustlin’. Every day I’m hustlin’. Baby,

I’m the layaway payment on a Ferris
wheel. My songs orbit parking lots

and rent parties like the crazy lady’s
eyes when she finds out her lover man

already left…It’s all because of you,
I’m feeling sad and blue. One of my songs

spins backward, while the other plays
forward like sugar mixing in to make

the grape. My joints are the pinwheels
in this parade of moonwalks and uprocks:

See, I like to get down, Jack.


Improv:
“I got me two songs instead of eyes—
all swollen and blacked out”
they play dogged, sidelong at you
two spinning plates stuck on repeat
between your chest and the fur
necking at your ears.
Your cheeks cube rosy when I
ask: would you like your mango with salt?
Then a tripwire: Jerry Leather eyes whip me like boot straps;
I dispatch.

While you drip cobbler from your nails
I sink my hands deep:
thumbing spoons in soap,
fumbling over spatchulas
that stick to your thighs
like saddle bag reflectors.

Free write 1 (week 3)

It’s raining the color blue and I am seaside
filling my pockets with denim and nautili.
My Nordic haunts: a saline mixture of switches, prattle and mutt.
Hot wires warm and, at midnight, begin to spin silk,
the orange spiders that hammock my dreams.
In lucidity I am my father’s Gregorian chant:
a churning rhythm, a booze strung rant.
I wake, knee deep in the muck of linen
I cling, all balled up skin flaking till I’m spread dermis, a milli-thin veneer.

Tonight, I am the rings around the moon.
I am lunacy arching its back to laugh
and wheel barrel all the way home.

Improv 1 (week 2)

From "Introductions" by Jillian Weise

"After we've introduced ourselves
with gin and tonic and jazz,
a woman asks to read our palm."
I slid down your leg's trombone
and rub the sandpaper on your hips.

Impatient, the palm reader exhales
in fact, she hisses and it smells of
sodden cardboard. I consider if the man collecting my trash
at 5:48 in the morning has the same stench.

These folks measure yesterday in pounds of grease
My neighbors, the man flicking to light an end,
Everyone around us smiles and,
waving paper towels like scarves,
they drive bomb this town

Junkyard quote 3 (week 2)

A lot of empty outcries
next to the hospital
witnesses the comings
and goings of pallets
the trappings of a life
strapping patience down

Junkyard 1-2 (week 2)

As I move this inkwell across the parched and barren
my pen comes to rest on a Gila monster
black and beady with a stinging tongue

we eat fur pie and roasted rope soup
at the mayor’s estate.
His wife offers me a panther’s claw
but I refuse, digging my eyes into scalloped moth balls
encrusting her lips

Free Write 1 (Week 2)

We venture to Tennessee together,
my Indian and I,
with slop on the roads
riding in each other’s laps.
All the time, my face,
hangs its droopy eyes out the window
to catch fire flies in the eyelids.

Once, we played with six shooters:
evenings filled with port and
bacon-wrapped minion.
You licked my face like a dog when
we assailed the neighbor’s hedgerows
to pop BBs in front seat of your Volkswagen.

But now, now Tennessee
and the tin siding of your face
that I imagine as I bed you in rust
Laying you on the springboard mattress stamped
Captain Daniels Adventure Highboy