Picture Credit & Poem by Kari A. Flickinger

In the Morning, We Make a Plant-Based Protein Smoothie with Every Magnesium

We Need [Vitamin A, D, E, Ribo, K, Sodium, No—Phosphorus (Lines Across the Darkening Sky), Biotin, Zero Cholesterol Ol Ol, Iron]—Sides[Chosen in Leaving]—Which We Proceed to Spill on the [Cracks are How? This Doesn’t Add. They May Rest Where the Lamps Leave Us…] Way to the Car; Then We Sit in Traffic through the Tunnel, Always Remembering to Turn on the Vehicle Lights [Caldecott Bore 3, Bore 4; (My Lights Need Your Lights Need Affectionate Non-Horn Panging) Maintain Distance. Never Knees-Length of Affection;]. /// Once Over the Ridge, We Can Finally Pierce the Bounteous Blinding Grey Heat of the Underworld Beside Our Boastful, Pliant and Broiling Sea

 

It has been following
all our steps. And still

radio silence. Switch in the vehicle and stalking
us at every turn; this shadow sizzles
a tune. A gorged germ of unreal command.

And keep breathing through

the mess of existing. It never evaporates the way
the girl in the meditation app says it should
or the way the psychologist said the meditation
app would make it all

siphon out. Madness and fire. The chatter
of the steel birds above.

The lobbed-off tree nightmares. Shadows keep up in waves.
In commercial white-strip-toothed grins, the ponytail force
of grotesque painted teacups tail you. The parody is same
thick bisque, turquoise carnelian lids. Our face becomes

a sarcophagus (you saw in a museum
when you were thirty.) False

nails wield these lines. We (the plural bit) look up
in a mirror sky, we watch ourselves flicker

and waste. We churn luck from haste. Love from
the gristle of a flour-fried chicken (wings)
whole and index-imprinted sign-in nodules.
From the hollows of a half-full beer bottle.

We go as ice caps and caged.

Zip death up in ice-to-coal logo-t-shirt rage and too smooth
boot leather. Unwind the sea with a predilection
for symbol divination. The sharp prick of the edge
of our volcano. We all die easy as the flick of our

remote selves. And we expand to two watching each death outside ourselves

and three watching and four and eight and nineteen and thirty thousand;
the whole heap of us watch ourselves give permission
to pray from our backs while it hunts.

But the catch: there’s no surveillance.

I watch you
and you watch me.

To rationalize, it pretends we had some power when the last line

fails. It left something in each skull but these
shadows have burrowed.