Horror Quiz

This little deaf plant has shrunk. It’s more like a mushroom now. Shriveled
little womb

it contains a baby of brown smallness.

A dwarf comes out of a nearby door stirring soup with

What is that?

a stick? Or is that a rib, a spine with some teeth still left at one end?
She waves it at me

like she’s waving it at a Christ.

The sun is still up there; unshaded, hard, like a cyst
that haunts an organ.

Last

She went over and covered the house with a blanket.

Inside, tulips grew out of the family.

One lamp

served as the grave marker

for her parents, a

gray

balloon served as the grave marker
for

the tulips.

Looking At It

Solitude is shrunken like a white dwarf.

Collapse feels like hanging on.
The Universe

is visible in a set of drawers.

Watching A Cat Fall Asleep

It was 8 in the morning.
The muted sun had risen, of course,
like a blanched sand dollar, just a white disc out there
in between the trees.
And I had my own brain in my lap.
I was soaping it, massaging it,
I didn’t want my wife to see that—my sad little brain
being washed underneath the covers. I hid him in there
for his own good, and mine.
He was a secret; I kept him quiet with the end of a swiss army knife.
Somewhere, a violin and trumpet
bowed to one another and took off their hats.
Their heads were bloody. They put the hats back on.

Her eyelids pinch shut like a clam breathing, then
pop open, then close again. What is it in her
cat brain that fires?

God, I’ve really made a mess in here.
I’ll have to mop the floor and disinfect;
The chickadees will be invited as pallbearers;
Don’t call my mother. She’ll be too upset
to move.

Dry Wood

Can it either open or close, or both? Does it have hands?
Can it be both large and small, like my childhood
feverish vision? I held it in my mouth, whatever it was;
the sameness of both sizes. Closed hands on a rock, a
fly, one strip of grass.
Can its waves cross the desk and touch me?
My father glued it to a rock
along with a few seashells like little buttons,
looked at his watch in the wind.
In doing that, he opened it, and he closed it.
His hands occurred and then died, while
the ocean indifferently watched them
with its mustache and crew socks.
Back to etiquette.
Bow to the forehead of time, seagull, swinging
through the snow like a block on a rope.
The beach turned flat and regarded its people;
they were invisible and sat cross-legged like monks; they drank
glasses of milk like Stonehenge;
they prayed to the sand.
In their eyes, colors were flushed down the
toilets of their brains, remembering quietly the childhood
they had apart from themselves;
how often does a brain consent to something so outlandish?
It talks to the ax, it reiterates nonsense like facts, it kisses doom on the prick.
The forest on the outskirts stands upright and steady as a priest.
Clues received in the information of it all—cannot
possibly be read…
the glass rainbows, the prism interred.

The Ovation

Still stuck
like a sheet thread on a nail, like
a quill,
like your eyeball in its socket,

an entire earth
with gloved hand at its throat…

Thunder crowds at the door; let’s applaud.
As long as it’s

trapped
it can’t go away.