Glamourghosts & Other Poems
prostate
you swore you’d phosphoress
like the allosaurus you earned
600 skee-ball tickets to get for me
we went wandering
the night after leaden jesus first asked
what flavor radiance you wanted
like he was painting fluoride
“Elderberry. A bramble grew
behind the house where I was born.
Grandpa would lug his rocker far in
and sit
and shout at the blue jays. Said
it was where he belonged.”
but they were out so you got rosary pea
and didn’t glow
dragons aren’t lavender
i wear peel-off nail polish
(to forgo gloves in august)
and when my fingertips molt
i pray their scales will congeal
into a great glittering dragon
that’ll kidnap the maiden
from my mind
my neck is worth most when melted
you wear fishnet and throw pennies
into the klein bottle
wrapped around my carotid
the copper slideshow bores
my blood and it fucks
off to climb an inflatable outhouse
i unloop my belt
and wear it like a blinding ascot
before you say “let lincoln look”
but you’re an amberjack
and i’m melodrama
so i fuck off to climb a chair
magazine cover
i shudderstare—the manface
in the microwave strobes
superimposed over a spinsick
bowl of ground cow
00:00
i spill it on my skirt
and tape sasha grey’s head to the door
glamourghosts
fabulous myself
with glittersugar and feathers torn
from crow bellies that ate
my ancestors with steak
sauce but they weren’t steaks
no sir
they were an eden garden of fruit
trees where every pomegranate cried
itself to sleep
the thing inside me cannot stay
its size exceeds minimum specifications to run this application
jetpack backpacking across north
west using ill-gotten capital gains
texas sky covered in oiling green peas
baby food for jesus
likes his steak well done his people undercooked
that’s why i’m not real
ity tv is where i’ll be buried inside
the box my flat screen came
packed mudlimbs in foam to fit without
the fight left in me i say no
thank you
slough off the ring finger
nail pullers were torture devices used by mars
terraforming venus into chocolate bars for a jailcell
holding fire spitters who eat their match
books whole no swallowing
but surgery to implant
in their stomachs and the reverse
when all matches burnout from life
in prison without the possibility of
jelly roll of belly grown from custard
smells like damp pillow
my face is a ravine cavepainted
with tarantulas screeching teeth
brushing noises noisy tutorial on how to
reinvent wheelchairs so spiders without legs can screech too
many inside jokes having nothing to do with anything
relatable to the average man i’m not so why
“Would you say nothing matters in the end?”
of the show because it all starts over again
on the next episode of mania
where do we go when we
dye our scarves the color of an earthworm
baked in the sun crystalline
mezzanine with a bomb the size of houston holy
hell that’s a lot of megapixels captured
below sea level bodies
float the undrinking water is still
undrinkable saltswill you need
to filter and nineteen hundred buoycorpses
everyone’s unhappy with their ancestors
resting in cisterns
skies cataracted with airplanes
constellations of staircases that a man lacking pilot’s
license climbs every night to say good
bye to his everdying wife who’ll be dead
by suncome and again the next evening over and over
counting the total population of heaven no one
signs her death certificates because
the only other person is her husband
who’s a polygamist
believing in an all-knowing
agency with the capability to en
force itself on you through nanoscopic
particles of ex-people who made it through
the water purification for severechronic stupidness
piñata boatbreak against iceberg in brain
waves that happen right before you fall
down the stairs
grandma used to call tomato veins in for supper
the sweet potato a heart
and the entire garden a man who she’d make love to
had he been less beautiful
CONTRIBUTOR
Grey Hudson
Grey Hudson is an aspiring writer living in northern Indiana. They graduated from Southwestern Michigan College with a degree in graphic design.