Landscape with a Periscope

I wasted dawn mining the horizon and dredging the rib bone shoals of the Colorado as it heaved an arsenal of stones at the periscope of my soul. The cold river churned over me until it broke the dams of my teeth and bloodied the tributaries of my eyes with a knuckled dose of comeuppance that stood in for the inner peace offered by the weekend medicine men of La Paz County. Where nature might have harbored an exact emotion along the muddy shore, I ambivalently charted on seeking a four leaf clover among arroyos that only house clogged arteries and ineffectual dietary remedies. I dove and dredged again where exorcisms often offer nothing more than belated apologies, but I found no treasure chests for my trouble. I surfaced and surveyed the space where casting spells often offers nothing more than preemptive insults, but I found no El Dorado for my suffering. Finally, as I took on water and worried about tomorrow, I watched the last of the morning stars fall like bread crumbs from a scuffed tabletop until they took on the aspect of lead shot from a golden revolver. That’s when I realized my lenses and radar were faulty, but with a money-back guarantee from the manufacturer, I foolishly felt no need to despair of this momentary infirmity. Oh, had I known such exchanges required an original receipt, I would have guarded that sacred piece of paper against the pools of bilge that inevitably accompany such a journey, but I left it with my other documents of identity in the leakiest section of the ship’s hull along with my fresh sets of skulls and crossbones.

Mythmaking in the Municipal Park

Those plum blossoms are clusters of muscles wresting the stones-throw sun into fingertip focus. That errant eagle is a velvet vest seeking flesh of a different sort to probe and dismember in a blur of hunger. Your desire is a blue vein, a sky full of hidden portents, a calendar full of lists penciled in with a tattoo gun and erased with the orbit of a cummerbund. I am a busted shoe concealing a callous, scraping against gravel.

Magnifying Glass

Wingtip to skirt, doorknob to door, we trace them from the country lawn to the city streets through innumerable boxwoods and bus stops until we are tired of the work, weary of always spying that loud tie in windows and tracing those sighing breasts from divan to divan. So we dig through the last nightstand in the last room for the definitive clue and end up in an elevator, astonished and off the record, a vibrant multi-story television test pattern fastened together by a belt and sounding off with the sign off that demands black and white reruns elsewhere. And in that blur of elsewhere we become an infant examining the keys on a keychain with no concept of locks but a keen sense of play. When cartoons finally replace our gumshoes in the morning, we will choose to look at this glass in only one of many possible ways.

Controlled Burn

Prepare to till under the blackness surrounding Americus, Kansas. Ready the soil for regeneration with the flames and haze ahead. Allow your eyes to insinuate greenness into the brittle grey squares of seeming sameness. Let your immolation strike the masses as they stare at chilled shelves with plastic bags in hand. Let your immolation satisfy them with loosed belts and napkins in hand. A single farmer feeds 128 strangers with a single match. 128 strangers recognize farmers from television sets. Their remote controls burn red.

Caleb Puckett currently has pieces in Great Works and Radiant Turnstile. His prose collection, Tales from the Hinterland, is available from Otoliths.