SHIRT: “The first hanging is also the last.”
BED: “Tiredness: the little death.”
PILLOW: “Once bitten, twice shy.”
I’m gonna shake these suburban
Small-town white-person blues
And travel to the most flamboyant gay bar imaginable
Forget your diet. We both know why you came here.
You ogle my browned buns,
my prime-beefcake physique,
and you cannot stay away
because I’m built
Light spills into the hotel room
like ill-prepared lemonade from
the sky’s 5-cent stand, the one
all the hung-over grown-ups
have been trying to avoid.
Orlando blinks
It is here you’ll stay.
I have to donate you—
and don’t lay blame: you were the one
who became a relic, galumphed
into the dismal swamp of old desire.
You are a specimen, so don’t insist
you aren’t exotic.
Sitting in her garden
I resolve to reflect a positive life outlook.
I begin a spiritually affirming list poem.
I like fish swimming in a pond.
Birds are good—they sing a bit.
Ducks are decorative but dumb.
Othello (Moor), Iago (scorned)
go at it in a Turkish war
but poor Othello doesn’t know
Iago’s out to get him so
The dreams
webbed and flapping, with beaks like orange shoehorns,
suffuse my head;
No friend to authors, the paper mite, devouring libraries with librarians in sight. I’ll squish any with my thumbnail that trample on my words and lest he be remembered, on a period, obscured. ———— Casey FitzSimons is an over-educated, under-published artist and writer. Her father was a Milton scholar and she has yet to walk [...]
[specimen] I couldn’t read my intervention on how hegemonic ideology physically changes the way people see the world until I put on my new glasses with the thick black ear pieces that are all the rage now. I started to see things as if I were a point-of-view shot in a movie, so I knew [...]