the coffin industry

Business is Business and

Business is Booming

Even with the recent production increases

Sajad’s shop can barely keep up

It’s a good problem to have, he sighs,

wiping his neck, shaking his head and smiling

It’s a big day at the shop

An American news crew

has come by to cover the nation’s

fastest-growing manufacturing industry

The shop guys are excited to be on TV

as the news crew stages the shoot

Two newly polished coffins gleaming

in the foreground

Sajad and the boys beaming behind

The second worker from the right

smiles proudly and straightens his sleeve

just before they go live

————

Of all the many things Mike Wiegand is not, the most interesting is his not being an amateur balloon tightropist. Which is a term we just made up.

you read it here first
has national post-traumatic stress syndrome
click here go shopping
stain your blouse and not care
become not mean or crazy
just dumb as shit

————

Nicole Henares lives and teaches in San Francisco where she hustles language and the willing suspension of disbelief to high school students.

Pencils don’t bleed, and if they did

We would have cardboard hospitals
filled with number two’s and sharpeners

Would surely be outlawed, especially

Those torturous cranks screwed into classroom walls.
I figured that erasers would be sold

As hats, but the longer pink rubbery monsters
would be for the most self-conscious of carbons.
I learned that pencil funerals would be cheap, just bury them

In the ground they came from next to their

Maple parents, shove them in that dirt as far as

You can and leave. I knew that the trees would mourn
their exsanguinated children and shed their leaves

To cover the slender corpses covered in teethmarks like proud scars.

I discovered that we would celebrate these forsaken pencils every year in October by

Wearing that wooden orange color, a testament

To the courageous pencils that have been squeezed and

Throttled by the hands of vicious poets. I noticed all this because
my pen ran out of ink.

 

I Have Been Slapped in the Face by God

I have been slapped in the face by God
but it was in jest, I suspect
Unlike my father slapping me when I said

“Bastard” at age six
or whenever that girl from school gets knocked up, you know her

Or when she got married, when

they

all
fucking

get

married

Or when my Pomeranian died,

the dog next door was slapping me, not the almighty backhand

that I felt yesterday morning, and this morning
He strikes in the morning, like hangovers and hot breath
At night he leaves me alone, just watching, waiting

for me to sleep, reaching his infinite arm back, bending his omniscient elbow

and my skin is red and sore from those glowing hands, but he’s smiling because

hey, He’s God, and
I dream of a time when my Pomeranian runs around the church, trying to eat

the rice thrown at me and my wife and the girl we both know
She is single and virginal and definitely not invited to the reception because I will be drinking, and I can’t control myself even though I just got married and my Pomeranian just lost all respect for me and–

Jesus Christ, where is this going?

I thought this was my dream–

oh hell my dad just showed up, he can’t see this, don’t let him see this, and he and the dog are fucking pissed off and why am I getting married in a church? I don’t–

9:30 AM

————

Ryan J. Rader is a mediocre student in the equally mediocre city of Muncie, Indiana. His poetry has been compared favorably to the works of Parliament Funkadelic and Black Flag. He writes at ryanjrader.blogspot.com.