“Why, how deliciously morbid!” said heavyset dowager Belinda Buxingham as she peered through lorgnette eyeglasses at the stout black box in front of her: The Predict-O-Ma-Tron! A thrill of exquisite, almost sensuous pleasure ran through her plump body and caused a single, elegant peacock-feather sticking out from her ornate headband to tremble rapturously.

“And you say it’s never been wrong?” Belinda looked up through the aforementioned eyeglasses at Montgomery R. Whistlingcox-Falsborough, their host for this evening.

When he met her at the marina with a single long-stemmed rose and the poem he had written just for her, she said if he didn’t stop she would have to make him marry her. And when they took her daddy’s powerboat out into Florida Bay and he told her not to worry about sharks she said fine, she trusted him. But when they snorkeled and he said that the death of the coral was caused by her father and other men like her father, they argued.

Somebody told me
the Doritos guy
died recently.

Although I wasn’t
paralyzed
at hearing this news,
a sadness overcame me,
one that leaves
a crumbling, artificial
powdered-cheese sensation
in my throat,
with bags of guilt to follow.

Ever stick a vibrator
in your mouth, bite
down, and pull
the trigger?

maudlin strains sift
Into my thin-walled room
God of Nepal nights