He practices techniques to ignore, explain, reconcile his daily affronts, fact that whole life is founded atop the graves, upon the backs of others, he was baptized in sweat and blood squeezed from countless invisible turnips, a rainbow of tones, oceans away. Likes to call it affirmations, being grateful, employing positive thinking…

tank on low
the bird pauses, gorges itself
to get back aloft

Jerome Berglund

The doctor prescribes a stimulant. His patient rampages. A sedative is then tried. The sufferer falls asleep at his wheel, causes a thirty car pileup. Injured casualties become addicted to obligatory pain meditations, when scripts expire switch to available street equivalents, take up lives of vice, careers in crime to treat the agonizing pains and debilitating withdrawal symptoms resulting from attempts to curb their intake, wean themselves clear. Their pill pushers, sanctioned and unofficial, compare notes at different lodges among orgiastic bacchanals, waited on hand and foot by trafficked courtesans, many of whom they recognize as past or present patients and consumers. They exploit their acquaintance, take advantage of positions to chisel them a bit more; knowledge of desperate neediness provides a phenomenal means of haggling rates down until they become quite competitive.

cannibals
cook month’s worth, seal in tupperwares
family-style meal prep

Jerome Berglund

Blood, blood, blood. I have it. You want it. I don’t want to give it. Buddhist. Buddhist. Buddhist. Not Buddhist. It’s only three millimeters, three milligrams, and one proboscis, but there is so much more to fear. It won’t kill me, but what it passes on might: malaria, dengue, West Nile, Zika, seven hundred fifty thousand viral deaths a year. Too late. There’s the sting. I’ve been had by the world’s deadliest animal – again.

a buzz inside
some thoughts won’t go away
itching and scratching

John Paul Caponigro

Halo wakes me, curled up against the base of my spine; my dog is dreaming, and his twitching wakes my dreaming wife, who shifts, waking him, and no one remembers the dream that was having them. We all return to dreaming: she’s making love to her wife; he’s packing dresses for our trip to Paris; I’m chasing squirrels.

awake and dreaming
the inside gets up
and walks outside

John Paul Caponigro

Long ago, mountains of snow bury the house. Inside it is so dark. The kitchen light
is always on. He is inside a spaceship, sometimes inside a submarine.
Now he is a groundhog. The window in the upstairs hallway is the new front door.
He climbs out onto the roof, shades his eyes from the glare.

enough snow
for an army of snowmen
not enough coal

Dorothy Mahoney