White Knight, God of Dreams
by David Sorensen

THE truth is, though, that I actually am quite a popular guy. Case in point: last month, I went down to Strappy’s, a gentlemen’s club off the turnpike near my mother’s house. It’s mainly a social experience. So anyway, I’m at the club, enjoying my Roy Rogers, and a girl comes up to me and just starts flirting.
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She went up and down the block with her briefcase. Door to door like some cheap salesman screaming "I got dreams for sale, Dreams!" All the neighborhood guys saw her in her skirt and bought as many dreams as they could. She kept skipping over my house for some reason, I never understood. That's all right, I wasn't buying at the time anyway. I went outside and my neighbor started talking saying "Oh man you should have seen the dream I bought the other day." He pulled out the box and showed it to me. I looked in and said "John, I don't think that's a dream at all, I'm pretty sure that's just a used condom." John replied "No, but she told me it was a dream, it even says Dream on the box!" I waited around looking for the saleslady to come down the block. After a few days I caught her selling some boxes to Dave in her car. I waited till they were done before I confronted her, I said "Ma'am, I'm curious about these dreams you're selling." She replied, "Oh you are, are you?" I said "Yes I'm worried you're misleading the neighborhood with these boxes of dreams, I saw them and I know it's a scam." "Big deal," she said. "If you're so worried about the neighbors maybe you should stop being such a chicken shit and buy a dream yourself."

We snuck away into a barn built around nineteen-oh-three that couldn't withstand the smallest spark, we were warned. The asphalt skillet in the afternoon put a gradual burn under our crisscross sunny-sides-down. The church bells rang a higher key in these parts than what I was used to, but Friday was Good enough alone. This was my first year not reenacting the Passion in a long while. Poor Mother. I sat myself on a toolbox and studied the subtleties in shade between dust, ash, nickel, while her glass inhalant whistles soared her above the gongs. I could only follow suit.

A rooster had not performed the job of waking the collection of six houses that made up the fleabite of Stilton’s Crossroads in over three years. That honor, such as it was, had fallen to the former professor, former reverend, current town drunk Reggie Lee Mast, formerly of Fort Payne Alabama.

occasionally bullied into solving problems
i don’t have

you know a dream is non-transferable
and i am no sponge

my dad must say something about
his rotator cuff

but i remember it as rotary cuff—
of course

the most charitable part of the body

I doubt you’d want to spend any time at all reading this poem

I imagine you’d want to do something like -
spend several minutes
trying to figure out the right angle for a sexy selfie
to send to your secret love

MAKE CHICKEN OR BE CHICKEN
the alluring title of the drama
wherein we-
the peculiar are ambidextrous
to perform the double role
as both active actors and passive audiences
with no exception
the shortest finds nothing in the dust
but a chicken in his heart