foam cups, and hide underneath
water from God; his woman
lips: Don’t make the same mistakes
your father made; a Southerner with
his bum-steer sense
of honor:
Why’s my name always upside-down
on all my magazine subscriptions? He asked
They say God is a southern
gentleman
Now, I don’t know
is there still
a problem with the word
innocent?
My feeling is, this cough’s gonna be the death of me
lying
in a bathtub overfilled
and plugged with soiled yuck
from what appears to be
dead bodies because
sound carries over
the water as they giggle
at their own monologues,
as God, needing to feel colossal,
renames himself Marvelous; with
ALASKA in great big, bold
letters across the front
of his sweater
my open-sesame, I ask him: “Why didn’t you just write SWAG, then?”
His response: Because, how illiterate does one have to be
to misread an arrow?
“Up”
as he snaps photograph after photograph
of bridges, and nicknames his bridge
collection: The Interactive Map of Shame
And I can already see the repetitions
beginning: he’d come for stories,
with a big bag full
of bad habits
our relationship had unstable
chemical properties:
A man called Home, and yet
didn’t give us his name
How awfully sweet of you
Michael J Pagan is a recent graduate of Florida Atlantic University's Creative Writing MFA program. His work has appeared in Bridle Path Press, The Rumpus, The Northville Review, DIAGRAM, and is forthcoming in the Eunoia Review, and Prompt Literary Magazine.
