By M.P. Powers
And then there was Jack Rhodes, twobit academic
slash pseudoeditor, sweating
over some lousy sestina
he was seeking so stealthily to slide
in your inbox.
He’d been prancing the carpeting
of his lower Charlotte lovepad, hands rummaging
in the subaquatic realms
of his fathomless trouserpockets. “…a zag up an’ a zig
down, and I be fittin to do
jiggies
whens I shoves out muh soord….” (Ulysses Jenkins)
And you know he’d read somewhere
something about the always unsung Concrete
Poets, and was considering
smashing his Dan Fogelberg record collection and heading up a Mom
Jeans
Movement, or dancing all over his neighbor’s orchid bed.
And there are some
who say he’d been spotted huffing nitrous and sleeping beneath
a Karaoke machine in the dumpster
area of a Peoria Olive
Garden. “I oughta svot you in de face
mit diz pissmop!” shouted Myron Pantwarski, former
door-to-door boner
pill salesman, fired recently for his strongarm
tactics. And I think it goes without
saying Rasputin fed on raw oysters, and Queen
Zingua had a harem
of men and would pick one to make love to all night, then have him
murdered in the morning.
And you wonder if Simon Perchik
really is keeping the bodies of those three Chilean
tax accountants on ice in his basement. “Why
don’t you and I step
out into the clean air? I’ve got a fifth of Cutty Sark stashed here, see?
Right beneath my long and flowing
broadcloth.”
Jack draws a bootyfool
snotrag
from the depths, dabs gently his pate
and cheeks and Frenchtickler
mustache. Puts a few finishing brushstrokes on his simply
“vaanderfool”
sestina
and shoots it off to a fellow alphadork
editor
who he’d recently nominated Personage
of the Millennium.
And a week later it comes…
“Hi all, I hope you’re doing well. Fall is making its tentative
arrival in NC. No joke, I think Charlotte
has become officially subtropical.
In other news, my latest sestina, entitled ‘On the Verge
of Alchemy’ was just accepted…” and so forth…
“Take care,
and all my best…” and so on… and such and such… Jack
Rhodes. p.s.
To remove yourself
from our list (and consequently trash your chances of ever appearing
in my jerky
fucking magazine), click here.
Clutching at Straws 