bar code

Slop that slough of eighty eight percent zebra steak on pink eye scanner, breech load one quid in smooth clicks. What remains: all fours prehensile dangling bush meat, lashed to sham shaft martini henry, shaken unstirred crucible of I’s dispersing into underbrush to glow wormy with new attrition labels.

 

Here we see a mail bag spike of spider prescript, contained in black redaction by censer smoking clerks in shade of sickly tint safari visors. No wait, rewind, I meant springbokkie! Meanwhile exotic tick borne m’ladies yammer gnomic metro giblets, data saga means dada, да, да, de nada, claret of murk & tile athwart a WC in pain of symmetry.




so called

 

Pardon? I am a rapt lather foaming along your quivering proverbs. Don’t be absurd. So called pronoun aliquots get melted down. Like crackers. At the cracker plant. But when the leopard rears its [sic] head of state, so called marks go rippling over shoulder blades. But down the line somewhere a hinge

 

has come detached. Flagrant sleight of mouth through megaphonic buttress, funneled in as opposed to out. Not without a hiccup. Oops, I’m [sic] supposed be a frigate. No clipper ship, says I. So called kale in other words has shaken the collards, the alfalfa down—arising as populist grub of choice.

 

Julep...urp. Now pardon me. I mint to say meant. Come again?

 

You’re sea sick already? No, really? If I was real, I’d take the so called form of “wizened mendicant.” We hope you enjoyed your so called stay. But come to think of it, your stateroom was but humble mesmer matrix. I mean, besides the feral Toybob, obviously. Bottom secret: sock and bible drawer harbors black gold. Or was it mold?




so much

 

We emerged from the hatch and disembarked. To the zone marked off as such by signs of triangular disposition, and interspersed with heaps but also mounds. To wit, one mound of congealed suds atop a heap of dung, reheaped teeth and hair. A pyramid even, of crockery orts and bottle corks, mounting the blue end. These began, as it were, with a bulging base, then sloped up, taperingly, to the cone. Aforesaid slopes would collapse at times in places, leaving concupiscent hollows. Yes, we conjectured, these heaps must surely correspond to pits elsewhere. A centerpiece of miscellany, fuzzed with rusty tendrils, dominated this zone in particular. If one would but garner sufficient will, these mounds could be dismounted from the zone, shoveled or bulldozed onto barges for transport down canal, then reassembled to form a second zone. Had we been delivered here for such a grandiosity? But then again, we thought to ourselves as if as one, they bespoke of such majesty just here. This spot, what serendipity! What undersecretary chose this patch of scrub and gulch, demarcating it with perhaps a dotted line upon official maps, transforming it by affixing so esteemed a moniker as zone? Stroke of urinal genius. To be so much in charge of something! From above, in a dirigible, say, our zone would appear a mandala of plurichromatic powder hills.

 

Machinations of a paper guillotine began to flurry down upon us, gracing our rods and cones with markings. Letters. Partial phrases, even.




tea pot shot

 

Bergamot reprussian in a murder how town. But stirred by knout of panties where, lb. for £, the burgher hoes down. We festered of a Sunday, jeek by chowl in a placid qualm. One last oblong noon before the tempest. When

 

whop—whinged it: pickle chaser towing hunks of rye, sponged from punch tureens or gauntlets. Tea v. vodka? Just what the doctor ordered so natürlich we ignored it.

 

Spike! and synchrosynthésis. Into

 

brew of locusts and bone ash and pestled geode. Down the hatch.

 

Supposing that’s why monstrosity slid to the now turbid surface, disgorging black bile from a severed hose behind the paddles?



William Repass is originally from Los Alamos, New Mexico, I live in Pittsburgh and work as a projectionist and film librarian. My work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Bennington Review,Denver Quarterly, Hobart, Small Po[r]tions, and elsewhere.