Saturday Afternoon Twilight Zone
With the bobby pin I’ve kept beneath my tongue all morning,
my fingers spring the lock to my parent’s bedroom
where mom’s cherry lipstick glows beneath a seashell lamp.
The babysitter calls me but trails off mid-vowel & I grab
the thumb-length tube, unscrewing the cylindrical top.
When the door-bell rings, she skips outside to pay for a pizza,
my incisors nibble red wax, & like a tiger shark frenzied
by its first whiff of blood, I devour a smorgasbord
of diamond bracelets, Rolexes, poker chips, glass elephants,
cellphone chargers, & multi-color X-mas bulbs, wedging
a grandfather clock down my throat. In the TV room,
subwoofers blare a blockbuster’s credit role & I swallow them
along with the top-shelf liquor cabinet & Answering Machine
repeating my name. By the time tires peel off the curb
& my sitter enters the hall, I’ve eaten through roof tile,
not to mention Earth’s gravitational handbook, & a blimp ad
for Nicholas Cage. Floating above the cul-de-sac,
I burp for good luck & my jaws crank wide to chomp
the sun like a crocodile crunching an atom bomb.
Rocket Ship in the Backlot of Joe’s Steak Shack
Piper & I race to the sand dune’s edge & kick up grit
in the silver moonglow, our windbreakers flailing
like the trigger-hand of some wannabe hotrod
robbing a nursing home on a dare. I flip a zippo,
burn a Pall-Mall picked from the pack with my teeth,
& motion to a rusted trailer flanked by a fallen
chain link fence, a headless mannequin sloped
on a flickering Coca-Cola vending machine.
In the backlot, Piper spies the jittery old wingnut
buffing his homemade interstellar stallion,
the dented stack of sheet metal & satellite array
he’s always yakking about at Ned’s diner
on Tuesday nights, his pencil-drawn blueprints
showcased to every gullible do-gooder & dunce
suckered into playing checkers near the pond.
I steady my Polaroid’s lens searching for his patched
sailor cap, his bomber jacket that gleams with mock
medals & ribbons fashioned from candy wrappers
& safety pins, the seaweed tangle of beard,
eager to snap souvenirs for the blue-haired girl
in my study hall. We creep closer, our shadows
passing over sage, but stumble when echoes
of clank & crack & a slow roar shudder the hills,
& like weathervanes ripped off rooftops, we whip
around to the first pop of flame, frozen debris raining
on tumbleweeds, & my camera flashes at a smoky trail
to Alpha Centauri, as Captain Wingnut soars
into a Coca-Cola sky’s glassy darkness,
no doubt bound for that planet where merit
is measured by coordinates on a checkerboard.
22nd Century Nightmare of Holiday Shopping for a Zygote
You drag me past the food court & toy store
with a home teleportation pad display
to a coin-operated dispenser shaped
& modified like a chrome gumball machine
filled with cryogenic hailstones that contain
the future’s all-star mathletes,
corrupt radio hosts, medal-of honor
infantry, black market milk peddlers, and third place
pageant finalists, except right now
they resemble unremarkable baby plankton
without pedigrees or spinal cords.
For a limited time, they’re marked down
to twenty-five cents with a tax
deduction & complimentary Ebola vaccine;
customers uncomfortable with childbirth
can choose from surrogates like the Alaskan
Survivalist & Bay Area Artistic Clairvoyant
for the cost of turbo-speed taco delivery. I faceplant
on a joke comparing DNA to a giftbag
packed with ferrets or an exploding bouquet
of roses & you point to a menu of popular customizations
available before incubation: undisclosed fear
of movie theaters, expert ping-pong player,
early affinity for fireflies, a habit of sneaking out
during thunderstorms to tightrope walk
the city’s powerlines. You feed a coin
into the receptacle, crank the dial, select
Mystery Option B, & my gut freefalls
like an anvil through a chapel, as if the possibility
of this new-fangled embryonic cell
slapped a chokehold around my agency.
I reach for your hand & you hand me your purse
& a frozen orb tornadoes down the chute,
your cupped palms padding the descent
gentle as a paleontologist cradling the last dinosaur egg.
As I study our newest family member,
the casing cracks & you tell me to say hello;
an ill-formed tentacle shooting through the ice
gestures a wave & latches to my wrist.