He Feels Honored by Love and Devotion

The president waits for the mayor. When the mayor goes to sleep. The president crawls out, like a toenail. From under the mayor’s bed with teeth and muscle and numbers. The president shoots the mayor with a polaroid camera. And the mayor’s new bride limp next to him. The president promises three hundred million dollars. The blanket is so thin. But would stop the mayor. From guarding his eyes. With his fingers. Next to him, she whispers an uhn. As she stretches her belly out. The mayor dreams he wakes up, and is prepared. The president tucks the photo under the stepdaughter’s pillow. The mayor cannot cannot cannot imagine a number that big: Three Hundred Million Ones. In fields of rows and columns, like toes. And not be terrified.

This Is a Special Time, Let’s Remember It

for Joel Amram Brock

“As I cut the ribbon,” the mayor intones, “for our prestigious basketball arena—” But the basketball players aren’t listening to him. They’re watching him. They watch his smile mean something else than what smiles mean. They watch his suit mean exactly what their suits don’t. They look at his house and then they look at their own houses: mayors’ houses and basketball players’ houses do not mean the same thing. “What if,” the basketball players interrupt, after consideration, “What if we put holes in our walls? To pee into tubes? That go into a funnel that ends on your roof?” “That, uh” the mayor replies, “would be very disrespectful?” “Yes,” agree the basketball players, with a new smile, looking like something else entirely in their basketball player suits.

Paintings of the Famous Assassin

Kelly makes me do the dirty work. I strangle something in front of her. She says it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s. Kelly paints her pictures and watches my linear movement through time. Her pictures are pictures of my linear movement through time. And about a time too long in a single thought. She says it’s predictable. Kelly has a nasty stutter. Then her words happen all at once and our flat fills up with red paint pretending to be blood. It’s pig blood, Kelly says, but it’s real blood.

Donald Dunbar’s work has recently appeared in DIAGRAM, alice blue review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Some of his poems are forthcoming from GlitterPony, sawbuck, and The Madison Review.

POETRY