Patrick Culliton

 from My Book Report on the Afterlife ​

I.
When it set in, MoMo said
it’s humid as dicks on turkey day.

Tony Pepperoni said through the grapes I taste
lightning. Turn your bikes upside down. Run.

May we all snap like sausages done right.
May emergency broadcasts interrupt Aerosmith

forevermore. Show me one flashlight
that isn’t fumbled for. File into the hall,

fall on your knees, cover your head.
Now is a good time to imagine peanut butter,

the creaming of your house.

II.
I’m no flat top. 7-Up and coal
bricks don’t move my grease.

I’ve got batteries charging inside
and when they’re ready angular

70s jams will crawl over the porch
like carpenter ants on amphetamines

infesting the neighbors’ watercolors by number.
I live outdoors, people,

raised on tent stakes and ground chuck.
This barbecue looks like a coffin because it is.

What are you so bonesad about?
This is what we do when it’s light.

Then we ride dirt bikes
through the mossiest part of the woods.

If someone wipes out the party swells
to epic. The old man does the goose dance. 

III.
Guess your pitching speed at the church
carnival, win a two liter.

All my clairvoyant friends have diabetes,
listening to the Indians fall in an alarm

clock radio, and nobody brings perch
home for months. Boats

rotting on trailers, lonesome
batter calling out to grease.

Our lake was tasered while we slept.
This up-ticks my brother’s blood pressure.

He makes a basement of his house
and one of his head at the office.

I want to buy us two nice bikes
and start a lawn cutting business.

He looks like paper
without a match held up to it.


 

--
Patrick Culliton is a small blue sock from Ohio. His chapbook, Hornet Homily, is available from Octopus Books.