Nix explains to Miss Anaphora his early affinity for the Contagious Radio
I liked the trashy
Death Metal guitars
tripping over themselves
on the late night shows.
They were a comfort
when you stepped out
with the hall monitor
and his sash of enraged
asterisks. The slag
blackened the speakers
as I drank my pixilated
liquid, carefully hoarding
my one obscenity,
whispering to my mirror image,
Don’t you fucking misspell me.
The Reader’s underground economy
is a gift shop concealed
in a humid grotto, glittering
pointlessly like the mist
spritzed on vegetables.
In the corner, a loop of squid-like,
soft-core porn blithers away
on pay TV, postulating
impossible endearments.
No one’s supposed to be able to carry
anything out of the fictional
landscape, yet here are the mock objects
in their display cases:
the diode that was once
hidden in the weave
of Auden’s tweed, a flourish
of menthol signed
by Chekov’s breath. But the rumpled bed
in the back room contains
the trophy prize: a sheet
with a Rorshach blot that no one ever
complains about having to sleep in.
Above the notched
headboard, the tautological
legend of the Reader’s
manifesto: The beloved other
is not an educated mime.
The Author addresses The Reader
It helps If you imagine me As a clerk at an inconvenient store
Munching Little Doesn’ts Watching you through closed-circuit TV
Outside there are Zombies Or pterodactyls
Maybe dust storms That make us into Denizens of silent movies
Or Victorian protagonists With fabulously complicated coughs
Something has gone wrong In a large, narrative way
And we’re barricaded behind Racks of swollen potato chips
You have a dollar thirty-five
And I’m flanked By the pastel anesthesia Of Bollywood movies
But someone’s dead In the storeroom
And the trapdoor to the sewers Won’t hold out Much longer
The story is coming
Our gazes stray to it As it shakes from the pounding below
-- Simeon Berry lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. Recent work appears in Sentence, Salt Hill, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Pleiades, Western Humanities Review, and Blackbird.