​Simeon Berry

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.