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.