High Horse

---

Delft Blue Cherub Ornament, Ebay 2025

---

Biking 

biking the sinkhole’s circumference 

at speeds variable speeds hummed 

into their bones kinetic melodies 

contorting twisting hastening at intervals illegible my children bike around 

the sinkhole’s maw and from my station dangling off this balloon 

blue with the hypnotic approach of corpses yes from my station when the sun 

at noontime positions immaculate above my children’s beloved deficit this 

starlight passes through the deficit’s 

wingspan entire i see through 

to the opposite continent where markets haggard, vicious, maim friends like 

vaporous dogs, the opposite continent 

same as where my children will float 

float into decay 

from this, my balloon

so blue and self-same 

and while they bike the sinkhole’s girth their eyes scour me and while their eyes scour me

Ransacked is the Living Room Where Families are Pursued with Ceaseless Envy by Some Wild Silver Fang 

after Door (1988) 

In the body of some loadbearing post 

mill’s sprung a loose tooth 

where strangers might lurk through  

with terroristic intent 

towards who i don’t know 

When i ask the pond’s face 

silence carpets space and time 

Meadows out back 

get shorn thin by the termites 

their hazel jealousy 

but termites don’t envy any 

body at all 

Instead the termites clamber to pack 

birdchests with 

their own breath 

Predatory birds curl blue 

with untended nails 

like chlamydial knives 

Language shears meadows to graveyards 

while i watch it through my windowsill 

while i watch 

incoming calls decline 

like god’s earthbound palm 

against a diaphanous malady

I Love Fast Cars 

Orphic growl of her accelerator 

rips every american interstate wide 

open, to exhale 

petroleum morning breath like 

somebody else’s deathwish 

Everyone rubbernecks 

to vertigo’s pinnacle 

driving themselves sleepless and in this 

sleeplessness dwells a four 

truck collision in the shape of her mouth 

She paints ten digits on her 

van’s flank 

how speedracers do and when 

lonely sons or lonely daughters 

dial her, orpheus answers 

with harpnotes 

to cut the breaks 

on the revolution of the heavenly spheres 

When the fire department finds us 

smoldering, glittering 

with smolderingglittering plastic splinters 

wafting from our headlights 

the landscape smacks them past hangover 

at once speeding and stuck 

icy, frothing with hunger

Sorry 

supply chains in shrapnel at the breath of a lovebird 

arrives the future 

a slow constriction of the human being 

I hung 

too much 

from a bleeding branch 

now every passing body flickers 

blue with alien light

---

PJ Lombardo is a writer from New Jersey. He co-edits GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry, and he previously worked for Action Books. Read his writing in Community Mausoleum, capgras, Tagvverk, Hobart Pulp, Lana Turner Journal and elsewhere.