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.
High Horse 