by Maureen Kingston

after the housing crisis, a badly shingled life

collapsed hives : collapsed lives : a cottage industry of pre-retirees : a fragile swing set : their endless road dead-ended : upended at 45 : at 50 : no longer Kerouac-cool to sleep in a friend’s barn he says  : bowing his head : his story a crushed compass : the punctured wineskin of a failed quest : his house deed : his bonds : sold off : blight-bundled by an invisible hand : start again I say : napalm your nightmares : don’t let the bastards win : & as we laugh I see trace flames rise from his vortex : a momentary flicker : lava red & blue : a last gasp of anger : before yellow silence engulfs him : before he’s absorbed : once & for all : by the bruise

over his cabeza on the industrial farm

she begs the crew to climb faster / to use their jaguar jaws / to shred

the corn bin’s flesh with their circular saws

the quest / one of childhood’s first tests / how long can he hold his breath

the rescuers know / hope for the rare pocket of air

will he be the lucky one / to strike the piñata’s sweet spot / to ascend

the corn ziggurat in a single bound

any god’s party favor would do / would serve to undo the negative siphon /

the silence of the balloon sucked backwards

the searchers

what’s olde is nouvelle again / heirloom tomatoes & heritage hens / the latest fads in corner shoppes / in roving food carts / hachure lines of upright parasites swirl in exotic sauce / marinara & mole / connect stomachs present to farms past / ingredients out of tense the foodie’s mantra / his rupturing creed / only the sweating globe protests / burps / undigests / there’s always one / a finger-wagger in every crowd

hair of the dog & hairworms / hindgut outlaws frozen for eons / are roused to life by some tanglefoot’s clumsy drop / by an ice core’s tuna melt / which is all it takes for the badass worms to jailbreak / to mosey into town / fatten themselves at ye olde shoppe / the hash house / take center stage at the wild west show

a fine performance too / we laugh when the squirming pistoleros play survival of the fittest with the vegan cowpokes / when they ride bareback through Oakley Annie’s alimentary corral / when they inflatulate the rodeo clowns / a roaring spectacle / until they gut-shoot the lot of us / chain-gang our retching forms to a flatbed float / parade us down the main drag / our dry-heaves trumpeting regime change / proclaiming a new civilization in town

saturday night welder

my husband belongs to the torch song society : dedicated to melding gloom : to bolstering every weak-kneed Gus who walks through the door : So, set ’em up, Joe : his voice scratches : a forgettable match strike : a galaxy skip from Sinatra smooth : from Etta’s tingling At last : day in : day out : he juggles divorced parts : solders one thing to another : his alloy-melt plying : coaxing reunion : on weekends too the same work : his voice sinking into us : (his audience fiends) : becoming the shot we need it to be: a night fix : a night of fix : for our sake he takes the spotlight’s body blows : the mic’s red-hot jabs : defiantly asks the lightning gods : Is that all there is to a fire?

Maureen Kingston’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, Beechwood Review, B O D Y, Gargoyle, Gravel, Gone Lawn, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Misfitmagazine.net, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, The Screaming Sheep, So to Speak, Stoneboat, Terrain.org and Yellow Chair Review. A few of her pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.