2 Poems

By Tempest Miller

Visitation

Bonanza hunk in a banana box
looking at star signs from hot, Connie RJ’s Buick.
Diving board flexes, all man evil.
1960s chicken bones fertilised via knife.
1961 dessert walked through room.
Warm Sunday afternoon, stabbing a hole in the garden
of ice and water and leaving home.
Baby – bare-chested – drinks Coke, sucks fries
of their salt.
Meanwhile, off from BBQ, fire burns ammo.
Purple, black-painted fingers, Chile farm.
Brains in pots, hosts are 1960s – dumb dinner.
And then the Polaroids
make him believe, him in Dallas, he could do
it.
Bodybag frizzled, bird-like, in cracked, freaky, white-stained
photo out in the printing shop tomorrow.
Smells of Americana, which hazes the mist – volcano eruption –
over stolen territories with pink hairs.
His name is Bobby but they call him Robert.
Cut to extreme close-up,
cut to extreme close-up of hand.
Coronation Street moving to techno-futurist dream sequence,
and diving board up and down,
up and down
in rigorous alien motion, starved of colour.
Entering Christ’s form,
smell of penial sweat and penial discharge on the Cross
in penance.
A woman-hater, clam swimmer so good he’s nautical.
Foot tagged by LAPD, officer serially commended,
he can’t gauge his new Goblin voice,
new plumpness.
Cruise around, bare feet out of car, and lick decrepitude.
Ever faster on the diving board,
a London phoenix on the diving board.
Dishsoap down the morgue drawers,
policeman coming in and out,
a muddle up wit the autopsies.
Soap opera, Coronation Street.
Bullshit, no love, no love for you just being born.
Dog, canine,
pleb.
Was a spree killing on the knoll.
We call it a rampage for false verisimilitude.
Verisimilitude, the car around the corner and in the next shot,
extreme long-view, telescopic.
Bulb hearts, bulging and illuminated orange.
Bye bye, bye bye bye.
Was a shame, a real fucking shame.
They were real nice college students and
they had to suffer that visitation still conscious.

Marlin

The two fish meet.
Logjam in a Liverpool stream.
Say to each other they’ve got nothing left to talk about.
That rich marlin, covered in crystals, came from the Gulf of Mexico
and gentrified the Crown Estate’s riverbeds
until the fishes shed their gills
in deference to Marlinist opulence.
Collapsing down the waterfall which is three foot high,
the marlin is a determined block of God.
A glistening ticket stub, filled with Abrahamic cum.
The two fish, trashfish, have conspired to kill
the marlin but he evades.
They hypothesize he fell out of a motorway fish truck,
that human exhibitionists travel the country – Albion –
decapitating them for pussies.
They guess he invaded their homes via bad luck.
They were punished, they enjoy suffering.
One day the marlin will die, beating his tail and fin
and beating up water ground – washed up.
They want his neck split open by a discarded apple peeler
rushing over the notches of rapids.
A grasshopper would tear at his splayed throat muscles,
and ash would cover him.
Cigarette ash powdered out by a lesbian,
and you can only smoke by the stream so police
can’t find you in the woodland.
Then the fish will be rewarded,
gratified on a lake of beer.
On rubbing themselves erotically over snapped, windblown boughs.
And shooting out a trail of creamy fisheggs
with fish spunk.
A boy, a nice boy, will scoop them in a boot
and keep them together, in his home.
They will see the household tank, facing out
on a shelf beside books and acne cream and a vacuum
filled with ashes.
Their water will be purified – blue like lobsters un-smelted.
And it will be their tired, post-marlin Keeping up with the Joneses.
In a proto-humankind home.
At first it will be a futurist dream.
The kind scrawled on a beermat, Lon-don, fervent.
But later it will be a microscopic bathtub,
like what they pen orcas or dwarfs in.
A shit bottle of life.
Hurting, unrefined.
Spraying fish piss onto each other.
Of course, in the last, they will crave the marlin instead.
They will ask God for the piss of the ravenous, boyish
marlin instead.

Tempest Miller is a writer from the UK. His work has appeared in Swamp Pink, JAKE, Bruiser, A Thin Slice of Anxiety and Revolution John.