Sometimes it was important to me

Sometimes it was important to me for no one to know where I was. Big burger solves most everything when the things are burger-solvable. Why he had quit the nicer job at the intrinsic field generator was anybody’s guess. Frequent trips to the bathroom? See Spot assemble progressively more complicated IKEA furniture. Researchers are working on a sentence that goes outside-in. And stop using ‘he’ when you mean ‘I’, people want to hear things from the source-center of it all. The silver disc hovers close by, so you can hear it humming delicious. Like this? Of the suffixes, -latry is most underrated. It must feel incredible to say ‘attack formation’ just before an attack. The yellow-orange beetles figured how to jack into the mainframe and since then it’s all been in pieces. Every time his mother called him ‘gifted’, Ryan would take a small stone and say ‘That’s another soul damned, unfortunately.’ Beavers represent a net-negative in universal entropy but this is not the universe of Total Beaver Victory. What size was the Cherry Supreme? Yes. Ohohoh, Mr. First-among-equals over here. Go bet on somebody your own size and I’ll stick to the featherweights thank you. Ursula used to turn blue when the sunlight hit her just so. Crying was no use when he got around to being there. Goal! Phantom-riddled desert just hankering for that cool blue Cola-Cola. Do you take this man to be your sentimental locus? If you listen closely, you can hear the sooner-than-later flying past. He packed a picnic of oysters and sprouts. I don’t.

Slow Dance Eulogies

And now
I’ve equated
absence
with distance.

[The trees
are heavy
with zeroes.]

Enough
is enough

[The child
has pissed
in the tub.]

Gargle
remains
an evil word.

[We take off
our shoes
in the dark.]

All day
we’ve been sad
in the garden.

[Tell Molly
I’ve discovered
a number.]

Old,
we grow awkward
and obsessed.

[This place
reserved
for the distance.]

Joy
and the stuck
gears
of joy.

[If I told you
of the sorrow
it would matter
very much.]

Tony DiCarlo (he/him) is a poet and translator from Northern California, currently residing in Wellington, New Zealand. His work has appeared previously in Capgras, Sweet Mammalian, and HAD, among others. Non-poetry aspirations include writing an essay called ‘Warcraft 3 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace’ and eating a lot of KC Cafe.