David M. Buhajla-

A Brief Understanding of What it Means to be Lucid

Fourteen feet under the rocky overhang, 

a man holds a fistful of pine needles.

The tattooed pistoleer wonders if the

grapes under the tarmac provide enough

bounce in the forests of Azerbaijan. The coolie

responds and smirks, the emerald in his forehead growing

to massive and incongruent proportions.

It's all proportion. Especially when six-fingered

ladies smack their sweaty ham-hands onto their thighs

in front of a standing ovation at the Orpheum. The

Georgians don't like it. But, the helmet-clad

spirits wish that they had the fruit that fell from the

tired old Joshua tree. That’s what they think.

Chalk one up to the misanthropes, and plead to the masters

and misers that control the radio waves that

vomit forth from the pulsar. It's all proportion.

Take the shiny blade that the kids want from the

catalogue, because there’s numbers to be had,

hidden in the hidden angles. Believe what the antennas

give to the people when their faces grow hair and their hair

grows faces. Make it and break the “it” that it controls.

Play the woodchuck song, Frank. The sun went nova.

Nothing left but proportions.

Bitter Yolk of an Angry Moon

Mundane, a pugilist lashes out

at a bitter protagonist,

confident in his swelling

pride and swelling face.

Three old men watch on. Their

gray skin hangs in folds

as they cackle and clap.

A drop of blood hits the middle man.

A sainted hunter pokes

the yolk of his egg, which seeps

like a septic wound. The blue

Montana sky behind him laughs

at his wardrobe of hair shirt and jeans.

In the distance, a coyote waits and dreams.

I sit and watch as the clown mocks my sight. His

one blind eye reveals a twinkle under its

filmy membrane. He yanks out the offending

orb, offering it to me as sacrament. I feast.

A child squeezes his favorite hamster

until it stops twitching. In the living room,

his mother lays silent and blue.

A general breakdown begins as the moon

goes dark and madmen shoot each other

across the dunes, sick from ocular wafer

hallucinations.

The disjunction of upper lobes

and membranes make a final resting

place at the old stone wall that crumbles

under the hanging prisoner.

It’s a bitter and frank discussion as I

speak to my internal minions that twitch

and breathe inside me. You call them

tapeworms but I call them brothers as

we revel in our symbiosis. 

Mary Perkins and Lester Holt Visited the Wallace Residence Thursday Night

      

A work boot with a tuft

of pink insulation clinging

onto the end of a brown

and tattered shoelace sits on

a worn wooden step in front

of a burning trailer house.

Cicadas buzz as a shadow moves

across the hot and broken

glass that rests and winks

on the sun-baked ground.

David M. Buhajla is a writer and poet living in Arkansas with his wife Marci and his daughter Maya. His work is available in Counterexample Poetics, Sex and Murder, Danse Macabre, Rose and Thorn Journal, The Gloaming Magazine, The Horror Zine, Death Head Grin, The Very Good Bad Comedy Show and the “Winter Canons” anthology from Midwest Literary Magazine.