Hell Hounds
"Do not eat anything in the
underworld"
Wherever they had been,
their environment had
treated
them in an unkind
manner,
unless they were accustomed
to
wearing clothes that had
seen
the inside of forest fires,
lakes
of industrial wastes that
could
only be encountered
wading,
knee deep, through
concrete
sewage pipes into
culverts
where stagnant runoff
bred
mutant insects,
plants-resistant
to every known
defoliant,
every toxic killer
spray
currently in use. Surviving
these ordeals had made their
skins
tougher than rawhide:
sunburnt
and cracked where thin coats
of
muscle, sinew, flesh
covered
bone met their clothes that
had stiffened
into something like denim
armor,
layers that glowed in the
dark with
a strange phosphorescent aura
of
other worldliness that made
their
eyes mostly off-white with
pale
shaded liver spotting where
irises
should have been, their black
tongues
flicking broken stubs instead
of teeth,
their breath a visible waste
cloud
as they hissed something
about a
powerful, more than one keg
of beer
thirst, a kind of smile on
the desiccated
strips of skin where their
lips should
have been, their cheeks the
last firewall
of resistance for what burned
inside.
Pond Scum
Where they came
from
pond scum was a
delicacy
to be served as a side
dish
with roadkill, toad
stool
mushrooms and raw
leaves
of rhubarb for a
special
night sitting around before
the brand new black and white
TV stolen from a CVS
store,
eating that old time favorite
dish
of road pizza with melted
pond
scum on top and a
healthy
coating of grated animal
feed
pilfered from a badass guard
dog
with an attitude, “Hell,” he
sd.,
“if animals can eat it and
live
to a ripe old age, so can
we.
We’re all animals
underneath,
aren’t we?” An
argument,
under the circumstances,
that
was so persuasive it was
impossible to
refute.
Evil Twins Separated at
Birth
these two teenage girls
inside
the shotgun house barely
sheltered from the rain, wet,
stringy hair limp about their
heart shaped faces, black
mascara
streaked across their pale,
white cheeks,
full lips sensual even as the
eyes project
totally afraid. Rain smears
the cracked windows at
their
backs, the unpainted,
unadorned
wood, protruding nail
heads
where picture frames once
hung,
mirror glass broken adding
seven
years to lifetimes of bad
luck.
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