bones

I'm off limits today. There's a rowdy game of Monopoly going on in our dining room and I'm sitting here in clean clothes, with a band-aid on my finger, having a meal of cheerios and beer and I am not to be disturbed.

unfit

I blew my first smoke rings tonight, and there was a big, hairy spider in my room, but I calmly trapped it and dumped it into the bushes outside.

THE LONELY MAN PLANS A PICNIC

He wears his invitations on his sleeve,
imagining the landscape
partly undressed, the sky entirely
nude. Remembers the orchard on the late show
where brandy sojourned in a basket:
poppies, plums, the blushing skin
of music. Clotted sweets, and swans half-
buried under tossed bread. Ah, lunchtime,
glands!

Festival morning dawns the color of brine.
By noon, the erected tent looms a maw.
He wanders drunk through arriving guests, prisoner
in a maze of acrobats, a man in an amethyst
panic. All his graces
reduced to a primal quiver, like
what happens to the larynx on the dance floor.
The sky goes licorice, thunder lunges
over the meadowflowers. Already, parasols
and organdy skirts cut crosslots home.

In the pavilion, the headwaiter waits
forever in tatters. A lattice of
melancholy guests, old maids with throats
psalmed shut, fossil tongues taking food
from strangers. A cruel waste of grapes,
he thinks, looking for an out. Lover's
Leap's been blasted for the freeway.

-Sarah Provost