Breadcrumb #49

KATIE LEWINGTON

I.

why do people talk about the walk of shame
walk of shame?                     

I aim my foot and boot him up the bum
pushing him further away
                            off of the bed

dawn, the orange juice stain
splattered on the window
blaring like a siren
coming through the curtains

with lipstick kisses stamped on his cheeks, stubbled chin and clawed back
pulling on joggers
he slips on sandals

<those are mine!>

he sets off to face —
                    the gallows
chop it off!
the neighbors, I mean to face the neighbors

to walk the walk
                  to the corner shop,
                       bacon and eggs

I need breakfast before I leave here.

II.

they aren’t mine, nor yours
or the other woman’s, nor the traffic wardens

stray hairs drift
                   attach to coat sleeves
                                   tight knees

pick them off,
                   let them drop
                   like stray leaves

walk through them, over them
not wonder which tree
                             they came from

where do they belong

will their journey end

is there a stray hair heaven
                                         somewhere 

III.

fucked up lips, swollen gummy
flesh rocky scabby tight tender
stitching 

don’t pick, they scar 

these noxious sores
of evil glee and loathing 

5 days a tube of cream
a wrecked pen caused by piercing the silver foil

no clear sky yet, cloudy, wet
I remain unkissable
               unapproachable
a leper

a dotted decoration
fucked up shrinking lips
wrinkled, creased
adornments
like a president in ambition
                    handing out a
                              very weak
                              manifesto
to the people 

these cold sores so powerful 

• • •

Breadcrumb #48

ROBIN WYATT DUNN

Every corpse I ever loved I found in Bethlehem, down below the darker
tragedies of life is the eternal balm of death, and its milder
horrors, of decay.

Each skull I rap my knuckles on brings luck; each skeletal shield,
helm and sword I've made from the charnel is lucky. I am the luckiest
of men. In my basement. In my saddle. In my village. In my nation.

In my nation all men are equal; the women more so. In my nation we
await death as eagerly as children await ice cream — which is to say,
not at all. We shove it into our mouths.

I eat death with heartache, with resolution, and with force. I eat
death, my balls tucked handily into my trousers, ready to spill out
when the party finally begins, when the dead finally rise, when God
finally shouts us to our feet.

But I know the dead are always rising. And I know God is always
shouting us to our feet. Every morning. Sometimes at night. Or even
crepuscularly.

Crepuscularly I await meaning on the edge of my bone-sword, the same
way Napoleon awaits the moving of the spark to the fuse to the anus of
the cannon.

Like him, I am short, and angry. Like him, I long for death, and the
murders which precede it. Like him, I dream of Corsica like one might
dream of a river, eternal, running under the wood and the stone and
the earth, and running over it too, like it runs over my heart, and my
balls, fluvial love eternal, a river bigger than death, is the one I
dream of. Even when awake I dream of it, when I pop my head out of the
nuclear shelter, to threaten the tourists.

• • •

Breadcrumb #47

RUSS BICKERSTAFF

From all outward appearances, it was the classic image of a kite. It looked exactly like one might expect a kite to look. It was the perfect diamond shape. There was a long tail flowing behind it in the sky it found to inhabit. Perhaps that’s why everyone was looking at it the way everyone was looking at it. Or maybe it was the fact that it was floating along high in the sky untethered to any line. Maybe that was it. Or maybe not.

Somewhere through some strange alchemy between the wind and the lift and the golden light of the moment, the kite had started to think in the way most people assume that kites don’t.

     Certainly no one watching could have guessed why it was worth watching. None of them knew that the kite was self-aware. None of them knew that the kite was thinking to itself at that moment. (How could they?) Somewhere through some strange alchemy between the wind and the lift and the golden light of the moment, the kite had started to think in the way most people assume that kites don’t. No one on the ground knew this about the kite. As strangely fantastic as the moment was, there was no one there to observe how truly strange it was, as no one present could read the mind of a kite from this distance. There were a few there who, unbeknownst to themselves, could read the mind of a kite, but only when they were close enough to it to be able to do so. This kite was out of range as all kites with any kind of consciousness are.

     Of course, the kite didn’t exactly know that the people who were watching it were thinking either, so it was just as oblivious to the real miracle of the moment as anyone else. Just like those who could have theoretically read the mind of the kite, the kite could have read the mind of anyone there once it had lifted itself to consciousness. By the time it had gained enough lift to find the right perspective for psychic kite activity, however, it was well out of range of its ability to read anyone else’s mind.

     This sort of thing is happening all the time. We are always encountering things which gain consciousness and the ability to communicate directly without minds. We always end up just out of reach of real connection and communication, though. Sometime’s you’ll get an idea and know that it isn’t yours. It’ll be the distant whisper of something inanimate realizing it can think and then realizing it has something important to communicate to you, but getting far too far away to manage anything more than a vague thought. You might think the thought might be yours but you know it’s not. 

     The kite knew it was in a strange position flying along without a tether, but it didn’t know that the lack of tether was the reason why it was in a strange predicament. It had no other kites in its immediate surrounding to attempt to model itself after, so it thought of the tether it originally had as something of an umbilical structure. It figured that it had probably needed to gestate a bit as a pre-kite before it could surface into the clouds to go off and live the kind of life that kites live once they’ve found their way off of land once and for all.

     The kite met up with a few clouds in the golden twilight as a cool breeze gusted into it, coaxing it along toward the future and all that it held. 

• • •

Breadcrumb #46

GERARD SARNAT

After four decades getting introduced as Dr. Sarnat’s boy,
some pleasure couldn’t be avoided when behind a door hidden
behind a false bookshelf, I heard my solipsistic dick of a dad
referred to as Dr. Sarnat’s father while a secretary shows him around.

Off stride not buried in the turned-out guise of academic research,
perched near my custom-made wormwood bookcase,
slithering through his own distinguished first editions,
after what feels to me like interminable general anesthesia;

Poppy’s SB, MD, MS, DDS & FACS pedigreed eyeballs
reluctantly bob up to puzzle past a futuristic titanium desk
(where I sat) through the one hundred eighty degrees
of picture window Golden Gate wraparound panorama.

Dad’s inner plastic surgeon’s once spellbinding billowy lips
(reconstructed with collagen by a junior partner) now leak
spleen & bile as if from a ruptured gallbladder while squirming
an unpremeditated simplicity: “ Do you diddling do-nothing careerist

internists take these luxe CEO gigs just for the dough — or what, Son?
Observing dueling antiseptic incivilities regressed/unsheathed,
my senior staff dissolve in jellied anxiety. Afterwards they confide
l took Papa’s veiled peace offering like an open rusty switchblade.    

• • •