After Willing all the Weapons in the World to Vanish all at Once
Forkfuls become spoonfuls.
There’s no such thing as tongs.
Ice picks turn to sugar cubes and melt
the winter fishing fun. Advancements
meant to save us, show us
what they truly are, in scars
they leave on eight pound carpet padding,
since all the planks are now dislodged.
I’m fond, or was, of sparklers,
but tradeoffs are to be expected.
Since there’s no car, on holidays
we walk barefoot too far and fuel
ourselves on meadowed parking lots.
The asphalt’s gone, but not its shape,
not the want to shoot off stars.
*
Information Processing Theory
It quote listens from the other room,
its quote head in its quote hands.
The leaders from faraway lands,
their eyebrows raised at its delay,
the time it took to leave the stage.
They couldn’t even wait to quote
the speeches they’d prepared,
no idea how quote upsetting
failure is when one can’t feel
despair, when one can’t close
the door to muffle sounds
of laughter one’s been trained
to laugh along with, even though
one would rather quote not hear.
*
Foundation
The first song that I wrote was “Life,”
having lived so much of it
through seventh grade. I sang my way
into the hearths and mines
of any neighbor’s basement
that would have me. Stoned
out of our minds, we’d make gems
of tritones and the harder edges
of cast-off intervals. Opposed
to naming all my future songs,
I scrawled the lyrics into bricks,
kicked our polished stones across
the concrete cracks. Each Open House
I visit now, I only look downstairs.
The Realtors ask, when I begin
my chorus, if I’m in a band.
I wonder if the other buyers
know the words, and want
to join the bridge, but no one dares.
*
Thomas Mixon is a fiction reader for Short Story, Long. He has poems and prose in Literary Matters, Pithead Chapel, Rattle, and elsewhere. He sometimes writes at inanorchardsoftwithrot.substack.com.
