A few more couplets

Breaking the crusty eyed, 4-inch dust blanket bullcrap hiatus haters is inelegant at best.  Still, where there's work to be done, it doesn't due for a working man to let it lie.


She had a quick trigger and sizzling Szechuan thighs.

She had a waist to end a war and turned my brain into a bucket of lard.

She had liquid eyes and a laugh that'd melt butter.

Her words trickled down my ears like otters down streams, and drenched my mind in a surprise waterfall.

She sliced the room in half with her walk and that ass made my heart stop for 3 minutes.

She wears that dress like a leopard in fur and makes men mice.

He made Biggie Smalls look like a toll booth operator and only drank milk with his cookies.

He wrote on the wall until his writing covered the wall and then bit his fifth pen in half.

His fist made the oak desk quake and his voice bit like Arctic ice.

She smelled like hot sunshine and ate with her fork backwards.



With humble mutterings,

Millicent "Bennie" Benjamin

27 Boxes in 15 Minutes

Wistful whisky walking briskly
Tumbling warmth, a welling of my youth
Dwell in my chest, tell me truth:

You are sparse, placid, I'm drunk
At home in my chair.  I can feel your dress,
See it from here, rip it with my teeth
I'll draw Orion on your knee
You'll tell me to guess about that scar.
If only I had a memento
So tactile and bright with life
But I only grasped your hand
Clasped, more like, a fingerprint powwow
No long council, such as our hairs might have
Brown and brown, wiry and flaxen
And while you slept, I'd weave a great knot
Knitting me to you, yours to mine
So tangled it would be, so utterly dense
An elemental nonfiction
With filamental connections
To keep me next to you, sugar

The Alphabet, Part III

Things are getting hairy.  No, not down there, I hit puberty months ago.  I mean the Sasquatch I am tracking.  There are no Sasquatch on the Internet, and that is scary to me.  When absurd loses its meaning we are all Shelley's rowboat: no current current.

I.

I'll intuit a while - itching for inklings -

Sitting high on a pile of Inuit tile

Smile. I think things, I think.

J.

Joyous Hajj just south of Jersey

To abject jub-drowned jurisdiction

Jingoes judged by jilted juries

K.

Jack a whole stack of darkened 8-tracks,

For a lark in the park putting smack into sacks

Crystalline cracks lack the tact of your act

Because even when you are too good for structure, environment and assholes' opinions, you still need all of those things to express the original thought.

- Bullfrog Kauffman

The Alphabet, Part II

After E, the alphabet gets decidedly less friendly.  Consonants come out of the fucking woodwork and you'd better hope you have more than a quarter tank left when you are cruising toward its buxom midsection.

F.

Rough Kerfuffle over a tufted truffle

Enough in the duffle for a fortnight's tussle;

Suss out the fluff before the five-card shuffle!

G.

"Grand Canyon," grinned the gray Cayman.

"A great gallumphing gorge, edged by stodgy green grass,

With ledges as high as the glassy night sky."

H.

Breathy whorls huffed by homestead ranch hands

While threading husks through stretchy, itch-proof conch strands

A shy, overshorn mensch to watch the ashy badlands.

Hellbent on flooding your basement marketplace with everything short of tyranny.

-- Severino the Younger

Free! Free as the wind blows.

Maybe the wind isn't really that free.  Like, he's still a landed gent and all, just without the extreme level of wherewithal (financial or otherwise) that the song indicates.  Like maybe he balls out with frequency, but his ex says the baby is his (!) and is there anything less free than having to surrender DNA to some quack?  So he forks over a few hundred each month to keep that fair-haired hussy off his case.

Plus, he works in finance, so his sooted soul is currently chained to the bottom of the devil's grundle for t-minus eternity.

So yeah, not that free.

- Scott Philippa

The Alphabet, Part I

The alphabet begins at A and continues, jostling along until it wraps up right around Z.

A.  

An Ayatollah named Amanda Ammaker 

Amasses armfuls of almonds almost arbitrarily

B.

Bespoken for, broken, brittle, emboldened

Holding a whole fold of old mold and bourbon

In turbans, in the urban hub of Durban

C.

Coco clodhop, clean a crusty cop's clock

A crackling crock of thoracic slop

Chippy crap shot chop shop

D.

Dark and dandered dewdrops

Drip drowsily toward your end

Dopplegangers thud out drenched sound

E.

All around and everywhere

Effervescent elderwine

Venerate the velvet line:

Helvetica, by svelt design

A hop, dip and a set.

- Marmalade Ruiz

One in my hand is better than a pear in your bush

We sincerely hope that the frock-tossing, bewhiskered reader enjoys the title.  Also, we think we're going to stick with this totally radical new font, skraight drippin serif all over da place.


It's time for some couplets.  They are long couplets, which you might enjoy even more than short ones.

He had a stare like a blast furnace and

Wrapped himself in a bearskin of silence

He had twin pythons for forearms and

Wore a jacket because it made his mother happy

His footfalls like the final turn at Pimlico

We watched that bundle-of-crows hair try to keep up

His heaving chest was a bison among goats

But he preened like a kitten

He had a handshake like a warm bed and

Laughed because laughing felt funny

His face was graven as though by ancient tides but

His leather boots shone fresh as a calf at the udder

He had a back like the base of a redwood and

Broke rocks when he kicked em

She had haunches like a fleeing doe

And a stare like candied steel

His knees creaked like an old house in a storm

But his trunk was a mule and an ox

And because any structure is originally established with a view to its eventual downfall:

He was coiffed like a Hapsburg prince but

Couldn't lash two clauses together if you gave him

80 feet of spider silk and a long weekend

You've all been so lovely.  A river there chief (say it fast).

- Alvaro Jefferson