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Exquisite Corpse
Issue 8A Journal of Letters and Life

ISSUE 8 HOME || BROKEN NEWS || CRITIQUES || CYBER BAG || EC CHAIR || FICCIONES || THE FOREIGN DESK
GALLERY || LETTERS || POESY || REVIEWS || SERIALS || STAGE & SCREEN
Eight Poems
by R. S. Harding
Author's Links

After the Flood
   
That skank'd nigger done
Went into that tree
And woodn't git down.
J. Jimmie Johnston said
He'd flush him out.
The air smelt of
Rotten mud
And carp.
J. Jimmie humped both barrels
And made a fine lookin' hole
Big enuff to drive Tubby Wilson's
Dodge Super-Bee right
On through.
But damn, the nigger
Woodn't turn loose o' that branch
And he bled, and
It looked like fruit punch
Raining on the ground.
And gawd, we held out
Cupped hands
And it tasted just like
Kool-Aid fruit punch
Yea, it did
And when we went
Home
There was that
Nigger again.
Only now it was dark
And the air smelt
Like a bad cantaloupe
He was standing
On my front porch
With his arm around my wife
And his other arm
Around J. Jimmie's woman
And the sumbitch was
A squeezin' their tits.
They're gone to Egypt
Seven years ago
Me and Jimmie
Are Martians now
 
 

South Carolina Is for Lovers
 
Here's the famous recipe
For that grand old southern dish
Spinal Cord Surprise:
1. Go back to the hotel
With a kid under each arm
And find your wife in bed
With a ball of sticky, overcooked rice
No...No...
The negro that carried your luggage in.
2. Pitch the negro out
(He may become the next Jimi Hendrix).
3. Get the filet knife out of your tackle box
Lay your wife on her stomach
Remove spine
Suck, savor
A one and a two
Tastes like a banana popsicle
Doesn't it?
4. We are 8-Tracks
We are oil.
5. Garnish with lime wedges
And crushed aspirin.
6. Take momma to the cemetery
For a driving lesson.
7. Leave the screen door open.
8. SERVES: (1) small hippy reunion.
 
 
 
Seven Dollars for Popcorn = Fuck You
 
You remember everything
In long division
But science was not
Your ice pick
The soybean field
The black eye
Wedges open your stomach
The map of garlic
A slave of this number
27.
1. The coffee maker is this month's rent.
2. Your mouth fits over a bottle of olive oil.
2a. Pass the plague
 
 
 
 
Stay and Slay  
 
Who brought this Chinese praying mantis
Into the house?
There is no more room
On the grill
For
Unrehearsed vodka crime.
Licked and dicked
A steam shovel
Walks across the bales of hay
(that son-of-a-bitch won't get off my ass)
Tricking the hotel dinosaur
Of an earlier marriage
Horror doesn't shave
In the rain.
Mantis said, My thorax
Is yellow-green
Your wife's head
Is pure sex on a stick
His legs are on my couch
I want to throw gangrene
Out the back window.
At times your lungs remind me
Of a vampire teaching macroeconomics
But there is little time
So many kids to be run over
The crypt of Mexico
Is in the cornbread.
Remember the typewriter
You buried in my skull?
Just try to find
Your next order of shrimp cocktail
From a man whose pants
Are two inches short.
 
 
 
Valentines' Horror

(Love is a Runt) for Toni B. (a Frank Frazetta Oil) and
Sylvia Plath (who 35 years ago this Wednesday stuck her
head in a gas oven--never to know that I would one day
be wearing shoes made by bare-footed Indonesian women)
 
We dress you up
In red-rooted binary
Numbers.
Chug, chug Rory
Lay the bacon
Sinister and slick
Your wife's mouth
Is a Tesla coil
Gnawing children
Like shocked mummies
Splinters of history
Chug, chug
Peroxide Jesus
And Peeps
Just for you.
EPILOGUE:     
We bleed green Cadillacs
The store is open
The rain is morose
The script unwritten
The cat litter pyramid
The dinosaur conspiracy.
I punch you in the stomach
And you spit up
A pogo stick
Get the cornbread
On the rocketship
RIGHT NOW, BABY. (choir: fade out "turn 'em upside downÖ"
 
 
 
 
Elvira Had My Baby
 
You served your brain to me
In a soup terrain
It looked like a whiffle ball
Floating in Worcestershire sauce
(goddamn anchovy pus)
I can see by your terror
That your spine is notched
With insect drums
(She was the fortunate one)
To survive the dumb down
Of pistol logic
And mold.
My wife fries
A yellow liver symphony
A cello blast
From the graveyard of deceit.
She tightens wing nuts
Like a martyr of Mars
The twister game of sin
Mittens made of Rin-Tin-Tin.
This processed meat ballet
Is a lovely noose, uninvited
Grease to the East
Bones boil.
Rattle the triangle
You cattle.
Love is a landfill
Of cancerous tits.
 
 
 
Horror Hop-Yard
 
What's wrong with you?
The punch line is:
At the same time.
There is no frenzy
As calculated
As your asteroid throne.
No wish too deep
In the swamp
Of bleached skeletons
And skin, tight to the wind
Like a hatchling
Of consequence
Your flying saucer breath
Your hydrogen bomb eyes
The wolf tone spittle.
The chemical cemetery.
We forced clinical hate mail
Through your veins
With vicious lotion
A slick scheme
Of forbidden calculus.
Your face is an ashen dream
Of tanna leaves
Pale with cosmic love dope
The corpse is a neighbor
With wicked manner.
 
There are ghost bones
In the forced grass.
The cleavage aroma
Of whiskey and lust
(medium rare)
They wait their turn
(To feel your crush)
You break spines
Into cheap kindling.
The breakfast plate
Has 9 pancakes on it.
 
 
 
This is Your Brain on Mohammaed and JesusÖGot it!
      -Herbert Spencer               
 
Mamie Van Doren is sitting
Under the Golden Apple Tree of the Sun
She says:

Larry Mahoney was flying to the moon.
Huff that toxic carpet, babies
Do not adjust your night monster.
Do not lick the night shadows
The gang's all here.
Thump-thump.
Capek, my lover
Robota, rumba.

Adam Smith bellows:
Bradbury must ride a bicycle
Is that NASA economics?
Walk to Mars
You filthy bastards.
We are dinosaurs
From the black lagoon.

We can't speak Spanish
Or nazism anymore
My big toe was cut off
By a lawnmower.
The living dead got married
And they fornicate like
Carbon paper
It's another Catholic gang-bang.
(Eat this meat wrapped in meat).

My father died
And I took off
My neck tie.
There is a dead body in my soup
Humpin' in Korea
We dream of the great tattooed tit
Of Venus.

Sorry, we don't have time
To squeeze yer ass.
Quartermass is brewing tea
From the long bean
And we sing:

Thank you Shirley Jackson
And James Tiptree, Jr.
Rhonda Penmark still strokes
The hard cock of democracy.
Sammy Terry and Bobby the Brain
Preach a strawberry statement.

The orchestra grows tired
Andy Offut picks
Off my wife
Sniper from the south
Wooden shoes choke
The Machine.

You know I sucked
Cigars on Halloween
And Mary Shelly
Gave me an opium bath.
You smell like cat litter
Or Jesus
I can't tell which.
Get up off your lazy asses
Protestants!
It's already past noon
And Star Trek VI
Is already on.

Your teeth are just golf balls

In the Jurassic pecking order.


ISSUE 8 HOME || BROKEN NEWS || CRITIQUES || CYBER BAG || EC CHAIR || FICCIONES || THE FOREIGN DESK
GALLERY || LETTERS || POESY || REVIEWS || SERIALS || STAGE & SCREEN
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