Licking the Saltless Beach
A car alarm, your breathing, and the tide
walk into a bar. Then they walk out
of the bar, and then they walk back in
again, a big neon sign blinking the entire
time. Erasing an erasable pen won’t help
you if you’re allergic to it, although it might
help the pigs, tired as they were of circling
every answer on their standardized tests
and after a few months being sent thick envelopes with RESULTS written on
them which, once opened, revealed
a single daffodil pressed in a diploma.
Next to the car whose alarm is going off
is a whole dark alley of shopping carts,
ready to be rearranged into a giant ouro-
boros you could use to summon a succ-
ubus to go shopping with you, to squeeze
each of the avocados in order to see
which ones are ripe. Once you’ve found
enough and carved them up, you can hold
the seeds up in the air with one hand and
say, however ungrammatically, “This is
the pits,” and the sighs will go on for miles.
walk into a bar. Then they walk out
of the bar, and then they walk back in
again, a big neon sign blinking the entire
time. Erasing an erasable pen won’t help
you if you’re allergic to it, although it might
help the pigs, tired as they were of circling
every answer on their standardized tests
and after a few months being sent thick envelopes with RESULTS written on
them which, once opened, revealed
a single daffodil pressed in a diploma.
Next to the car whose alarm is going off
is a whole dark alley of shopping carts,
ready to be rearranged into a giant ouro-
boros you could use to summon a succ-
ubus to go shopping with you, to squeeze
each of the avocados in order to see
which ones are ripe. Once you’ve found
enough and carved them up, you can hold
the seeds up in the air with one hand and
say, however ungrammatically, “This is
the pits,” and the sighs will go on for miles.
Tom Snarsky is getting married soon.