NEW FEATHERS ANTHOLOGY
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Photo by Sam Te-Kiefte
We’d Wait in Line All Day Just to Go Upside-Down Again
Bobby Parrott
 

As if the lighting in the room had shifted 
from primitive to orbital, the wine’s bright 
notes make a visual music of her face, 
a flicker of third eye. I always wear a hat
 
so my crown chakra must check with me 
before admitting uninvited universes. But now 
this? And even though the mouth may not 
always see it, a pack of clouds goggles between 
 
two different theaters. As if your voice comes 
from a distant murmuration of starlings
all believing they are you. Please don’t look at me 
like that. I’m radioactive, but still don’t know 
 
for how long. Hydraulic bones, I go pneumatic 
in how I work my saxophone on otherwise mindless 
nights. Like the construction of paradox, my life 
pirouettes on the turn of a screw, waves of idle woo.
 
If I could simply escape this bloodless urge, say 
a more alchemical fondling, a classical meta-virus
of players who spring up, shoulder my coffin 
across the canyon in a dance. How the stage rumbles
 
with cannon fire. Or no, was that four centuries
ago? Doesn’t matter, as long as it rumbles. Because 
here, we oxidize slowly until we’re dead, melt
thru our skins to the next exit, shiny car adverts
 
winking out. See, even evolution never hopes to enter 
this kind of sleep. Vacuum the vertigo of stars. If we 
could only touch the oiled tracks of this godless roller-
coaster, then maybe we’d never be afraid again.
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