mckernan

John McKernan

Nude Egg

Fayetteville Arkansas    Highway 71             North   Midnight walk past the water tower with its Christmas light crown of thorns    Wind clicking             bulbs to a steady beat   A blue one’s faulty connect sparks orange             then blue    Far off the Bee Gees new Boy Scout Handbook on staying alive hisses             in red bread truck exhaust How did I get seven mosquito bites             – Spider bites? – on my neck & skull? A bakery window full of old wedding cakes             At the party tonight someone kept talking about No Exit             The drunk dwarf claimed he’d memorized all of Howl    Side roads no wider             than a bike path slide to thread lifting a slow almost soundless             hallucination   It is great pleasure to stand upright after grape vodka             A motorcycle in rain glides by in transparent film    Its shadow             a form of ballet      Musical notes in orange spray paint fill the back side             of the Cheetos billboard Pink shirts and blue jeans drying on a clothes line             guarded by a sleeping Doberman Last night was quieter    On this same walk             I saw a nude girl hitchhiking toward Rogers    Her thumb bright             in purple Taco Bell neon    I didn’t have a car so I             was mute as a pebble When the egg-truck driver hit the brakes             a tire squeal fishtailed in a cloud of pink light    Followed by a kind             of an inside-out silence approaching the slow curve of thousands             of broken egg shells   Not one in the shape of a star     What’s a sea gull doing in                          this church parking lot?

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