Slowly, Slowly Now

Somewhere between biscuit mix
and superglue. Brain-spackle

vacuumed from the ceiling
with industrial strength.

A kinked hose is my kink.
Building pressure until pop

like in that one movie—Scanners.
Normalizing aneurysm porn.

Venn diagrams of middlemen
jerking themselves into existence

like a creationist’s concept
of the last Big Bang.

A bunch of goddamn liars
sitting around a campfire

around a dumpsterfire at the
local bookburning. They scream

“Turn the brain off halfway.
Keep breathing and heart,

listen for the laughtrack,
watch for the pratfall only.”

A dripping faucet just needs
a little righty-tighty—like us all.

Cantilevered

We stacked lead balloons beside ballasts

leaning over the port side like a drunk.

“Radiation is eventually the death of us all”
she proclaimed from the plank.                                 They’re all
planks                         pinned in place by gravity’s pinky.

No time for dirigibles,             no other way to loft ourselves at the Milky Way
screaming dreams like pulsar blasts.
                       Cells, as cats, create
            myths of ennea-lives through regeneration.

She calls it me her lizard-brain-and-body.

I nominate her counter-weight—
                                                balance.

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer, and photographer living in San Diego. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in The Collidescope, Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Atlanta Review, Texas Review, and many others. He publishes the writing blog Notebooking Daily, edits the journal Coastal Shelf, and recommends literary journals at TheSubmissionWizard.com.