The Mayans Can Eat A Dick Poetry Series featuring: April Michelle Bratten

My Landlord and the Devil


My landlord looms over the phone-line
like a Shakespearean villain.

As he cackles into my ear,
I imagine he drinks from a jeweled chalice,
and summers in Ibizia where the waters are warm.

He demands more money
from my already depleted bank account.

I'm sorry, I tell him, I am sorry.

I would probably apologize to George W. himself.

Now, with minus signs all around me
and the breath of history growling down my back,
I take to the winter highway.

The devil follows behind me in a pink Winnebago,
tweaking his 'stache and dialing up whores.

He glides over the ice like a pro.

I enter my work building with the swollen body
of a woman who once knew better.

My bra strings barely adjust.

The sun cracks overhead and births a foul moon.
A rare thumping vibrates the room.

I rumble the floors as I maneuver my heavy body
to the window and peek out.

The devil and my landlord lounge on the hood
of the pink Winnebago,
sharing a joint and cranking Metallica.

I wave to them with the naivety of a baby.


Intimacy

In my dream
a zombie tried to have sex with me
on the kitchen floor.

It was all teeth,
crumbs,
rotting limbs,
awkwardness,
and piles of useless flesh.

I woke to find not much had changed
since I went to bed.

The shit still falls from the sky even in reality,
even in the day light.

The afternoon unloads itself
like a horny teenager
deep
into the crevices and holes of my backyard.

The sun is unimportant,
insignificant.

I still walk the rooms like a coward,
a dead person,

sniffing out the meat.

Your organs only become intimate,
useful,

when they sever and separate
from the body.

Happy Joe

I was a mixture of cracked yellow brick
and severed limbs,
paint and crashed fences, femur and scapula,

raw meat.
We would take to the floor of abandoned apartment buildings,
touch hair, and play
with bottles of glue and motor oil,
beer cans and salt water.

I was 19.

I knew everything about vodka and the shoulders of boys.

You liked that.

The first time you came on my tits
your eyes parted like blue birds
leaving the ground.

Tell me what you want.
Your balls pressed my thigh.

I wanted more.

The snow fell in the trees like hammers,
waiting to ice us down.

Now you are married.
Now you go hunting and play with your dogs.

I bet your hands are still the same.

I bet you taste exactly the same.