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9 Lives and 8 legs

I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say "Love" and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.
            -- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood


I want to be a large empty house slightly scented with bleach. I want   to smell bleach while driving to work. I want to smell bleach when I pull into the garage, flatlined with living, and when I pass out in the yard by the dog, I don't want to smell anything. Birds fly because their bones are hollow. Filled with air, the clean atmosphere they rise into almost unwillingly. Give me the sky, then, in a blue bird's bones, play the note that makes everyone weeping stop and dance, and of course, leave their bodies. Everyone at work is having babies and I'm not even going to tell you what they smell like. Their eyes, huge pools of water waiting to be  plopped.  If  the  ceiling  lights  were  more  beautiful I would say  aim  your  skull at  the ceiling  lights. Wait. Do you know an octopus has three hearts? How beautiful. I unfortunately only have one that isn't working well. 


In My Dreams I'm in a Small Capsule Spinning Free


Imagine the water swerving up into the borrowed car and its undelivered newspapers that fall like honey on our heads. Once a year or so we look at one another and ask, What holds up this solid world? We see the Road Flooded signs every spring but never think they apply to us. Strange carp pulling up onto the street. Hook it and tug like a log. Just in case you are stupid, imagine raindrops in skulls with helium at a party for one dead  idiot. You blow my candles out—or you keep trying to. I bought a purple bathing suit and I'm teaching myself to swim. I practice in the tub when you're asleep, covering the floor in pink bubbles that settle and get away. Oh please bubble get away. Decency, order, safety, strength, sirens, smoke. From a low orbit our reservoirs can be seen to spell out a name. In your dreams it's your name.

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Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015), and his poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2014, and Prairie Schooner.



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Dustin Nightingale lives in West Hartford, Connecticut. His poetry has been or will be published in journals such as new ohio review, Margie, Cimarron Review, Portland Review, and decomP.