April’s Pressure Cooker
The ice has melted
into sidewalk slush,
all the more slippery
to break you with
all the dead animals
on the walk to work
where daily you die
monitoring a monitor,
eyeballs on eyeballs
until it’s goo-goo-goo
all the way to a raise
fit more for moon-walkers,
crab-walkers, reverse
social climbers. Flesh
melts too, but at higher
temperatures, pressure
builds in the workplace,
brainspace. Claimants as
we are to destiny, effort
still sweats toward fortune.
Towering Above the Pond Biome
Frogs hop like droplets
on a blistering frying pan
and burn with their croaking
the sleep of the boy next door,
a seared sound of demise
which haunts him frequently.
Rain falls, people too. Gods
are rare—if it’s said they don’t
exist with a loud enough chorus
it might be impossible to ignore
the roar. To be a toad sounds less
important, more comfortable. No croak,
no jokes to distinguish from koans.
Every slumber has specters lurking.
Yellow Brick Road to Nowhere
It carries on streams of air or water
manifolds of space trailing planets,
blasting fire, steam, manna, stars
like farting in a big empty room
cosmic voids edged by sulfur-scented
space, superheated plasma, loneliness
under time and pressure for company
whether a building or whatever being
inhabits the alley between failing
and failed. The pavemented bottom
is cashmere after stressing the fall
all that long. Empty sky a dirty puddle,
its rainbow an oil slick, exhaust fumes
a turbulent tornado undulating Oz.
The Sun King
When the walls stop melting and
air raid sirens cease their racket
is when I wake to breakfast in bed.
Care is only too much in demand
when I let my mind slowly recover
through the curtains of delusion,
the only matter waiting for calls.
No waiting, complaining, renewal
the puppet-strings of time taut
against limbs like I’m on a rack
of bloody cashmere and complain
about all the stains no one cleaned.
Post-guillotine heads belting a chorus
of screeches Nero would swoon over
lie joyously together around Versailles,
where even I never again will piss or die.
Carson Pytell is a writer living outside Albany, New York, whose work appears in venues such as Adirondack Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, North Dakota Quarterly, Fourth River, and The Heartland Review. He is Assistant Poetry Editor of Coastal Shelf, and his most recent chapbooks are A Little Smaller Than the Final Quark (Bullshit Lit, 2022), Hate, Love, Hate (Back Room Poetry, 2022), and Willoughby, New York (Bottlecap Press, 2023).
