The love of my first life wheeled her art crush down St. Mark’s Place in a shopping cart. They almost ran over Jim Jarmusch. Silver hairs were tincturing the sky, feathers after a pillowfight. I pawned them all to recuperate expenses.
What I need now is a slender canoe, brown lightning on my cheeks and a knifelooking moon that arrives on time to see its own gallows. All this to look good on my wanted poster. His characters are hunting me. They have wasp nests in their sleeves. My asshole of a pawnbroker sold them whiteman’s metal; here they gallop snappy as a croc’s green jaw.
My spear talks to me: We’ll turn you into the tallest totem if you come into our skull tree house.
Their horses wear hoods of night. I have the trees call them limpdicked. Only to find my last kidney flung across skies of hell, scrubbing its wings, buttery as wine that’s too thick. My other kidney’s already in hock. I’m all out of hooch and the hooch is all out of me.
Richard Prins
Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker who also spends time in Dar es Salaam. He’s underway with his MFA degree in poetry at New York University, where he’s a 2011-2012 Goldwater Fellow and Adjunct Instructor in Creative Writing. His interests include platypusses and the blues; his work appears in such publications as The Los Angeles Review, elimae, kill author, decomP Magazine and Night Train.
