by Justin Karcher
A really big crow
is chasing an ice cream truck
down a crusty alley
where high school students
are chilling sugar on their tongues
and talking about how their parents
were murdered by breathalyzers
high school students
drinking too much tap water
pissing in their ancestors’
coffee cups
Mercury is in retrograde
boys and girls in America
carving search engines
into cop car tires
hoping justice looks for them
when they go missing
you can’t get to Europe
or a better life
on the wings of a crop duster
so high school students
are hurling themselves
through metaphorical droughts
the dead they carry
are tiny
hanging from their eyelashes
affecting vision
but only ever so slightly
prom kings and queens
dreaming up an apocalypse
unlike the rest
supervillains crawling
out of dusty video game cartridges
just to say, “You were right all along
congratulations
now a sword in your gut”
Justin Karcher (Twitter: @Justin_Karcher. Instagram: the.man.about.town) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, New York. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). He is also the editor of Ghost City Review and co-editor of the anthologies My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry (BlazeVOX [books], 2017) and MANSION (dancing girl press, 2019).
(And for more from the wasteland, don’t miss Justin’s Your Hometown Is an Apocalypse from the November 4th Weekly edition. – Elephants Never)