Poem Essay

A Word from the Fat Lady Gabrielle Calvocoressi It isn't how we look up close so much as in dreams. Our giant is not so tall, our lizard boy merely flaunts crusty skin- not his fault they keep him in a crate and bathe him maybe once a week. When folks scream or clutch their hair and poke at us and glare and speak of how we slithered up from Hell, it is themselves they see: the preacher with the farmer's girls (his bulging eyes, their chicken legs) or the mother lurching towards the sink, a baby quivering in her gnarled hands. Horror is the company you keep when shades are drawn. Evil does not reside in cages.

Road Signs of Pigs Eating Pork Frank Montesonti
If a cynic were asked why the world was created they might say it was so the goddamn car could break down in this small, Texas town with a clapboard sign of a pig taking a bite out of a ham hock; hell, they might claim Texas itself is a cosmic joke to turn urban sophisticates selfless, stuck five-hundred miles from the real world for eternity. For the cynic, any sort of hell would suffice, I suppose, as long as it was properly unpleasant, not some shadowy, un-signified underworld. That shit doesn’t fly in Texas. No Hades or anything found in a textbook. And no loud wailing or self-pity. You take your punishment like your own signature pitched you off the world. On the cracked television in the repair shop were more commercials where animals can’t help but plead to be eaten. They are noble examples. Helping after helping they confirm their texture, their flavor, until I become queasy that there may be some slipped logic in myself that dream-world uneasiness where the signature turns to consume its signatory and I start to suspect this waiting room is hell— the vending machine of red-hots, the old World News and Reports washed out by the Texas sun, the smell of fresh tires, the landscape itself, twisted and alien, almost too unreal to be a temporary stop, too unreal to be a place where they just let you sign