Doug Cornett

 

Rex, Down the Street

He’s like an abandoned house,
the way his bones fold into incorrect angles each afternoon,
warm chutes of wind passing in and out of him,
an almost mystical clumsy.
The modern anti-acrobat, he performs daily.

Each morning the body offers breaking news.
There are crackling reports of rotgut from our man on the scene;
a sharp something or other in the upper abdomen, a mute lump residing near his neck.
All sorts of technical difficulties;
our man vainly hammering out compromises with the petulant feed.

He still stands for minutes on end in front of the refrigerator, letting the cold out, but without the old authority,
that almost feudal lordship.
He is no longer the king; or he is, but nobody shows for his masques.
It’s too far to drive, they say, and what with this weather.

Those birds outside sew figure eights in the sky above him.
The neighborhood kids drive their fathers’ cars through his lawn, reversing over
the peonies, making ruins of the mailbox.
At night, men enter through windows and unplug lamps, tracking dirt from
room to room. His rights, amassed over the years, melt like arctic chunks in the sun.

But it’s not all doom; he finds enlightenment paused on a speed bump. The vaunted front wheels, poised for launch. Upward.
A horn behind him, but he is already on his way.

 

 

Sleepover

I thought I’d never tell.
From the sleepover
We snuck out
Into a hot dumb August.

The trees with spike shoulders
Blacker than
Everything
But that was ok,
We made our own spike shoulders
And stalked on like cereal-box tigers.

Discussion on how best to maraud the lawns-
Inside adults with daylight eyes we averted,
The denizens of shopping malls and drug-store
Parking lots-
One of us suggested grabbing a wicker deer
And yes,
Doing something weird with it.

Headlights flashed
And we willed ourselves invisible,
Grew into the dirt.
This was being alive
And not that Living it took to
Mow the grass on Sundays.

We ended up
Peeing in all their careful flower gardens,
All their nice-looking things.

In the morning our moms arrived in minivans
To tumble us away
Through the wilderness, refugees in the marble madness
Of our small town.

 

 

Doug Cornett is originally from Hudson, Ohio, and earned his B.A. from Skidmore College. His work has previously appeared in such publication s as Superstition Review, Prick of the Spindle, Word Riot, and Ooligan Press. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is earning his MFA from Portland State University.