poetry || John Pursch

Handball Nuts

Risible nouns pour 

surreptitious bobcats 

on frosty whippoorwills, 

trembling in precession haste. 

Gaveling cropped seedlings to Danish pasties, 

my flavored floodlight gooses lime and lavender 

from fleshy icicle crocks for hankerings 

of classroom tarts. 

Sweaty skylights trip a waffle detector, 

hopping isthmus pawns in beckoning chirp waders, 

cobbling nursery palms from gumshoe termination. 

Mooning wartime foreheads with shadow pox, 

goulash trepans acoustic stylus monks 

for breastwork poplar stilts, 

whittled to missing easel soup.

Icons bay at dehydrated gnomes, 

itching to dwell on supine Ferris wheels, 

mocking burritos till pundits hire 

the noontime Parisian chaff 

for dawdling lesion retrieval, 

craving fine sand. 

Cornish gams heed the motile six-shooter, 

clanging lips when ethereal handball nuts 

escape to knotty quintets. 

Prom Tomato Fins

Octal crusaders decimate pubescent eels 

with clocking maze roulette decay 

for timidly gawking middlemen, 

pulling on Dacron sweeteners. 

Dainty hitchhikers inflate brocaded lug nuts 

for beeping paroxysmal peccaries, 

schmooze till overdrawn, 

and leave belated breadbox boons 

with caterpillar quotients. 

Throwaway niceties phone depilatory sawbucks 

for escrow’s simian armful of arrowed fungoes, 

stapling keystone carp to lurid henchmen, 

browsing eyeteeth for serendipitous collisions. 

Minutes transpire inviolate, 

bluebirds vitiate oligarchical wingtip shrews, 

and sycophantic serenades convolve 

with whitewashed poise retraction, 

living laundered daylight’s 

speckled birdbath delay 

in ski lift octogenarian scrunch. 

Why would pawns eschew mice parolee stew 

instead of acrid fistulas when puffins stratify 

a penguin’s piebald crescent nametag? 

Baby skylights 

cross impassive tarts 

with prom tomato fins, 

twirling necrophiliacs in foveal disgrace, 

plowing inch by waving formulaic ostrich 

through serrated quicksand.