immigrant drunk.
Etymologic
Within earshot her exposed brassiere
clenched The Brasserie. He kept quiet
about the whole incident
to conceal her objective:
way back in the Triassic age
multitudes of creatures
trampled Earth. And then
came the great extinction—
all but a few stout species
annihilated by a meteor
or mammoth volcanism.
According to paleontologists’
acute phrenology, systematic analysis
attests that crocodiles abounded
thereafter, alphabets of the ancestors
integrated.
And then Emerson went and said
“The poets made all the words.”
Thus ravenous croc poets
forged raw linguistics
but eventually
their enigmatic idioms
fossilized,
words that once conveyed
vivid living tropes become
obscure etymology.
Painstaking if not impossible
to determine which specific traits
allowed millions of swarming crocodiles
to thrive in a world of swamps,
overflowing rivers and boiling oceans,
the words they employed now absent
their poetic origin, ineffable, dead.
The Hoax
“It was all a big hoax,
the moon landing,” insisted
the sexy Mexican saleslady.
“Same as 9/11,
totally trumped up
government publicity stunt.”
To which the wily salesman
impulsively retorted—“that’s bull!
I remember it distinctly
as I was high on mescaline
that very day, driving my dad’s
luxurious Olds 98 down 101
at 80 miles an hour
with bald tires and bad brakes,
listening on AM radio to details
of the landing, the astronauts’
broadcasts back to Earth.”
“Ridiculous!” she chirped,
“like the holocaust,
it didn’t happen.”
“I know that what I
thought I perceived
derailed me” he replied,
“and one prime factor
I didn’t recognize until too late,
the light standard I took out
skidding and fishtailing
in the rain—I crashed with
an enormormous thundering crash
across hood and windshield,
totaling the car.”
________________________________________________________________________
Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly. His theater and restaurant reviews have been published in various newspapers, with poetry and interviews appearing in numerous national journals, among them Portland Review, Main Street Rag, Kestrel, Scarlet Literary Magazine, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Penny Ante Feud, New Plains Review, Poetry Quarterly, The Muse-an International Journal of Poetry, and Clockhouse Review. He has published a travel guide, Best Choices In Northern California, and Time Lines, a book of poems. He lives in Marina, California.
