Ryan Bender-Murphy

Glitch

Once, I returned home from the store.

In the living room my brother stood up from his work papers.
His hands held other hands.

I held up the loaf of bread, and he pointed to the coffee table.
I could not see my brother’s face.

The work papers were white.
They glowed with a white luminescence.

My brother said
“I can fix this.”

The room became pitch white.





Something squealed.

The Roller Skater

Digging leopards out of the fireplace does not stop
me from entering the rink.
Nor does a hose of snakes
leaping out of my bedroom window and frightening my
car into several defense modes.
I grind the handles of a mushroom bat.
I spell the names of former hound dogs
with the sludge of day-traders who were beaten by teenagers.
No evening begins without constructing a statue.
A saddle over the moon, I take a fish stick
gouge out my eye. Some remember marauder rollers
did the same thing, but I am better.
Twisting around in that oval for hours
my feet become blistered, watery eyes flicker
stork hands stork feet angels hammering
palms into my bottom.
I learn to steal avalanche ingredients in the darkness.
Those spinning wheels meter my heart. Nails poke through
pigeon screeches,
lights meet lasers and the goat heart that I jammed
into my chest a week ago swells. Old guts
hang out of my lips and smear the wooden planks.
Memory holds the air like a lover.
The rink remains
daggering—with those blades, those pit stops and sweat ponds. I
sweet my lips with a mustache
clutching disco matter.
That makes these weightless moments veiny.
The market of hair opens and closes, needles pile in my throat
and neck. Chimpanzees coo in my fingernails.
If I cannot float, I will roll.
If chimneys lock the fires into their hard chests,
I will bathe in telephones.
I blow a kiss of parking meters. Someone's helmet
turns into vampire bats.
All beneath lights twinkling year round, all beneath
firestorms of hahaha.
A woman sticks her leg near my leg.
Ringing in my stomach
a small tenor purrs
then screams.
My elbows do not crack.
The machinery of evening cranks out
my child body.

The Underground Villager

It ate through the ground every night.
My digging machine with a line of cockroaches buckled to the front.

We traveled farther and farther into the earth
in search of new countries to offer kings.

When we came to the door on the core I knocked.
A somber man who had been immolating for decades answered

slammed my head into a fire table
rode my sled back to the surface.

Now I sit in this black sphere kicking charred mandibles
licking puddles of candy bars.

I cannot read the books that the somber man has left
every sentence trails with smoke.

*

The dream of white.

On a patio in March.
Reading a novel.

The Xmas lights
hanging over the clotheslines.

A green and a red
and a white.

You pull a stove out
of the stove.

You pull out our hands
crossed at the dinner table.

You pull out a burning village
every villager

has your face.

A stream of micro-meteors
penetrate the windows.

In the backyard I sip my soda
and look at the stars

clapping.

*

The last time I clapped my hands:
sailing on the sea of shopping carts.

The last time I hung clothes to dry:
after impeaching the volcano.

The last time I tore a mandible from a savage:
digging and tunneling the 57th state.

The last time I watched a B movie in your living room:
before cities grew legs and fists.

The last time I ran our dog through the flaming house:
I thought you'd still be there.

*

As far as I can tell, there are only two ways out of the earth's core.
I cannot kick down the door because I did not practice in the gym.

On a table the instruction manual says that I must direct the plate tectonics.
I must tap the volcano trenches in the ocean to form new oceans.

In several decades my replacement will come
after I do all of the work needed.