King Erasure
At your intervention which was nothing more than a pageantry of post it notes stained by a ballpoint’s opium ink dangling on an inch of yellow adhesive stuck to your armored chest, you told us what you wanted to be- a cold steel coffin of pink champagne where a jewelry box gleaming with dirty needles floated in the hands of ladies in waiting who no longer spread their legs like wings, sheltering veins of regal blood, as your shimmering crown of aluminum foil sparkled above a bath towel cape hailing you King Erasure.
Commando Ballerina
The need to remember not to remember swallowing yesterday’s glassy swords sharpened by trembling hands, by fingertips calloused from dancing on lighters to the beat of blood beneath these nails that kept me alive through the night, is why ten little soldiers in pink fishnet stockings salute the light in my eyes, twirling at dawn on the shores of my face, like commando ballerinas disarmed.
Daniel lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems have been in Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Columbia Journal, Western Humanities Review, and others. His poems are forthcoming in West Trade Review, Duende Literary Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Magnolia Review, Isthmus Review, Glass Mountain Magazine, Columbia College Literary Review, January Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, Yemassee and Cumberland River Review. His books, “This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians” an Anthology, and “Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist,” can be found on Amazon. Visit Daniel at DanielEdwardMoore.com.
