Member Poem

Carnival, September 17

The tweed-suit men with cul-de-sacs of hair
stand glasses-down in mobile dating apps
while up above their children sway and swear
they’re not locked in. Pink iridescent sap

from cotton candy trees goes sludging down
a pair of freckled cheeks, and somewhere in
the night the smoky call of the peep-show man
summons a Gentile crowd to slip within

his temple’s inner curtain. Blue-green light
and thirty-second loops of carousel bells
are weaved into a luminescent blanket
that warms the autumn night, and all is well

until the chemo-balding lady with the red
bandana smashes in the glass-front box
that holds the red-eyed Zoltar, and bloody-fisted
grabs and twists his wired neck until the cops
                                                               are called.