Step Mommy Tawny

our jowls crashing like cymbals, while my baby brother takes out his eight-ball left eye and squints his right to line up his shot on the world’s smallest pool table. Mother has a camera for a head; it flashes uncontrollably though she claims to have run out of film a hundred years ago, when father’s penis, an unstoppable spigot, became a garden sprinkler, contained by adult diapers, changed hourly, and hourly, my sister— shuffling out of her hiding place in the cuckoo clock, her hair a mess of paper clips, a Raggedy Ann doll in her arms—sighs to pass the time. Water seeps through the ceiling, because upstairs the bathtub overflows, for Grandma has forgotten the bath she’s drawn, and on the stove the gas is high, the flames are heating up a pudding over which my opa whispers: boil, boil, loyal rubble, follow me to the end of my life. by Christopher Shannon Minnie

Don’t bring camels in the classroom. Don’t bring scorpions to school. Don’t bring rhinos, rats, or reindeer. Don’t bring mice or moose or mule. Pull your penguin off the playground. Put your python in a tree. Place your platypus wherever you think platypi should be. Lose your leopard and your lemur. Leave your llama and your leech. Take your tiger, toad, and toucan anywhere but where they teach. Send your wombat and your weasel with your wasp and wolverine. Hide your hedgehog and hyena where you’re sure they won’t be seen. Please get rid of your gorilla. Please kick out your kangaroo. No, the teacher didn’t mean it when she called the class a “zoo. by Kenn Nesbitt Minnie