Saturday Afternoon Twilight Zone
 

With the bobby pin I’ve kept beneath my tongue all morning,
my fingers spring the lock to my parent’s bedroom

where mom’s cherry lipstick glows beneath a seashell lamp.
The babysitter calls me but trails off mid-vowel & I grab

the thumb-length tube, unscrewing the cylindrical top.
When the door-bell rings, she skips outside to pay for a pizza,

my incisors nibble red wax, & like a tiger shark frenzied
by its first whiff of blood, I devour a smorgasbord

of diamond bracelets, Rolexes, poker chips, glass elephants,
cellphone chargers, & multi-color X-mas bulbs, wedging

a grandfather clock down my throat. In the TV room,
subwoofers blare a blockbuster’s credit role & I swallow them

along with the top-shelf liquor cabinet & Answering Machine
repeating my name. By the time tires peel off the curb

& my sitter enters the hall, I’ve eaten through roof tile,
not to mention Earth’s gravitational handbook, & a blimp ad

for Nicholas Cage. Floating above the cul-de-sac,
I burp for good luck & my jaws crank wide to chomp

the sun like a crocodile crunching an atom bomb.
 

Rocket Ship in the Backlot of Joe’s Steak Shack
 

Piper & I race to the sand dune’s edge & kick up grit
in the silver moonglow, our windbreakers flailing

like the trigger-hand of some wannabe hotrod
robbing a nursing home on a dare. I flip a zippo,

burn a Pall-Mall picked from the pack with my teeth,
& motion to a rusted trailer flanked by a fallen

chain link fence, a headless mannequin sloped
on a flickering Coca-Cola vending machine.

In the backlot, Piper spies the jittery old wingnut
buffing his homemade interstellar stallion,

the dented stack of sheet metal & satellite array
he’s always yakking about at Ned’s diner

on Tuesday nights, his pencil-drawn blueprints
showcased to every gullible do-gooder & dunce

suckered into playing checkers near the pond.
I steady my Polaroid’s lens searching for his patched

sailor cap, his bomber jacket that gleams with mock
medals & ribbons fashioned from candy wrappers

& safety pins, the seaweed tangle of beard,
eager to snap souvenirs for the blue-haired girl

in my study hall. We creep closer, our shadows
passing over sage, but stumble when echoes

of clank & crack & a slow roar shudder the hills,
& like weathervanes ripped off rooftops, we whip

around to the first pop of flame, frozen debris raining
on tumbleweeds, & my camera flashes at a smoky trail

to Alpha Centauri, as Captain Wingnut soars
into a Coca-Cola sky’s glassy darkness,

no doubt bound for that planet where merit
is measured by coordinates on a checkerboard.
 

22nd Century Nightmare of Holiday Shopping for a Zygote
 

You drag me past the food court & toy store
          with a home teleportation pad display
to a coin-operated dispenser shaped
          & modified like a chrome gumball machine
filled with cryogenic hailstones that contain
          the future’s all-star mathletes,
corrupt radio hosts, medal-of honor
          infantry, black market milk peddlers, and third place
pageant finalists, except right now
          they resemble unremarkable baby plankton
without pedigrees or spinal cords.

          For a limited time, they’re marked down
to twenty-five cents with a tax
          deduction & complimentary Ebola vaccine;
customers uncomfortable with childbirth
          can choose from surrogates like the Alaskan
Survivalist & Bay Area Artistic Clairvoyant
          for the cost of turbo-speed taco delivery. I faceplant
on a joke comparing DNA to a giftbag
          packed with ferrets or an exploding bouquet
of roses & you point to a menu of popular customizations
          available before incubation: undisclosed fear
of movie theaters, expert ping-pong player,
          early affinity for fireflies, a habit of sneaking out
during thunderstorms to tightrope walk
          the city’s powerlines. You feed a coin

into the receptacle, crank the dial, select
          Mystery Option B, & my gut freefalls
like an anvil through a chapel, as if the possibility
          of this new-fangled embryonic cell
slapped a chokehold around my agency.
          I reach for your hand & you hand me your purse
& a frozen orb tornadoes down the chute,
          your cupped palms padding the descent
gentle as a paleontologist cradling the last dinosaur egg.
          As I study our newest family member,
the casing cracks & you tell me to say hello;
          an ill-formed tentacle shooting through the ice
gestures a wave & latches to my wrist.