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Two Prose Poems by Bobby Parrott

Like Idiomatic Stones Spun Across
  the Placid Surface of Ker Plunk

What’s called skipping stones in the U.S. in Russia is called baking pancakes, in Sweden tossing sandwiches, and in the Czech Republic Throwing Froggies. If this is true, the infinitesimal flags implanted on my brow like weather vanes to measure the magnetic drift of our relationship decompile themselves all the way up to nothing, and I think, I’d buy this anyway, even if it weren’t reduced for quick annihilation. But we’re fine, you and me. Our immune systems crash, yield our apologies red to yellow to green, threaten us as we drown in the brassy bauble of bird song. The missiles of our imaginations precede us into a place of prayer, expand us beyond the unbuttoning sparrow in that field of purple milkweed about to drunkenly deny insect extinctions. My little bell invites the moon at its liquid most, swallows the last curl of froth milkshaking a swollen sky. We upload into your electron tunneling, another quantum chitchat linking elements like fixed circuits. Hallways down small. And soon enough my body finds out about me, I mean the real me, much less the me they’ve cultured beyond the blood-brain barrier, the one who tells me that no human afraid of death can ever be holy. At the end of our whirling skim of the water’s surface, the stone and I sink, and I recall again the sun-bright undulations I mistook for the lake, repression the red tulip bed identity, birth-canal brain-death enigma unthinking.

Hippy-Dippy Weatherman Jesus
  Playing Charades with NASA
    in an Orbital Space Station

We are not the astronaut, and neither are the frequencies our body broadcasts when we depress your doorbell or text you, where your door dilates or your camera starts and I must again attempt a portrayal of my self. Decompositional muscularity scrambles human ambiguity, light-flickering noise a fractal functioning in Reginald’s theory of mass inversion, or how to remake the world from the outside in. Sponging up news like spilled pineapple juice, depressives sprout in the programmable cluster of my nervous system, that leafy branching jumble my body. Until my semantic coffers runneth over, surely goodness and mercy live in the chaotic radiance of your unkempt hair, and eclectic selection anoints the appointed precisely for the Unabomber crouching in my chewy center. When it’s Hippy-Dippy Weatherman Jesus’ turn, the moon of his smartest parables shadows NASA’s flame-throwing phalluses. In poems, we create smaller versions of ourselves, try to replace the real with a more advanced system, though instead we find antimatter at subatomic. Even though it shakes loose parts of his Bible, Baby Jesus lets each heart attack wash over me until I’m trailing clouds of glory like a snow globe shaken in the swirl of pink blossom summers. Or one of an October tree, golden-orange tinsel for the dance of falling leaves. At this my pheromones commence to snuggle molecular fingers into your chemoreceptors like trick-or-treaters returning again and again to the only house on the block giving out full-sized Hershey bars.

Bobby Parrott

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