Tonight's Poet Corner: He Coughed Streamers
He Coughed Streamers by Belinda Roddie He was a party assembly man, a goofball, a confetti buffoon, a clown who wasn't really a clown, but he carried enough red and blue balloons to fill his house twice over (and they all fit into the pockets of his gray carpenter jeans). Since his twenty-seventh birthday, he had popped out of forty-nine birthday cakes: for family, for friends, for politicians, even for his own wife's fiftieth. She loved it, kissed him so hard that she sucked away patches of frosting from his cheeks and nose. Delicious. And the man couldn't help it. Firecrackers lit up his blood. Ribbons and bows coiled around each tendon that sprung wired like the lights of a Christmas tree. Merlot made his cheeks red and turkey made his belly rumble with music. He was a happy rambunctious soul, and people loved him. So much so that when doctors discovered from his autopsy that he had swallowed seven rolls of purple tissue streamers, we laughe