Tonight's Poet Corner: Too Easy

Too Easy
by Belinda Roddie

Like a quick gulp of excess
salmonella on a picnic espresso
served hot in the carved out heart of an
apricot. Doesn't make a damn difference how you
inebriate the optic nerve, just the fact that you

experience some sort of deja vu
when sucking on a straw leading into your
boyfriend's malt horror story, campfire songs
laced with ecstasy, dripping down a spinal cord
dangling from a clothing line. Makes sense that you

spent a dollar on graduate school and fifty
cents on a can of soda that you
drank in the middle of a seminar where the
professor vomited into a trash can and
screamed literary Gatsby obscenities,
nineteen twenty sentences with silver
spectacles all caved in around the meters of
semi-formal text, all swirling.

Pseudo-importance. Faux glory. Deep
aspirin heart attacks over the kitchen stove. Don't
make me try to write a glossary, I have no more
vocabulary to lick off the linoleum. Where you last
set down your bottle. When you last whispered an
anthem. How you last stuck your knee deep into the

twinkle-toed outlines of my denim drunkard
archetypical shelf of common sense.
Knocked the teeth right out of my chest.
Buried the hatchet into my right hand.
Dropped a fried egg over my eye and made me
happy to be half-dead.