Streaming
by Jon Riccio
The revenue a chat room derives from a duodenum
and a stapled pouch,
a stomach’s subculture of gain, cleanse, loss
in the bypass
gifted to me when I turned nineteen.
The buffets it wrested,
the domain I registered,
all those ethers clamored around a meme,
the social word-shit one types
“like my lap band” “tweet my gout”
streaming on alt-dot haunts.
My searchability full-blown, I’m a phoenix
gone gastric with more boyfriends than you
have optic nerves and that’s Ohio alone.
Mother, I’ve macerated my tract,
the live feed of a chafing dish
less invasive than bariatric.
Father, meet Evan from Ashtabula.
He crowd-funded my flab,
one download from betrothed.
Prompt
The writer wearing a mercurochrome corset
gives you a picture of half-eaten pie,
you inure a blood phobia,
the transitive inferred.
She sends the angel
with candy-wrapper wings.
The Rapture is a dinner bill, you
are its Andes mint. You jostle a trinity:
the abortion building
next to the Weight Watchers
near the Flapjack Shack,
rev the Z in Nazareth, smite its arcade.
Separate Recyclables
I am the nightmare of every environmentalist
turned conversion therapist
hoping to biodegrade
the gay away.
Woe to the zealot
who’s chained himself
to my landfill, its damnables
poking out of a cardboard pond,
diorama forsaken because I ran out of tape.
Each morning,
tribunals and a tin glade.
My handrail, on eulogy,
saying, “absence of rings kept me
beautiful, self-realization drained him alone.”
BIO
Jon Riccio studied viola performance at Oberlin College and the Cleveland Institute of Music. A recent Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Paper Nautilus, Qwerty,Redivider, CutBank Online, Waxwing and Switchback, among others. An MFA candidate at the University of Arizona, he resides in Tucson.
