Boss Crashes the Party

As he slowly walked up the ice-sheathed driveway
a trapped orgasm ached within.
The feeling reminded him of how people
are always telling him he had the face
of someone about to hiccup.

Over the candlelit room
a Wallace Stevens poem unloaded within his mind
frozen and uninterrupted:
“Freedom is like a man who kills himself.”

He overheard part of a conversation
between two Abraham Lincoln imitators
and a woman sporting a Beethoven wig

“These drinks are filling me with rage.
Don’t they just make you want to runaway
to a town you’ve never heard of?”

Toeing the floorboards he blinked randomly
at the beams holding up the ceiling
until a hyper young lady startled him and screamed

“You fired my father.
I know it wasn’t an act of hatred,
but he’s hung himself in the laundry room.”

He ran forward, dashing beneath a cat bathing on a chandelier
and caught a whiff of everything ancient,

it grounded him like a submarine beneath a hurricane.

The body limp and spoiled, dangling above
a town replica assembled entirely in red legos.

He left the room behind a woman
who buried people’s cell phones
for ringing during the climactic scenes of movies.

As he fingered the keys in his pocket
the picture of the body swung
back and forth in his mind.

Previously published in word for / word.

Noah Falck teaches elementary school children. His first book, Snowmen Losing Weight, will be released later this year from BatCat Press. In addition to three chapbooks, recent work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Kenyon Review, H_NGM_N, and Smartish Pace. Noah’s “from Life As A Crossword Puzzle 5. Across” and  “from Life As A Crossword Puzzle 14. Down” are also in Reprint.

Object(s) to bring back to life: “I would bring back lemonade stands. In the traditional sense. Not the lemonade stands currently featured on corporate commercials. Lemonade stands that manufacture a kind of lemonade that doesn’t really taste like lemonade, where there is either way too much water or way too much sugar. Lemonade stands where there is a high overturn of nickels & dimes and an overwhelming enthusiasm for the process of it all.”