Alphabet Ghazal

Pamela Miller

                       for Mike Puican

A man flies to Europe wearing Warren G. Harding pajamas.
Blackbirds erupt from his rucksack as he jumps off the Eiffel Tower.

Click beetles mutate into cabochon emeralds in my
dreams night after night. I bolt awake like toast.

Everyone should visit Pickles Gap, Arkansas, where
frogs build towering Neuschwansteins of mud along the darkest bend of the river.

Gelatinous thighs, quagmire chin, a chest as feckless as a minnow.
He had never learned to accept his limitations.

Isidore begat Aloysius and it all went downhill from there.
Jewish girls and sleek Tibetan men couple moistly on abandoned steamboats.

Kansas City redhead Gwendolyn LaTrue is this year's Miss Unthinkable.
Little red mushroom clouds sprout from her back in her big production number.

Munificent Virgin, grant me temerity, a stagecoach of
noisemakers, a banshee dance to dazzle the dead.

Orpheus is twanging like mad beneath my window, but I'm not
permitted to listen. Night falls like a bridge collapsing.

Quotation marks open around my heart.
Resoundingly raunchy love poems pour out like a slot machine jackpot.

Senegalese leopards with dragonfly wings skulk around the gates of the cemetery.
The sun inching up electrifies the sky into ribbons of tumbling spangles.

Ukuleles terrify her. Narwhals, their pointy grotesqueness, terrify her.
Valentines, miasmic love, kisses that can splinter bones all terrify her.

Wheelbarrows filled with poison-pen letters careen through the streets like charioteers.
Xenophobia breaks out among the townsfolk and the mayor's wife spontaneously combusts.

You will never see me again once this poem has rumbled to a finish.
Zones of light will open all around me and whisk me up to God like a prayer.