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Honk if you're Lonely
I buy bumper stickers online to pretend I’ve been places. Let the
newspapers pile on the front porch for two weeks each year; lock
the doors and refuse to turn on the lights
so the neighbours believe I’ve gone on vacation;
pay $3.99 plus shipping for “Aloha State” and twice that for fake tan.
I keep my stick-figure family in my glove compartment
for when I go to Costco the next town over.
I pull into the carpool parking lot near the highway,
decal them on the rear window,
then drive to waste money on food in bulk.
I browse Baby’s-R-Us to see the tiny clothes,
trash talk with other mothers about the terrible twos,
feigning gratitude that Grandma’s at home with the little
one. I joke I should really remove “Baby on Board,”
my baby isn’t a baby —
anymore, I add.
Drive-In Theatre Time Machine
I built a time machine in my backyard.
Materials:
- a white sheet clipped on the clothesline to hang like a drive-in movie screen
- a cracked telescope looted from the planetarium dumpster
- an overhead projector from my mother’s days as a primary school teacher
- a junk-drawer worth of drained batteries, old cellphones, and miscellaneous wires
- a Mercury Comet convertible frame
- a vintage popcorn popper (for aesthetic purposes)
How I did it:
I replaced the lens of the overhead projector
with that of the planetarium telescope,
and modified the plane mirror
to reflect the nightglow,
amped the hardware
with silver substances
and metal organs
harvested from the graveyard
of electronics from the junk-drawer,
then flipped the switch,
angled the scope toward the stars,
projected the cosmos on
the bedsheet screen.
With butter-soaked popcorn in a red-white striped bag,
I settled behind the wheel of the decommissioned Mercury
Comet, the projector propped beside me in the passenger’s seat.
Static on the bedsheet screen transformed
from stagnant stars to features fleshed out in the cosmos.
— Isla McLaughlin
09
Polygot
By: Joseph Donato
Sometimes I talk in my own language
even I don’t understand.
It’s only sounds,
grating consonants
and tongue flicking
that launch spit from teeth,
earn knocks to the head from
my mother’s broom handle.
I like making zs bump elbows with ks
when they’d otherwise be strangers,
that qs warm in my mouth
more than any other.
I like that there are no verb conjugations
my teachers have me memorize
with ruler-smacks to my wrists.
I like that tripping over my words
creates new ones.
I like that there’s a phrase
for every feeling imaginable,
even the ones that other language-speakers are too afraid to name
(skftr zucqin, pronounced however,
is to peek at tabloid covers
in the pharmacy check-out line
with the men from Jersey Shore
while hopping the cashier won’t notice
and tell your father).
I like that nobody can translate my secrets
because there are infinite equivalents for
each English word
and one is never spoken twice
I like to sit crosslegged in the living room
with my mother knitting in the armchair,
my father thumbing the remote buttons,
and say as loud as I’d like
with as many butterflies in my stomach
qiptk clck svekor ke!
— Joseph Donato