Beast of Wire

Beast of Wire



Once a beast, territorial yet admirable, shunned statues and ate a cloud. In a

field south of the post office, he fondled the envelope of his life, his carefully

constructed life, and the food he ate made him hyperventilate. Hard to believe

he wore three watches, even in bed! On a muddy farm in Denmark, he

hallucinated about politicians and bugs as psychopaths sodomized him with

gift cards, with furry shoes. He came, he spoke, he scrawled graffiti on giant

detergent bottles. His laboratory was the universe. Wearing a scarf, he opened

a blues song of a novel and became one of its shoes, pondering its foot. Outside

the church of the blue people, he kissed pets goodbye, scratching their heads.

Then he fired a pimento cheese biscuit at a clean slate because he couldn’t

save butterflies from lost love. Though he climbed to the top of a plane

and shaped it into a little angel, his extraordinary story wasn’t meant to be.

He lost his leg, torched black by a meteorite. In the end, his own wire turned

topsy-turvy under the stars as a life raft slipped from his shoulder.




Cliff Saunders




Cliff Saunders is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including Mapping the Asphalt Meadows (Slipstream Publications) and This Candescent World (Runaway Spoon Press). His poems have appeared recently in Atlanta Review, Pedestal Magazine, Lullwater Review, Inscape Journal, The Phoenix, Vagabond City, The Main Street Rag, and Tipton Poetry Journal. Originally from Massachusetts, he now lives in Myrtle Beach, SC.