by PJ Lombardo
Beltane’s Fires (2)
Wishbones smoke on the rotisserie
While crack crawls out of open pots. Everything sucks
Like hookah wires, so if you need a hospital,
There’s none for miles, but if you require
Firearms, we’re past ready, aleap
Like mollyeyes from dancing strangers,
Like violets high in hormonal spring,
ㅤeverything’s right here, caving
ㅤㅤㅤㅤin. A smeared bridge of light
clambers across all vision.
A Ram Rather than You (2)
Abide the pleasure principle thirty-fourty years:
Maybe sky’ll send a ram, rather. Say your prayers,
And huff your nailpolish
Through a trumpeter’s vermouth lung.
Sunlifted elevators cater to the camera
Only to drop us all goldminewards,
Where crude pools, lies, slows, thickens
Nearpurple in its depression; for millenia, I wait, but there’s no
New volcanics to redeem it: your applause’s
just worthless!
God’s Infinite Grace
Guesses stretch a lifetime, coated
in sunstain and reverb, inoperable:
and somehow, God’s Grace strums
ㅤㅤㅤㅤa sour nerve buried sublime down my pupil
No crevice of tenderness goes un-
nourished or uninterrupted
across this carbonic mattress of coir and bitter miles. In
kitchens where alcohol towers between strangers
everybody hiccups, pairs, gaggles
Let’s
leave
I
have swiped
every other partier’s truckkeys; let’s
read in those beds, multiply to many tribes
and clobber our dissenters with God’s Infinite Grace
PJ Lombardo lives in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of The Blue Cherub (Cult House Books, 2026), and he serves as co-founding editor of GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry.