PJ Lombardo is a writer from New Jersey. He serves as co-founding editor for GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. HATE, DANCE, his latest chapbook, was made available in January 2024. Read his writing in KEITH LLC, Tripwire, Peel Lit, Tagvverk and elsewhere.
Driving
Steering wheel, straightened out clutched like the oaths monks make, alone It’s how i return to hometowns my eyes restless with splinters sprung from the mahogany chunks my former townsfolk carve to erect greeting columns for the Blue Salve of Mystic Aboveness whose name alights the townsfolk with miragic calm and sullen blue serenity Here they drive with palms above their heads, spread wide with a blue space for something false to land inside Meanwhile, i crank my head as elation means something’s missing Yes Yes, here arrive my rotten children soldered together like a cyclopean eye driving towards salvation’s baffled mirage
Proving
Bought a billboard downtown in all caps reading NO DINNER TONIGHT SEE YOU AT CANYON’S DEEP Recite this, my children like an eightball’s last words and then drool dejected under the tide’s heightened blueness There, where, once, plugged each rapturous mammal into the stony pectorals of time there you can tally the record call all snipers conmen call my dead phone whatever names or crimes you have but human sacrifices don’t re collect My human sacri fice leaps from billboards surefire proof of a titan’s descent
Waking
Cortisol tangs my mouth pulled from some riddlesome knot between my shoulderblades I roll through the blurs burning muted in my bedroom Know how everybody acts? like truth hangs clear as daggerbreath? Less certain, i smell, preverbal wrecks you left, my children strewn across this beat honeycomb while outside, pigeons hop squeal, circle counterclockwise like so many rewound omens and under ambiguity’s forgiving blot i imagine a column, blue, of light erupting from the focus of birds an unmanned hearse gone vertical to quiet the clutter of nerves or futures