BAD SAD HABITAT
Do you know or have you ever heard of the Rhetoric of Sally?
She’s the dream bucket who works at the Eidetic Mall.
No one has branches like her, such cognitive glue.
The Gnostics hid their coins in her like a bad cave.
I mean:
Remember the bully with the “magical matches”? The one with the mesh hat, who smelled like bait and orange soda and punched like a bookcase?
The one with a black guitar named Antelope?
Remember his chicken wing tattoo?
The one who could only sleep if there was a motorcycle within 50 feet of his hut?
Todd?
He’s married to Sally!
All he does now is sleep and wonder.
And sleep and sleep and sleep and eat and sleep.
Gregory Lawless is the winner of the 2013 Orphic Prize for Poetry and the author of Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming). His poems have appeared in such places as Pleiades, Third Coast, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Sixth Finch, Gulf Stream, The Bakery, and Verse Daily. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.