P. Edward Cunningham is a Western Pennsylvanian who currently serves as Asst. Managing Editor of literary magazine, SLAB and Managing Editor of Radioactive Moat, an online literary arts magazine. He writes screenplays and poems and some of those poems are forthcoming in Neon and Open Thread. A book of essays, This Boy, This Broom, will be published by BatCat Press later this year.

All The Gone

we said: all the grass and all the sand is gone. we took skin from the old. we’ve made a book of skin. we’ve remembered what humans feel like. we must remember the hands. the soft of shoulders and wrists. the smooth of a stranger’s back. the warmness.

we said: we must take the birds too. we must bind their feathers. i have kept one bird. it has forgotten its bird name. soon I will forget too.

i said: what do you want to be named, bird? the bird died in my hand before it could answer. i buried the nameless bird in the ocean. it looked peaceful inside. i’m sure it had trees and large worms. i’m sure it recalled its first marriage. the happiest one.

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Our Bodies And Our High Impact Styrene

I went to the supermarket--bought meat and
inside my car where the sun beat down my
ear rubbed against the lamb chops enveloped
in plastic. I listened for ghosts and stiff wires
on the fritz and talked like a notebook. The
lamb chops were these two dying boys I
remember meeting in a hospital during the
mid-nineties--they were siblings. The older
boy gave me an autograph book. The first
autograph was from his uncle and before he
passed out on his cot he explained how much
he idolized his uncle. Before sleeping he asked
me who I idolized. And I had no answer for
him. The lamb chops were beginning to stink
so I unwrapped them and set them on the
dashboard. They were full of pink heat. They
began baking and the car smelled like meat.
My uncle holding me down. I'm vomiting later.
The pink heat develops.