Three American Geegaws
in a grand mal seizure induced by some Karens at Walmart
we honeymooned in the Watts Riots in a megaphone
we foresaw the future in Hunter Biden’s glass laptop
that’s us converting all our cats into hectopascals
me impersonating a slowly-rotating Rod Stewart
the two-headed peacock that’s allegedly fraudulent
she changed all her vowels into consonant clusters
she moved house to a box in a dead letter office
where I am left wandering the bayous & graves
Amy Adams travelled into the future for a Chinese cell number
where a Rubik’s Cube solved itself in Matt Damon’s fedora
as a poem is a puzzle missing pieces in a thrift store
at a second-blush meet-cute exposed gears of the planet
allowed us some deck-chairs on the coast of a chemist’s
where Westeros astrolabes made projections in Sanskrit
in domestic departures Elon Musk feared the po-po
the Ghost potter’s wheel had escaped from its jail cell
& wild ginger was blooming through splashes of sun storm
Lazy Susans dispensing teacup poodles for Maria Callas
the suicide machine on a t-shirt worn by the Carnegie Hall
Waiting for Godot on Broadway with the Lady & the Tramp
Marlee Matlin in a callback for the Gimp in Pulp Fiction
into exile in an endless event horizon of Porgy & Bess
the Miranda Rights read to Maxwell Smart’s shoe-phone
walla actors defecting to Argentina in an Evita-style shocker
a nervous tic crimping up John Dillinger’s death mask
re-casting The Remains of the Day in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
Clay Thistleton has previously appeared at Unlikely Stories as a character in John Bryan's epic Love has been Liquidated. Clay has taught creative writing and literary studies in universities, community colleges and not-for-profit organisations for almost two decades. He is the author of Noisesome Ghosts (Blart Books, 2018): an Elgin Award nominated collection of found poetry that investigates the phenomenon of ghosts and poltergeists that have the ability to speak or write. His current project, Never Mind the Saucers (Stranger Press, forthcoming), examines documented instances of alien-human sexual contact. Along with his son Dylan, Clay lives in New South Wales, Australia with a fluctuating number of feral cats.
