Philip Byron Oakes


Amerikan Polka

Asthmatic rhetoric urbanely conquistador grating cheese. And then frogmen legs like Betty Grable, mottled to complement the rajah of la-di-da, no longer clicky clacking their porcelain heels. It’s true. A bluster of belief in the city’s faint odor of lizard droppings, wafting like a third world carnival ride, into the anticlimactic sphere of what’s left of Schenectady. An oncologist plotting the arc of the covenant to breathe. The getting wet. Swimming language with loopholes. Beyond the pale of anorexic teenagers. Tinhorn anesthesiologists, promoting amphetamines at a birthday party for inclement weather; not the copilot, the time of day written on the palm of his hand, nor the unkempt cosmetician leaving elbow room for the beauty of life. The too loose to be worn in public falling into craters of suggestion. A parked car on the interstate luring Floridian playboys to yodel biblical text into the frantic naivete of early evening. Tegucigalpa and a toucan on a stick. A kamikaze refrigerator, bringing the whole house down to where the brittle people live, like like is love, and love is a house haunted with incompatible chocolates, and a passenger pigeon on the breath of an inimitable missionary wearing his hair just so.

Outer Skirts

Splicing of events growing frayed under a scrutiny of spindles. Peek-a-boo in retrospective indemnity. The glutinous remedies trickling, a parody of tears. The rudely hoisted land. Fish eyed mutineers, launching paper boat manifestoes, a silk of sayonaras godspeeding a lonesome word from the front. A run on the banks of the river. The fauve gaze, a cryptic tide of newly dirtied verbs, a plentitude of color’s stooges grown gray. Elephantine, come pocket sized to the party. The fat side of someday. Blunt slickered with brilliantine, a prickly rhetoric of undercurrents turning tides to symphonic movements for change. A coterie of narcissists, voluntarily bolstering the ranks of an army of one. A wisp of atoms eroding beneath the feet of a track star. A swallowing of old angular prides, the roof of the bubble built to float, as the lizards sun on the rocks of creation to assure the children of the continuity of time.

Philip Byron Oakes’ work has previously appeared (and is presently viewable on the internet) in Sawbuck(1.6), Horse Less Review(5), Otoliths(6 and 8) , GlitterPony(3), Hamilton Stone Review(12), Euphemism(3.1), and he presently has work scheduled for publication in Cricket Online Review, Snow Monkey and My Name is Mud.

 
 
 
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