Poetry 2nd Place - Literary LEO 2015

Everyone

by Emmaly Saliga

Everyone is fat

in the candy aisle, in lawn chairs tipped back like a kid class act, clown, crash cream-colored bell bottoms are a palette for pepto-bismol

makes you puke like pepsi makes you burp the alphabet bet me ten bucks you can; your easy bake oven can-can gulps air and spits out sugar sadness It comes in eight colors but it still feels gritty on your tongue

Everyone is rotting

like great quantities of sea air and dense branches Translates to sink golden into the ground The pain in your body goes to heaven with the victims

lucid and moaning from fetal position to skeleton excavations of a thin young woman in between went to heaven with the investment bankers who lied and cheated and went to church and took their wives to see the rockettes kick their seamless pantyhose parade when the snow lay thick outside

Everyone is taken into the asylum

All that’s there is charity, a shanked sense of ball and chain when a missionary woman knocks on the door, says you’re crazy. Tell her mad daddy runs the place, it’s not your fault your mind is filled with hazy

half-meanings that light up and sputter out like the lazy liquor-store sign at 1:00 am and tell her it smells like powder like you’re coughing all the time inside its dusty, musky, musty--it smells like her denial when the portrait of god you’re painting inside has eyes like blue summer dusk and turns its back on you