DREW KREWER

from Ars Warholica

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You were a boy with the right

to weep and wept

you did in various ways.

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Bubbles iridesce from your wand

to blazon their razzle-dazzle

over the house in Sylvester.

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Broadcast your sick-bed collage

into smog-adorned skies.  Breath––

enough to speak the story.

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“Where did I come from?” screenprinting itself

as lectures on pollen locomotion.

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Everybody’s doing

a brand new dance now

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but they’ve pom-pommed you

into a corner for the skips

you cause in music.

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Let’s twist again

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let’s dress the bed in aluminum

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count my thread

‘til I cough up rubies.

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Dress again, again.

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Pluck yourself into elaborate boas.

The audience laughing because they’ve paid.

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Your dressing room provides seizures of light,

the little bird machine nude and repeating itself.

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You are not saddened by its naked stutter

because it isn’t real.

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A lovely stiletto spritzer

effervesces over the boulevard

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movement punctuated by fizz

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Hi-top frivolity veers

a stolid sports car red.

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Red, a pink for boys.

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Why bother fashioning the permissible?

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The marvelous must continue its performance

pulsing stimuli through petals.

No time to trace for radices.

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The flowers won’t remember how it happened.

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The literal igniting your father with knives.

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Comfort food in the kitchen

lumenesced in flamingo hues.

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Finding myself explicit is a taxing production.

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High-heel eruption over Pittsburgh,

threats of mythic magma glow.

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Beautiful dreamers make beautiful flames.

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Your father was a clown teaching fire safety.

A fireman cracking jokes about fire.

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Entertainers provide the foulest advice.

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I have come from the future

to line the halls in neon light.

I will save you by the bell

by my knack for the synaptic.

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Try your future on until it arrives.

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It will alight on your shoulder, a little chirping

machine covered in meadows

of Technicolor feather.

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Clouds have unbuttoned

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shock of aqua cleavage.

Boys cannot handle such color.

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They have lost the ball in tall electric grasses;

I’ve promised them you’ll help: you don’t.

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Boys are khaki nightmares

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Do not force me to taupe it up

in the clown shroud

of America’s Favorite Pastime.

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It’s the Good Ship Lollipop

and a celluloid Shirley scarf

encircles your neck.  A sapphire

ocean littered with candy wrappers.

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Am I an entertainer?

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Your tears coalesce to form a disco ball,

blinding the children

before they spill from their locomotion.

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Look at the surface, and all you’ll see is me.

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They Brillo the sidewalk

Confetti falls in a light and fabulous coat

yellow busses undeserving of such glamour

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I’m a mess but you love to mop me up.

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Teachers transmitting to Mom

with a news anchor’s flair for scare

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I cried and cried and arrived

at something resembling drag.

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America is a clod of dirt

that cannot paint its chest

or spill cheap beer.

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Baseball needs a real diamond

one that blinds me in the bleachers

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parents ra-rah for sparkles

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I am starstruck

by this spectacular and horrifying love.

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Audiences will adore you

until their candy’s gone.

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Don’t worry, Shirley.  When I’m around

garland self-ignites.

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Your presence shifts my internal chandelier,

and I shock into a firework

frozen in bright pose.

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I reflect for miles on water.

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Water, and a parent

made of wrappers blowing away.

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Drew Krewer’s work has appeared in Poor Claudia, Pequod, Quick Fiction, andHanging Loose. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and has attended the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. He received his BA in Creative Writing and English from Oberlin College and his MFA from Universityof Arizona. He currently resides in Tucson, where he dreams of imported palm trees and illuminated swimming pools. He blogs at Mars Poetica.