The Tour(ette's) Guide by Shawn Misener

This is my sixteenth glass of orange juice, and the sixteenth glass that has shattered before I can lift it to my mouth. These dry and quivering lips have grown impatient and are threatening to spew expletives in Portuguese.

I am of course naked, my skin sticky sweet and matted with pulp. The walls are on fire, as they should be, my frustration turning dragon. There is a woman in here- I am never alone- but she is fully clothed in Detroit Derby Dolls gear and stands at a modest seven inches tall.

I turn to her and sigh, “Are you the one doing this to me?”

She cackles like a demon, her bellow cutting through the smoke. “Who the fuck do you think I am? That chick from The Hunger Games? Legolas? Cupid? Any old coot with a bow and arrow?”

“I think you are some kind of evil bitch, and I would appreciate it if you crawled up my ass now.”

She languidly sits at the edge of the coffee table and dangles her bruised legs in a violently playful rhythm. “Hmmm,” she muses. “Back where I came from?”

“Back where you came from,” I hiss, nodding imperceptibly.

The South wall crumbles from the flames, thousands of neon embers billowing up and settling into constellations above us. I find myself standing, with a new glass of juice in one hand, the other one flailing behind me, trying to grab her. She is suddenly normal size, no bigger than that, a freakish giant, squatting behind me and working her forearm into my anus.

A disturbingly unreal scream escapes me in the form of a cacophony of cuckoo clocks chiming all at once. . . underwater. The glass again shatters and I use both hands in a poor attempt to extract her from inside me.

Her voice smashes into my earholes: “HOW FAR WE HAVE COME, HOW FAR WE CAN GO, I'M IN THIS SHIT, UP TO MY ELBOW.”

And she's in. The world feels perfect again, clean, delineated by straight lines and Febreeze.

I'm sitting on the couch, watching the fireplace and thinking that maybe this was the most symmetrical and pleasing wood stacking job I've ever accomplished. The fire seems content with its balance. The pictures of my eight children smile back at me, so evenly spaced, so full of goodness. I resist the urge to rearrange them in alphabetical order. The first week of the month is always by age, the second by melatonin concentration, the third by income, and not until next week do they line up by name.

I slowly swallow the orange juice, wishing I had a straw to protect my teeth from the acid. When I belch, it's her laughing. She wants me to check the lock on the door. She wants me to shout random words. She wants me to blink and blink and blink and blink. She wants me to execute the tic where I rub my eyebrows until they bleed.

“COCKSUCKER! TERRIFIC PIZZA! COCKSUCKER!” I yell, jumping from the couch to the rug. I know that she's satisfied, somewhere in there. She's satisfied as hell and she has a cool grip on my thalamus.

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Shawn Misener lives in Michigan.  His chapbooks include Dry Humping a Fire Hydrant and In Your Face(book), and he edits the absurdist blogazine Clutching at Straws.

Copyright Shawn Misener
Artwork by Max Ernst

The Finding Smile by Shawn Misener

He was a smile. The rest of him was almost transparent, barely a glimmer of form, but his gaping grin shone so intensely that it provided a distraction from everything else missing.

My mother gave her all to convince him to be a politician. My sister begged on bleeding knees for him to give her head. I just needed somebody to help me find things.

I handed him the list of lost items. He quickly looked it over, then swallowed it whole with that magnificent, glowing mouth. “We'll look for your sense of humor first,” he said.

It took six days in the jungle until we finally had leads. He negotiated with birds so colorful they made crayons leap from cliffs. He threatened enormous snakes, and when they didn't cooperate he'd clench their jaws between his gleaming teeth and swing them around like weed whackers.

We finally stumbled upon the End of the Earth. A beautiful sight for sure, the red yolk of sun framing his levitating smile, bright upon brighter. Hovering closer, he whispered “Look in your pants. The secret to humor is nestled softly down there.”

So we began the frightful journey back home. By law I was required to go without my trousers or underwear. To refuse would invalidate the rediscovery of comedy. He took hold of my shaft and used it to point us toward the highway.

In this way he guided us out of the jungle and home to my wife, where I proceeded to make love to her with all kinds of sarcastic thrusts. Orgasmic laughter all around. “I'm sure glad you followed that smile,” she later sighed, sweat dripping from her chin to her clavicle.

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Shawn Misener lives in Michigan.  His chapbooks include Dry Humping a Fire Hydrant and In Your Face(book), and he edits the absurdist blogazine Clutching at Straws.

Copyright Shawn Misener
Artwork by Picasso 

Cactus Subconscious by Shawn Misener

I'm bouncing along the desert like a rubber ball, deftly avoiding cactus after angry cactus. My pants are soaked with scorpion juice.
      The voice in the sand: "If it has soul you must funk it."
      The field of geysers has turned to carbonation. A bubbling tribute to the three clouds suspended in the air. What does a cloud feel like when swallowed?
      Below, the army of Southwestern poets begins to gather. One by one they set up shop: Rusty typewriters, old booze, loose tobacco, and pissy attitudes. Flailing through the sky I see them as they skeptically measure me up.
      "He won't be up there for long," they croak, sharing nods and commiserating huffs. The clacking of atomic words explodes from their fingers. They blast away my abstractions with sex, drugs, and indie rock.
      "See you when you fall," they sing.
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Shawn Misener lives in Michigan.  His chapbooks include Dry Humping a Fire Hydrant and In Your Face(book), and he edits the absurdist blogazine Clutching at Straws.

Copyright Shawn Misener
Artwork by Carlo Carra

Harvesting Brains Pastoral by Shawn Misener

The sky is red and violent and the skinny farmer digs up brains with his shovel.

      Pitching them from the earth they shriek in Morse code. A bawdy secretary languishes behind the farmer, translating the squealing gray matter and scratching her rectangular nose obsessively.

     As each rusted wheelbarrow fills with minds a donkey appears and slouches away with the load. "Fourteen thousand eight hundred and twenty seven" counts the secretary in whispers born under the prairie wind.

     Somewhere behind the far distant trees a monstrous fog horn bellows. Both the farmer and the secretary vanish in identical puffs of heavy dust, leaving behind brains strewn around like so much neglected cauliflower.

     A vacuous, slow moment.

     Then a new farmer appears, the atmosphere popping violently in his arrival, followed by another short-skirted secretary, her glasses askew and eyes cocked in confusion.

     The second shift begins when the farmer scoops his first brain. The sky reluctantly shades from maroon to a painful deep purple, the clouds wrench themselves into loose threatening coils, and the secretary bends an elven ear towards the multitudes of pleading encephalitic vegetables.


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Shawn Misener lives in Michigan.  His chapbooks include Dry Humping a Fire Hydrant and In Your Face(book), and he edits the absurdist blogazine Clutching at Straws.


Copyright Shawn Misener
Artwork by Leonora Carrington

Robots Make Our Food by Shawn Misener

“This is where we suck the skin off the beasts,” remarks the General, pointing to a small white tube dangling from the ceiling. “We coat the mouthpiece with mushroom sauce, and as soon as they wrap their stinky bulbous lips around it... VROOOP! No more skin.”

He leads us over to an electrified holding pen, where several skinned beasts meander, bouncing off one another and yelping squeamishly. The General smiles and points to them with his bone cane. “These are the skinless sows. Watch what happens when I press this button.” He taps a tiny button with the cane and the floor releases, sending the beasts into the void with the force of a public restroom toilet. Rousing applause booms from speakers mounted on the fence.

“Thank you, thank you,” says the General, bowing.

The tiny pink woman touring with me pipes up, “Isn't it the truth, Herr General, that robots make our food? What do you say to that?”

“You bitch!” He sings, pounding the top of her bald head with his cane. “Where do you think you are? Afmenistan? Turkily? This is 'Merica! We invented robots.” Breathing deeply and adjusting his robes, he whistles. The entire facility rumbles upon the grand entrance of a metallic ball the size of a three-story Victorian. It saunters up next to us, and I feel compelled to hop the fence and join the beasts in their doom.

The General laughs. “This what happens when you roll all the robots into one! A Katamari! You guys want some dinner?”

The Baby with Monster Truck Wheels by Shawn Misener

The baby has no legs.  Just monster truck wheels.

She rolls around the yard, fifteen feet high.  Nine months old, such amazing control.

Grandpa sets up some things for her to crush.  The old Gremlin. Al's doghouse.  That dilapidated barn.

Baby has the spirit.  We can hear her cooing from down here. Under the porch.

We start to wonder if the electric fence can hold her in.   She's taken to killing the sheep and sucking them up with a drain pipe.  The once cute baby noises now sound monstrous.

Somebody needs to call Frank.  The pediatrician who fixes cars on the side.

If there's a storm rolling in we might be able to make a break for it.  She's bound to run out of gas one of these days.
 
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Shawn Misener lives in Michigan.  His chapbooks include Dry Humping a Fire Hydrant and In Your Face(book), and he edits the absurdist blogazine Clutching at Straws. 

Copyright 2013 Shawn Misener