Run-off Sugar

Crystal Lake

\\\

The hunger makes me lightheaded. We fuck through holes in our unitards. A smile carved in your cheeks. Your cat makeup. Dripping.

Teeth like candy corns.

My wig is red synthetic fibers. It’s on fire. I scream at the TV in the dressing room mirror. I lick the security camera. I sing the national theme song:

Bargain prices.

Fire in the drug den.

Fire in the migrant van.

Fire in the Amazon.

My urethra is loose and spills urine abundantly. It could use a tightening. A torque-it.

In the paradigm where production becomes the sole unit of appraisal for one’s life, Art becomes the twin of Death.

The health insurance rep eats my shriveled foreskins. Fork. Masque. Cotillion.

\\\\

Sun scream. No filter. Lake bake. Face full of beetles. Scales.

I think the drugs are kicking in.

A moonscape where the lake completely dried. Piano wire. Cow pies. Tootsie roll lumps seethe on your skin.

Stalk the campsite. Nothing under my mascot suit. I’m the Forest Fire Bear! Pinch my udders red. Fear. Athlete’s foot.

Gasoline.

Hash inhaled through a hollowed pelvis. Ramshackle hut in the woods in which I store my trophies. Jerseys. Clipboards.

Lore ended when everything became the news. My face plastered all over handbags at Fashion Week.

\\\\\

Crayon paste in commissary Smucker’s®. Snickers in intercoms

all night long.

Bodies torn through like toilet paper.

Teeth gyres. Pig parades.

In one sense, everyone should aspire to be president. In another, nobody should.

Everyone should strive to write the country’s tome. To sing its song & carve it into its tomb.

When I was a kid the pinnacle sexual experience I could imagine would be to be devoured whole.

Nothing’s really changed. I’m just a little older.

America.




Logan Berry is Artistic Director of the Runaways Lab, a Chicago-based experimental theater troupe, and on the leadership team of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their typewriters who compose poetry on demand. He works the graveyard shift at a residential treatment facility for at-risk youth. His libretto, NASIM BLEEDS GREEN, is forthcoming from Plays Inverse.


Photograph of performance by Leif Holmstrand.