from The Invention of Monsters / A Performance in One Act

[scene]

The world’s as dark as someone painted it. A hawk eating its own wings. A man in a cat suit killing an actual cat. No one knows how the weapons got here and no one asks. My mouth is bandages. (Where is the doctor. Someone get the doctor.) There is nothing to be afraid of says the man with the megaphone. The man looks like my father but he is not. He wears my father’s shirt.

[scene]

As if they are not men. Photographs with the heads cut out. I walk where once there was a garden. I get so lonely walking. I wear all the bodies I love. I see the gnawed torso of a rabbit and get the feeling I am eating it. On the day the soldier dies, a woman spills wine on a white dress. A piano plays itself in the empty mall. The weather holds.

[scene]

Actual fire in a paper house, the sound of children laughing. Hair growing quietly away from the body. Souls float near each other as if asleep. Faces like exploded daffodils. I fall in love without even trying. No Americans were hurt.

[scene]

An ill wind that blows nothing. Girls and boys exchanging body parts, drowning in the same earth. The voice of so many dogs. Close your eyes, it hurts less if you close your eyes. A boy who is a girl might be an elephant. The traffic lights blink to indicate a malfunction. Nobody is crying. An entire future bright with red.

[scene]

The house is a former version of itself. The telephone rings in the former basement. My pulse is a lighthouse. Hundreds of moths beating inside a paper bag. My hands are pockets inside my pockets. I follow the ringing down the formerly winding stair. When I find the telephone it is a crying baby. I answer the crying baby. The voice on the other line is my voice, also crying.

[scene]

An entire city is projected onto a screen which is a woman’s dress. Ghosts line up like an orchard. A ghost wears the haircut of whom it loves the most. I see a ghost in the bottom of a bowl and I tap it with a spoon.

C. Dylan Bassett currently attends the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is the author of five forthcoming chapbooks, Some Futuristic Afternoons (Strange Cage), Lake Story (Thrush Press), and No Audience (alice blue press), One Continuous Window (Mouthfeel Press), and The Invention of Monsters, co-written with Summer Ellison (iO Books). His recent poems are published/forthcoming in journals such as Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Inter/rupture, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and Verse Daily. He’s received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Stadler Center for Poetry, the Morrie Moss Foundation and the University of Iowa. He co-edits likewise folio / likewise books.