Stream of Unconsciousness: Whales, Unicorns, & Another White Jesus
When I squeezed the toothpaste tube this morning, a unicorn oozed out onto the floor, creamy & butch like the hairy man next door who speaks to me only on garbage day. Of particular interest was the horn, a calloused outgrowth of secondary epidermis, a coalition of cells with an eye that winked at me like a well-defined lighthouse beacon. It was that kind of day. Our unit supervisor informed us via email that end-of -the-year bonuses had been canceled due to a downturn in corporate production. My great aunt’s caregiver, a little twit from Idaho who has her beady eyes on my great aunt’s money, sent a text that she had taken a turn for the worse but it wasn’t necessary for me to be there yet. My friend in Norway called to tell me that his mother had been bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat in her seaside cottage. And when I got home at day’s end, I discovered that the cat had thrown up in five different locations. The leftover soup I planned to warm for dinner was molded so I made a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich instead. I found a mouse in my bed when I tuned down the covers and I tasted blood from the oral surgery I had two days ago. I dreamed of capsizing into the Arctic Ocean out of a rib boat while searching for whales who sprayed all of us with a sticky mammalian glue. When I squeezed the toothpaste tube, there were no red stripes, just toothpaste, plain & white just like all the images of Jesus.
JOHN DORROH once wrote a poem while sitting in a red wooden chair that had been placed atop a small mountain along the Ring Road in Iceland. He’s also written poems in candlelight in the basement, waiting on a tornado to pass. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Hundreds of others appeared in over 125 journals, including Feral, Kissing Dynamite, River Heron, Many Nice Donkeys, and Pif. He makes his home in southwest Illinois not far from St. Louis.
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