in parentheses

Jeffrey Park’s poetry has appeared most recently in UFO Gigolo, The Camel Saloon, streetcake, and the science fiction anthology Just One More Step from Horrified Press. A native of Baltimore, Jeffrey currently lives in Munich, Germany, where he works at a private secondary school. Links to all of his published work can be found at his website. You can read Jeffrey’s previously featured work on In Parentheses here!

BODY TALK

Here in the semi-darkness of my manly boudoir
I would introduce you to the wonder of my underarm,
place of concave curly mysteries,
promise of pulsing glandular activity and
Euclidean geometries, the rank trance-inducing
sweat lodge of our fathers’ fathers’ fathers.

Let me guide your fingertips softly, searchingly down
and over my trembling flank and my knobby
gnarly hip bone, bristling as it is with
unspent progenitive energy, and – daring still more –
down my hairy, bumpy illuminated thighs
to the ropy calves that will bind you to me forever.

Come closer now, enfold yourself in the sticky savor
of my hyperhidrosis. Drink from the chalice
of my collarbone. We have long hours until dawn
and the otherworldly landscapes of my body,
so myriad and so fascinating, defy you, dear
intrepid explorer, to fully plumb their mysteries.

CRAB

Crusty
feeling crabby
reflexively snapping my
display claw
scuttling
leaving tiny chevrons
in the sand
squirming ass backwards
into a coral reef
lashing my antennae
at passing fish
timing the vagrant tides
watching you
and waiting
for my shell
to get hard.

EQUESTRIAN SPIRIT

High time now for the cow-ladies
to saddle up their mounts,
girths pulled tight as ever can be,
put heel severely to rib
and charge out
into fields of gaily dancing wheat.

They don’t pause or glance back,
don’t whip their prodigious
ten-gallon hats
around with mad abandon,
they just race on across the broad
cultivated meadowlands,

leaving a broad swath of trampled
and fermenting grain,
like a sad mutilated daydream,
or the crushed hearts
of the very delicate gentlemen
who watch them from afar.

RADIANT

With each successive dawn
our life-giving sun grows visibly larger,
irregular blemishes spreading
in a sardonic leer across her roiling visage –
worms dig deep, birds slump
exhausted to the earth – as the seas
begin to evaporate, a cascade of glorious
rainbows spread across the heavens,
bending the scorching white light
into a palette of treacherous beauty
as we tumble into the zenith.

YOUR LIGHT

Your light
shining into my room
was refracted
bent beyond recognition
your indigos
reds
yellows
deep violets twisted round
one another
like stripes on a stick of
candy
but with determination
and the right tools
and a bit
of good honest elbow
grease
I managed to get them
to straighten out
fly right
and cast themselves
warm
and willing
onto the surface
of my monochromatic
bed.

Ben Quinn is a 2013 graduate from Columbus College of Art & Design and is currently applying to grad school. He grew up without structured religion and naturally gravitated to ancient cultures and UFOs at a young age. He has been researching, pursuing, and feeling many accelerated paranormal energies for years, and painting is a slate to share experiences.