in parentheses

A poet based in Cape Cod, Brian Pilling has been published in The Main Street Rag, The Berkshire Review, Cutbow Quarterly, Down In The Dirt, New Pop Lit, Hidden Peak Press, and elsewhere. Brian has two forthcoming chapbooks, The Poet’s Struggle & A Substitute Algebra Teacher with a Penchant for Poetry.

IT MUST BE DIFFICULT IN UTOPIA, TEXAS THESE DAYS

if you sport an undercut and a nose piercing, betraying the rolling green hills—hills climbed by black snakes, as a reenactment of the original sin—in that other pristine garden. You can almost hear the strained verses of church hymns, strains of underachievement, when the entire choir drops out in the eighth grade—flipping off the American dream. Their gym teacher, cute bangs, the perfect nose, knee-length skirt, steps on toes while dancing the dance once called a waltz—now called a banned movement. They point to her rowdy hips, her pouty lips. It’s easy to accuse a teacher of indoctrination—just pick from the list of sacred cows.

A LITTLE GIRL ALL GROWN UP DECIDES TO JOIN A CULT—WELL NOT SO MUCH DECIDES AS FALLS INTO

I remember her on training wheels—whitewalls, white handlebar grips, white tassels. Today she rides off a cliff, like in the Saturday morning cartoons we used to watch side by side. The same blank look the villainess made—the earth lost beneath her feet—fast pedaling on an absent bicycle, becoming reacquainted with gravity. Imagining a commercial break, my daughter, her niece, the art school graduate—the one she had no use for—pulls paintbrushes from a recycled coffee can. She paints her aunt in a soft explosion of tumbleweed and sand. Not all artists would be so kind—there’s usually no forgiveness on the canyon floor—the fall from grace unbroken by a pile of dry bones, decay quickened by hellish heat, the previous week’s crooks and beer-gutted philosophers who proudly waved the stars and bars, and other flags of insurrection. I tell her, “Night falls in the desert only as COLD HARD TRUTH.”

PRIVILEGE

A brow beaten Uncle Sam steps into decaying storefronts, through shaky front doors armed with brass clangors. In America there is no ceiling, where once saggy tiles precariously clung to enameled grids. Floors are a scuff of dusty footprints—the dustbin of history rewritten, then resold like Chinese fireworks—a jumble of costume broaches, blue not topaz, red not ruby, clusters of white rhinestones—the medals of war, stripes of forgotten meanings, carved ivory pipes smelling of rotten tobacco, pocket watches no longer keeping up with time. I imagine the founder’s wives, stiff and starchy, standing on crooked legs, always clutching well-worn pearls, as if to inherit the religion of necklaces. I imagine their prayers—the tarnish is opalescence rubbed away by guilt, passed down as ancestral artifacts, crafted to disguise a theft. Aisle after aisle, haphazard piles of hardware, books by forgotten authors and historians, postcards of demolished landmarks, photographs of a family whose surnames dead ended, patchwork quilts and porcelain dolls from which love has been withdrawn. Here, peg-boarded mountings; a trophy fish with missing teeth, a sword sheathed to hide the unimaginable, oil portraits of slain presidents, and the crucified Jesus. On every wall, out of level shelves—a bowling trophy (the perfect 300 game) and an absurd array of empty pharmaceutical bottles and milk glass bowls—to hold the plastic fruits of our labors.

In Parentheses Literary Magazine (Volume 10, Issue 1) October 2025

By In Parentheses in Volume 10

48 pages, published 10/15/2025

The October 2025 issue of In Parentheses Literary Magazine.