originally published by Mojave Heart Review, 2019
resurrected by HAD, October 2021

After Cab Calloway’s Infamous Appearance
in Max Fleischer’s 1933 Animated Short, “Snow White” 

you realize the void you walk into is no longer a cave…right? The same den submerged in permafrost with x-ray prisms illuminating the carved faces of phantoms. It’s been draped over with tarp, drooping, sagging shroud scarred with cigarillo burns and splayed across piano key boneyards. The world is the same wasteland you left it as. The same land of tension you thought you’d escape when you tried to venture to the woods, and laid your body down, like a sponge absorbed into the cold, wet dirt. You sang your somber songs where your body topsy-turvyed its entrails and innards, morphed you into the ghost who hovers over the earth raising a bottle of booze to a raspy horn & allows his voice to scat & thump to the rhythm of demise // the demolition of a heartbeat // the world at large: a flying dutchman waiting to become an ancient tragedy. There aren’t enough movements to numb the parade of red, white, and blue nationalism. There aren’t enough moments of protest, to mask the fact that your belief in a world void of war, plague, famine, and corruption is still a fool’s wish. And there aren’t enough shooting stars, and plucked dandelion lashes to make this magic happen, and it’s a horror not even a phantom like you wants to confront. You sit here in this regretful pit transforming your fingers into claws, your feet, your legs a manifestation of gaseous formation. You anatomy lets loose a stampede of pale white horses thundering across the scorched earth terrain of your wriggled skin. You frantically mutter This can’t be happening several times pinching the ectoplasmic shell where your ass used to be, wondering if this future is just a drunken fever dream, with a mid-morning hangover to follow & not another reality you can’t call resting place.