By Bobby Parrott
Why do we do this? We don’t know. No one knows. We’re stuck in a Dr. Seuss hardback.
We can’t just pop off the page. We’re all in a lockstep sequence, part of a mechanized
subconscious, puppets of community sneakers. Every family in town lines up thru the
square leading up the hill where the one machine churns out a new sky from each load.
The great appliance’s cubbies rotate and while the neighbors’ wash zaps the heavens in
soft pastels of foggy neon chartreuse laced in purple floral stars and planets, the oohs and
yipes reverberate thru the populace, quiescent, orderly in their cue. Each child (and we’re
all children) holds a paradoxical lollipop that smells and tastes like their favorite flavor of
Kool-Aide, and the electronic display above their head activates the flavorings, warbles
like those tapes the Beatles play backward in the middle of a song to be surreal. Lucien
and I worry whether our dirty clothes are advanced in turn toward insertion, where the
flaked dead skin cells relax their grips on the fabric, the machine’s soapy agitation frees
the dirt and grime from its hiding, and our family adds to the groovy sky-works, Peter
Max Yellow Submarine in riotous pinks and fractalized zoomies of ultramarine, lemon
yellow, and some new color’s ascending orbs in a tango no one can follow without doing
ocular somersaults. Everyone calls this way cool, but then pulls out their phones anyway.
About the Author
Bobby Parrott is radioactive, but for how long? This queer poet’s epiphany concerns the intentions of trees, and now his poems enliven dreamy portals such as Tilted House, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Rabid Oak, Diphthong, Neologism, and elsewhere. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.
Nebulous 