by Sean Kilpatrick
DFC
My instructor at the Detroit Film Center
had had his name spelled wrong on one Spike Lee joint.
He wrote ‘weak’ across the script I submitted.
His script’s exordium consisted of nonlinear flash edits.
Damn near thirty, can’t skip sleep like I use to, he would reiterate.
Then he and I had a twenty-minute summative conference,
the apotheosis of which was that the movie Butterfly Kiss (1995)
was not the movie Under the Skin (1997).
Condescension met aspersion,
ablating my minimum wage paychecks.
The degree came as an annotated palimpsest
on a parking ticket.
FED
A fed neighbor interviewed me on an emergency ride to school.
I wanna do standup, I said. I find I’m the butt of most jokes,
regardless. Might as well get out ahead. Where ya from?
Ever think ‘why was I brainwashed to blow into a recorder?’
They trained those notes a bit too aggressively.
What’s the Manchurian premise here? Wocka-wocka.
So, anyway, I used to steal the folded-up posters
inside video game rental boxes because no one used them,
that okay?
Later, he pointed a gun at our dog.
He owned three nice cars, practiced a radio-voice,
and was about to move somewhere reasonable
when headquarters said he could.
My friend’s knee had been
impaled on a strip of rebar.
Cast upended, parsing dried ligament,
fibromuscular cartilage shed from his meniscus
could be manipulated with a finger.
We invited the fed to
slip off his rings
and dive in.
****
Sean Kilpatrick's writing has been featured in Boston Review, The Quietus, Columbia Poetry Review, Vice, Bomb, LIT, Ex Pat, and Fence.