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Scars Publications

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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of Down in the Dirt magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.

Down in the Dirt v057

this writing is in the collection book
Decrepit Remains
(PDF file) download: only $9.95
(b&w pgs): paperback book $18.92
(b&w pgs):hardcover book $32.95
(color pgs): paperback book $75.45
(color pgs): hardcover book $88.45
 Decrepit Remains, the 2008 Down in the Dirt collection book
A Horrible Red Smear

Steve De France

��I judiciously select salad stuff,
vegetables, potatoes.
Passing frozen treats,
I fail.
I snatch a pint of vanilla ice
cream, rolled in crunchy Heath bar
parts. I contemplate ice cream,
ruminating in my soon-to-be-
plugged-up arteries.
My heart, my blood pressure.
Death by dessert.
Behind me, someone starts
using a cart as battering ram,
trying to shove it up my ass.
Behind the offending cart,
an ancient lady smiles under blue hair.
Lots of costume jewelry&lipstick:
blood red&lopsided. Comic, really.
What the hell, it’s the season.
“Happy Kwanza,” I say.
“Merry Christmas,” she says.
Her teeth slip as she smiles.

��We wait like lambs for the line to
move, I stare absently through her caged
basket. There in the middle of the
white tile floor—cart wheels
rolling by—barely missing him,
sits a fat orange spider with
long delicate looking legs.
Waiting. Forlorn.
Tentative. Vulnerable.

��Shoes scrape past.
Motionless it waits.

��A close grinding of wheels
—he makes a run for it.
Straight for the Hi-Ho Crackers.
God, let him make it.
The lady with loose teeth
staggers backward&squashes
him under foot, but regains her balance.

��He leaves a small red smear.
Across webbed-streets I drive
reflecting on spiders&other parallel life forms
who have tried to share this planet with us.

��I hear—maybe feel a universal sound.
It reverberates through my bones in the darkness.
Cracking sounds of celestial wheels grinding,
things coming apart, in a higher parallel universe.

��The sky jerks—bringing a sudden faltering in the stars,
as an indifferent step from a mighty blue-haired God
stumbles toward us, her teeth slipping,
her nylons falling around her veined ankles,
and her lipstick leaving a horrible red smear.



Scars Publications


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