Mugshots

A shingle, glittering gray
and rough as sandpaper,

peeled from the roof
by the wind and slapped

at the feet of a chalk outline
of a child's shadow 

traced on the pavement
beside a black Tbird 

with its hood propped,
engine ticking in the sun.

The Pride of the Wolverines

        After the parade, the street is littered with porcupine quills scattered like pick-up sticks across the asphalt. City workers pull on thick gloves to remove the splintery sawhorses that block the traffic. The crowd has dispersed rather suddenly A small child squats amongst the popped ballonskins and silly string, spelling out his name in quills. He tugs at his mother's hand but she is busy texting a message to her sister. That's nice, Honey, she says, never taking her eyes off the little screen. The plod of an exhumed Sousa march still echoes lethargically between the buildings as the last band staggers around the corner and collapses. 
     Thirty years pass. The porcupines have conquered the nation. In the basement of an abandoned Woolworth's on the outskirts of Detroit, the son stretches his arm through the bars and gently bumps the stump of his wrist against his mother's. He nudges his bowl of pine needle soup toward her, urging her to eat. The swill is congealed and cold, but still it's sustenance, and they take turns bending low and slurping from the bowl without a word.

Cleave

An early spring storm brought down 
one of the big elms on the corner. 
A woman was trapped beneath it briefly, 
cradled between its branches but
swiftly rescued without a scratch. 
The upper limbs of the tree, not yet budding, 
came to rest against the old stone church 
across the street, shattering one 
of the stained glass windows. 
A single squirrel darted up and down 
the trunk for a while 
before finally disappearing 
through the narrow aperture 
into the building. 
I stood there thinking about you 

as city workers set flares in the road 
and strung up a web of yellow caution tape. 
Rainwater filled the hole where the roots had been. 
Soon the chainsaws would start up, 
followed by the grind and munch 
of the woodchipper reducing 
the toppled giant to sawdust 
as inside the church, a small furry creature 
darted beneath the pews, its tiny heart 
pounding wildly in the dark. 

A few notes on The Glandelinians

This project sprouted from a longtime desire to create comics that work more like poems than stories. In the past, I’ve failed miserably in achieving this goal, and I’m forced to admit that this most recent attempt is also a failure, having ended up looking more like a traditional comic book narrative than I’d hoped. Part of the problem was no doubt the breakneck speed at which it was created. Once I had the basic concept (which was “attempt to redeem the character of John Manley and show that those goody-two-shoes Vivian girls are not really the innocent little darlings that they've previously been made out to be”), I made the whole thing up as I went along, posting pages the day (or the day after) they were completed.

All the characters are the creation of artist/author Henry Darger, with the exception of Elsie Paroubek, a young child who went missing and was found suffocated to death in Chicago in 1911. Darger really did lose a newspaper photograph of the poor girl, and his resulting distress triggered many of the events depicted in his 15,000 page magnum opus In the Realms of the Unreal. In this lavishly illustrated novel, the saintly Vivian Princesses lead a child-slave revolt against their evil, godless overlords the Glandelinians on an unnamed planet around which the Earth orbits like a satellite.   

I’d like to thank everyone for indulging me in this experiment, which I’ll leave up on the blog until the end of the month before making room for new work. As usual I welcome any feedback and/or criticism, which you can either leave here or send me directly at carrioncall@gmail.com.

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