you’ll be happy to know i started taking telekinesis classes at the local community college

Now I can move things with nothing more than a strongly held belief. Small things. A sparrow fibula. The blades on a baseball-sized patch of Kentucky bluegrass. Children’s scribbles taped to the fridge. It takes a lot of concentration to clench your brain like a fist. To focus your gaze on a single point until you start to smell smoke. My professor thinks I show real promise. She said I have chutzpah. She said I have what it takes. She never once said that I “refuse to take anything seriously.” Just yesterday I was this close to mentally unscrewing the cap on the Montblanc 149 you didn't know you left under the couch. That takes dedication. That takes commitment. You probably don’t believe me but pretty soon I’ll be able to cook your chicken piccata with extra capers from the other side of the room. Wave my fingers to make the hands on our clock scream backward, barely strain as I squeeze out all that wasted time like a wet rag.

the princess and the pea

When the guards finally removed the green sphere from just below her twenty-first mattress, it was the size of a child’s skull. See, the Princess said, I’m not crazy. This was impossible of course. Something in the expensive royal air, something emanating inside all that scorched hay and densely woven linen, had caused this pea to expand to its present proportion. But the Princess didn’t care, she was off the hook, free as a Carolina Wren. She carried the girthy pea through town, showed it off to lord and serf alike. But it kept growing. Soon it became too big for her arms. For her pigskin handbag. For the King’s most sturdy chariot, the one with pole shafts molded out of fresh-spun gold. It outgrew her powder room. Outgrew the Queen’s most ornate topiary. Eventually it expanded to such size that it was pulled into orbit, a second moon broadcasting a pale green pall over the kingdom. The townspeople prayed to it every night. They bayed like the arctic wolf. Pleasured themselves as they lapped up its supplementary luminescence with their sandpaper tongues.

sisterhood

Each night my sister turns into a pineapple. Tingling arm hairs crystalize into fine barbs. Her blonde bob a small clump of pointed fronds, violent to the touch. Her muscles, her fat, her large intestine, all transform into butter yellow slabs of sweet scented meat. She asks me to change too. Begs me every evening. The clasped hands, the quivering lip, the whole megillah. I say no chance. All that cutting-slicing-digging-skinning just to get close to something worthwhile. Still, once the sky has closed its magical eye, I lie stiff as rosewood, boring holes into our leaky ceiling with my paralyzed glare, wondering if she’s right. What if it’s great? What if it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for? What if it changes everything?






Ben Starr studied poetry in college and as part of the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, Bruiser, Dishsoap Quarterly, HAD, Maudlin House, Gone Lawn, Scaffold, and other journals.

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