Queer-Southern with View of Beef Plant Ramp
You die faster if you can’t find a metaphor . . .
–Alex Dimitrov
Also, simile leads to febrility. Back up my claim?
The ‘as’ muscle teethes on the cerebellum like
salesmen noshing QVC porn. I’m more deviant
than I come across with my plastic spoons and
almond milk, my representation button jammed
on repress, this being Mississippi where someone
as queer as me needs word layers lest the wrong
person confirms my pastiche, landmines even
when I buy laundry soap. You want metaphor
pathologized, zinger breathing a Puritan sore.
I could go on like Parisian furniture or nitrates
in love—kills me when a simile’s wrong
as sybil kudzu or butcher wearing rain
boots in the face of such carcass elation,
bivouac meaning y’all in smothered schism.
Jon Riccio is a PhD graduate from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Recent work appears in Gris-Gris, Inverted Syntax, and The Ocean State Review, among others. A 2018 Lambda Poetry Fellow, he received his MFA from the University of Arizona.