Darrell Petska

Vitruvian Man Enters a Bar

Where in this impious world is your symmetry, man,
with asteroids skimming our rooftops and the oceans hungry for land?
Godly tresses no longer become you.

If you open your legs enough and raise your hands enough,
know that your center is a bullseye and the region between your legs
a map of hyperspace with a spiderweb of coordinates roughed out
by Han Solo in a valiant attempt to avoid the Great Black Hole.

And haven’t you heard about the two-headed man who orders a drink
and the bartender asks which one of you is paying? Or maybe it was
a two-headed bartender so the man asks which one of you do I pay.

Nature is as relative as Einstein. Consider outlier man, unlike you,
whose measure from his knee to the root of his penis
is more than a quarter of his height—your tired assumptions
leading him to build his “right-proportioned” bar different from yours,

which relates to your woman problem:
if man is 24 palms and his bar reflects his measurements,
is there a bar that reflects woman’s? Undepicted and undeified,
could thirsty woman enter man’s bar? Could she even be seen?

I don’t know, man, but somewhere must sing the body virtual,
with duckweb feet or flippers and gills and worlds to match.
So a hologram man orders a drink at a hologram bar.
The hologram bartender says what’s the point, you’re not real.

James Croal Jackson

Cashing Out

White plate spinning
on the head of summer
god: boredom

in the breath of grass
illusion, green
in brain, in wiles, wet-

rag fingertips pressed
against nose, sanitation
breath, crater of spirit, the

less mortal, the mightier
morals, if what you have
is less than you entered.