To draw the line of fire away from your deepest-held tenderness, or retrace your instincts of self-love beyond the fizzy tingle of your next thirsty beer, you trigger an explosion of hollow-point projectile subversion, a billboard from a Leigh Chadwick poem over the highway saying Free Bullets Included with the Purchase of Any Gun. A disturbing vacancy in the vice-like death-grip inflicting the wound. The rhetorical misread in a photo of Adolf Hitler kissing a baby on its blank  and wondering forehead, making your life’s crux a dream of defusing a tyrant, which never looked so enticing, but now wins you fewer magic-charm whistles. We mimic oblivion all the way back to the first commercial break in Star Trek: the Next Generation. Aging may not be all it was meant to upend, but nostalgia’s never been less than it once was. Owning a gun is signing a lifetime lease on butting heads with a screaming locomotive and expecting to find god. This little hand-held friend makes you strong, hardens into a crust of igneous commodity-mongering hawked at holy-roller dime-store “Going Out of Business” sales. Or a child determined to become King of Forever without first eating the meat on his plate cut from creatures his mother pays dismal workers to torture and slaughter, their roasted flesh pronged with metal fork, chewed, and then swallowed.

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Bobby Parrott’s poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Phantom Kangaroo, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Collidescope, Neologism, and elsewhere. In this queer writer’s own words, “The intentions of trees are a form of sadness we climb like a ladder.” He sometimes gets the impression his poems are writing him as he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.