Pugilist
It’s me and you inside a drunkard’s
dream. where teenage boys dissect
an ouroboros on the asphalt of the
high school parking lot. They aren’t
boys, they’ve grown non-newtonian,
they’ve grown five stories tall like
the gundam figurines in their room.
Like a pair of disembodied boxing
gloves. Attached to no one save
the notion of sixteen-bit violence.
It’s me and you under
the table with Spinks,
keeping a match lit, I was never
adept at keeping a match lit.
Never adept at anticipating a punch.
Its you and these steady fingers
the boys with their scalpels
lined in infinity’s guts.
Spinks wavering in his corner
a minute thirty-one
before swimming
between sensoria
Economics ( if you really want you can )
you can walk the entire gold green planet in search of strife,
in search of reckoning, revenge, a narrative to nudge,
river-wide conundrums awash in perfect indeterminacy,
you can pogromize the pisspotless, deepen each trench,
you can mark each field in barbed wire, obscure means,
you can conquer and coax and careen off the cliff of madness,
you can keep time with the maniac men, the hopeful whimsicants,
you can tell the townsfolk of the coming sun and make money off their shadows,
you can study the underbelly, rend chaos from order, eat
your weight in bullion, stack a tower of sugar cubes to hide from
your family and a tower of quarters to show to your neighbors,
you can forget yourself in sex and forgive yourself in lust
and you can press your middle finger inside the seam of a human being
and will your consciousness back to the womb where all senses collapse
into a warm pink hum.
but you can never ever ever forget
about dying
The Asylum Where We Fell in Love
The chairs are bolted to the floor here in America
It’s to keep you from hurting yourself.
They used to put bars on the windows here in America
but now everything is bolted to the floor.
It’s to keep you from hurting yourself
here in America, the Asylum where we fell in love.
My love, I loved you at your most American
and you were at your most American
Drunk in Boy Scout uniform Polaroids.
In Polaroids, with a bottle of American Lager,
your face suggested you were surprised by the flash.
In America, with your gun in your mouth,
your face suggested you were surprised by the click.
In America, the asylum where we fell in love,
I was so proud of you for you reenacted your
death flawlessly, toppled over the arm of the sofa.
Your zombie ass and the white of your thighs
and your bleeding gums reciting Shakespeare but only
the sonnets because you have no stomach
for tragic stories anymore. In America
here in the asylum we fell in love
you only want to laugh so you giggle
and giggle but can’t remember who wrote the joke.
In America,
the asylum where we fell in love,
it has become our responsibility to keep
the chairs bolted to the floor,
to keep from hurting ourselves.
— Eric Subpar is a poet from Washington whose work has appeared in Hobart, XRAY Lit, and Burial Mag. He is the author of Ghouls in Love (2025 Pig Roast). @EricSubpar on Twitter & IG.