Bullet Pudding ~ poetry by Damon Hubbs

Bullet Pudding

After taking a strong sleeping potion
I left my bed, and the four of us spent the day playing badminton.
Chloe says I have eyes like errant cabbages.
Lately she’s been obsessed with luxury communism
fully automated. Because we haven’t been thinking big enough,
because badminton before it was badminton
was known as battledore and shuttlecock
and it’s safe to say that Jane Austen was the feathered bird
of the Regency Era. Boy o boy she kept her cool.
My neighbor is throwing some kind of party with wine and spare ribs.
Yesterday, she sunbathed nude
and reinvented backyard gardening.
Slanted on the cross-hipped roof she has an instinct for cachet.
Ruth is doing a reading tonight in Lowell, Massachusetts.
She wrote a poem about artists who have died
from jumping out of windows
—Francesca, Vanessa and several other women
whose names end in a. 
                                  The report from the field
suggests no one does nostalgia better than Cliff.
King of the flick serve, he’s chalked the floor
of a ballroom, or two. Swapped seeds, poked holes in the ocean.
He eats bullet pudding and rolls sugar cubes like dice.
False trails of blackthorn and pimpernel keep me up at night.
Ruth’s lover has a hard-on for Kerouac.
He drives for hours down her silk road; I admit, I’m jealous
of the secret poets of Kansas,
they’re close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.
Badminton is dominated by Denmark
but we don’t know any Danes, although Chloe once dated
a Norwegian who lived above a cigar store in Harvard Square.
Back and forth they sang their gin song,
elbow to elbow like model trains.
O there, there Chloe
the sun is as fat as a zeppelin ready to explode.

Damon Hubbs is a poetry editor at Blood+Honey. He’s the author of the full-length collection Venus at the Arms Fair (Alien Buddha Press, 2024). Recent publications include BRUISER, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Ranger Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, Spectra, Don’t Submit!, Horror Sleaze Trash, & others. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. He lives in New England.