Playing in the Bad Room

Janis Butler Holm
April 2022

Invocation

In Dixie Chick profusion my time is spent. Here savor the location, this mirrored, raddled manifest.
Now a rolling camouflage, crisp in its dexterity, depends on maiden wings. O let me taste your
rowdy beauty, pieces of Braille, the glory of orphans laid in colored sands, alone. Hear my spinal
demons rising, a crazed and harried pool. Dim the silly portals. This is prelude to the fox.

Flower Power

Crowned with heat, the full intersection of rose and stain. Curl of breadth, arc, shim, the possibility
of root, effort in the dark. Plane upon plane, they speak their pale green confusion, elastic basketry.
Grits at the Majestic, and we’re sailing to chrysanthemums, unleashed. And what of olive torso, that
slim, corbelled feat?

Heigh-Ho

Check the deck. Rustle and creep. Job the gob. Do jumpin’ and bumpin’. Stitch the pitch, heigh-ho,
heigh-ho. Tickle the jackal. Pink that sink. Wrestle, snort, canter, pull, start, chortle, tumble. Muscle
is deep. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.

Field Day

What is a delinquency? Think Hojo’s crafty syllables, laced and costly vows. Error upon error, tree
upon tree. But now we farm, we sing of monuments, we laugh at how the nerves betray. Full-
throated leaves beguile us, loamy voodoo, mucky creed. Loping, we are carnival. How putter leads to
paint.

Geometry

Sanction, imprimatur. Feeling vaguely festive, Gidget won’t comply. Can metonymy be funny? How
to measure the textures of sadness, craving, sigh? Do we color our geometry? Broker all the ocher,
joker. Mom’s at the station, smiling and sure.

Marxist

What could be more powerful than a Yoko motive? Honey bunny, lunch money, pudding and pie.
Believe me, friend, to hew is to stew. Tell me what you blow, dough. Wake up and smell the poses.
Model me. Yes. Neiman Marxist in black, playing in the bad room.

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Janis Butler Holm served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal, and currently works as a writer and editor in sunny Los Angeles. Her prose, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, Russia, and the U.K.