by

Matthew Dexter

 

I poke Jazz’s scrotum with a soggy stick. Jupiter boogies through fire ants, ashes, blackened marshmallows. Menstruating in the backcountry is beautiful. Mom’s skull bursting in the jaws of the grizzly, turquoise eyeballs popping from sockets into moonlit vomit, gorgeous face minced into collage of cartilage, Dad’s tongue cleaved as a trophy.

We sleep a million starry deaths ’til dewy dawn, and Jazz, grunting, growling. His skull crushed into fragments, eggshells. Current skirts through nostrils—eyeballs festering—an orgy of flies.

Inhale primal preposterous ecstasy. Barking oozing from Cumulonimbus, Jupiter floating, I count flies on rotting fur and fear in vacant hollows. I rock a somersault into the inertia of swarming maggots, clenching sunburned eyelids, riding Jupiter into tomorrow.

*

Matthew Dexter is an American author living in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. His fiction has been published in hundreds of literary journals and dozens of anthologies. He writes abhorrent freelance pieces for exorbitant amounts of pesos to pay the bills while drinking cervezas in paradise with tourists. He is the author of the novel The Ritalin Orgy (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, 2013). His second novel, Hero Custodian, will be published in 2019. Debut memoir, story collection, and third novel forthcoming. He’s the Lil Wayne of literature.