20161224

Michael Caylo-Baradi



The Usual Handsome Cowlicks


understand the mathematics of hair / bouncing on a
pair of gams / all high and mighty / in a California
kind of way / Everything / must equate and line up
neatly / where suns offer silhouettes for whispers
destined to converge / All variables are fortified /
to slurp up fizzle / and spin out discos, to the feel
of riptides / ebbing for natural laws / attuned to the
casual and familiar / or those predicates / thirsting
for the fleshy girth of thumbs



Birth of a Ventriloquist


Barbie spanking Ken must be a dedication to a dream,
subject to words crowding a living room of neat and proper,

framed in a cosmos of family portraits, of pedigree
uninterrupted. Their heads are now witnesses to a

punishment, of a woman overpowering a man to a child’s
lexicon of accusations. Here, the punished subject

has reverence to the latitudes of a happy face exiled from
worries, like his blonde punisher. They are part of a drama

of seclusion and exclusion, housed in a room of plastic
molded into miniature human beings and animals. All

are citizens in the world of a voice festering in garbled
languages talking to each other, to revise a bigger drama

around the dinner table or the master’s bedroom, unleashing
storms of invectives into the never-ending fourth act

where the wife has clawed her fingers with a knife, at least
once. As ever, instruments of murder understand moral fervor,

steeling for inevitable annulments, where the script is often
unsure of itself, and verges on the unpredictable.

This is where fiction intrudes. It translates conundrums into
arias, within the borders of fine-tuned perspicacities.

They often adore the perfect arcs of fairy tales, tucked in neat
methods of violence, dismissed from the color of blood.



Michael Caylo-Baradi lives in California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Fifth Review, Blue Print Review, The Common, Eclectica, elimae, Eunoia Review, Galatea Resurrects, Ink Sweat & Tears, Local Nomad, MiPOesias, Otoliths, Our Own Voice, poeticdiversity, Philippines Free Press, Poetry Pacific, Prick of the Spindle, and elsewhere. An alumnus of The Writers’ Institute at The Graduate Center (CUNY), he is among a dozen guests featured in Eileen Tabios' first book-length haybun poetry collection 147 Million Orphans (MMXI-MML) (2014). He has also written essays for New Pages, PopMatters, and The Latin American Review of Books.
 
 
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