By Damian Taggart
In a rush
To solidify our posture
We built gas lamps and horseless carriages
We built children and they built children
We studied the contours of tiny chambers
Not wondering what was outside.
We covered our forms because we couldn’t identify them
And crafted complex disciplines
And monuments to our greatness
In an armor of song and fable
Ashamed of our confusion before the endless nameless unknowable
Discontent with the vulnerability of
I don’t know
Damian Taggart is a serial entrepreneur and investor currently focused on Wildist, a dual bottom line start-up using wilderness expedition and adventure as a platform for personal growth. Damian is excited about changing the world by teaching radical self-acceptance as a foundation for empowerment. He enjoys writing poetry and essays.
Ted Intorcio is the owner of Tinto Press, a Denver-based micro publisher of the most outstanding comics ever devised by man or beast…Please buy a comic from him or he may have another crying fit. In his day job, he helps promote quality educational programming like Ash Vs. Evil Dead and Party Down. He also likes to draw biographical comics.
Everyone is waiting for the guest of honor.
The birthday party at the senior center
is turning into a round table argument about medications
and sit and be fit exercises.
Stretched secrets of survival pontificated by near centenarians.
Exchanging advice on how to have an extra birthday.
Always move it or lose it.
Put a tobacco dip can next to the toilet.
Drink a home brewed tonic made out of crushed daisy stems and cheap beer.
A chorus of cane clicks
the hum from walker legs wearing tennis balls sliding across linoleum.
The party’s brought out all the residents’ best wigs, muumuus and tracksuit tuxedoes.
Everyone’s excited to have a slice of the sugar free cake.
It’s not a party until Girdy takes out her teeth.
Alice and Linda tell stories about when they were arrested for wearing pants.
Shrinking high school sports legends named Norman and Jed knee slap
about days before baseball gloves and football helmets.
Any and every tale about war. Plural.
Dust bowls.
Radio stories.
Black and white television.
Playing checkers on porches to the drone of cicada songs.
Holding up the walls at Saturday night dances.
Cider sipping on hayrides to nowhere for no reason.
The birthday girl used to be a beauty queen.
Maud’s window faces the street,
She is watching traffic pass her time
wearing the crown and sash
and almost as much makeup
as the the night she won Miss Quad Cities.
Charly Fasano is a poet, performer, filmmaker and block printer, as well as a Westword-voted Colorado Creative. Fasano has read his poems with and shared the stage with bands like Lucero, Drag the River, Crime in Stereo, Madson Jones, Land Lines and The Queers. He is the founder of Fast Geek Press, Pretend You Can Reab audio zine, and As Well As Magazine. Fasano’s poems have appeared in Yellow Rake, Lubricated Magazine, Syntax Magazine, MovingPoems.com and Growing Strange Magazine. His book of poems, Next Analog Broadcast (2011) was published by Sunnyoutside Press, and was followed by a multimedia book and 7 inch called RETROSPECT/ED featuring the music of Lucero, released on Fast Geek Press in 2014.