Nihilist Cookies
In baking, you beat the butter-sticks
first with the revelations that Santa isn’t real
and your sister’s dog ate your hamster
You add a tiny bit of vanilla in the form of awards,
Dairy Queen ice cream cakes at birthday sleepovers
with games of Apples to Apples until you fall asleep
to a generic late 90s Lindsay Lohan movie.
You break the smooth eggs of being turned down
by a half-sleep loser and try to throw the shell that
held your hopes in the trash bin of your body ‒
No, not the heart, the gallbladder, because it’s dealing
with the sugar intake of you eating your feelings.
Then things stagnate as the dryness of adult life
is shifted slowly in, as you wake up to brush off flakes of flour
from your windshield at six-thirty in the morning.
Baking soda comes from being the bridesmaid
at a marriage everyone knows will have the lifespan
of whipping cream, and salt in the 27th “we are sorry
to inform you that you weren’t selected” email that month.
Until, that is, you are welcomed by the warmth of
coming home, back to the earth as you and
the tray of others molded into casket-balls
are lowered downward into the womb and then eaten.
Cotton Cave
Clawing through piles of frizzy fibers,
laid atop each other like stratums.
my cheeks buried in yarn as my grandma
reads a paperback romance novel.
The mid-afternoon grey-gleaming sheet of a sky
graced the labels on the spindles, giving
them a shine in a world of dust bunnies.
I swam through the crochet ocean,
a deep sea diver exploring cotton caves.
Morgan Boyer is Carlow University alumni and author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Rune, and Pennsylvania English.
