The following piece is a result of ReadWritePoem’s prompt #84, brought to us from the fantastical mind of Buckeye State poet, Nathan Moore (not to be confused with the Virginian songwriter, Nathan Moore). I can’t explain the prompt in complete detail here, other to say that it involves using a dictionary, and that it was great fun.

PEAS & DOPE

Remember when Tim aimed his peashooter
from the veranda at Sally with her D cups
sunbathing in the yard and launched?

We scattered like a post-traumatic waterfall,
twelve rug rats through the arborvitae
where her father, the self-made senior controller

of his Masonic village, stood from his poker game –
a royal flush at that – and whipped each of us
for castigating the one beautiful thing

his sperm ever made. Remember how the slash
burned the backs of our thighs? Bent over chairs
as the old man sang Yankee Doodle Dandy, we cried

Daddy whenever his belt cracked and belched.
Years later, after an unwarranted search
and seizure put me away for a long weekend,

the sheriff sized up my dreadlocks, said us hippies
had no clue about pain. So I dropped my pants,
let my scars correct him.