In an alternative rag’s alternative
personals, you paid for this: Heat-seeking
missile — and received three cash offers,
two replies, one consisting of a phone number
for the women’s rape crisis center, the other one
garbled word salad ending in the obligatory
call me, and a full-court investigation
by The Department of Homeland Security.
You took on the schizophrenic. You
won. Why does the small head always take
the big-headed down like oxen

felled by an elephant gun? You only say you
need love. The test drive runs you like
a perpetual motion machine, though you prefer
battery-operated bunny rabbits that choose
the incredible vibrating hand of Wing Wang Dung.
This is always Greek to you. You wrote

another: Love me — for a credit card deposit
(imagine that) of sixteen bucks just because
those you use are nothing but the best
automated teller machines: the in, the scan,
the out, the get out, I’m done. You got one
odd reply — from the Iron Wheel Missionary
Baptist Church. You circled “Missionary”
and sent it back postage due, but the alpha mail
returned three years later. Something about

enough and never enough never meets at dusk.

– Athena Stickseed