19-12



Solarcaine

I've found a joy.
There's a remedy I must employ.
Gotta tell you I'm a lucky boy
When I get my Solarcaine.

A pair of squirts
gets the pain out where the sunburn hurts,
and it hardly ever stains my shirts.
How I love my Solarcaine.

When it's raining, how I miss the sun,
but sunshine never misses me.
I try to cover up but hardly get it done.
Oh that sunburn misery.

Each night I pray
that nobody steals my can away.
Just can't beat that ever-lovin' spray.
How I love my Solarcaine.

by Phil Huffy

Read more Parody

Support


------------------------------------
Phil Huffy had a long career doing something other than writing. He was quite surprised to find his work accepted in a variety of print and online publications and loves to Google himself. He scribbles away at his kitchen table in Rochester, NY, and much prefers those little saltines they make to the regular size.

19-11



Roses are red
Clovers are green
Like the luck of the Irish
Whatever that means.
It's St. Patrick's day
You might get a pinch
If you don't like it
Just respond with a wrench
Hands to yourself
We are civilized here
Though incidents of pinching
Increase with green beer.

by Amanda Pearce

Read more Parody

Support


------------------------------------
Amanda Pearce is from Portland, Oregon. She enjoys playing Mad Libs, bothering strangers, and attempting stand up comedy. She spends her time traveling and overthinking minute life details. Her writing is inspired bad dates, cynicism, and middle child syndrome. For more of her delightful and outdated angst, please visit pdxpurge.blogspot.com

19-10



This Be The Glass

They fuck you up, both red and white,
but much more pleasantly than brew.
They fill you with a sense of right
and righteousness known but to few.

Grapes pressed in the traditional way
and slowly aged in old-world oak—
the crisp, the rich, the round bouquet,
a hint of citrus, cherry, smoke.

Without a glass, we may sink into
mournfulness, gloom, gravitas.
Surely, it is no great sin to
drink! In vino veritas!

by Antonia Clark

Read more Parody

Support


------------------------------------
Antonia Clark, a medical writer and editor, has also taught creative writing and manages an online poetry workshop. Her full-length poetry collection, Chameleon Moon (2014) will be reissued in 2019 by Bellevue Books. Toni lives in Vermont, loves wine, travel, and French café music. Contact antoniaclarkpoetry@gmail.com or visit antoniaclark.com.

19-9



École des Beaux Arts

About suffering you were never wrong,
Pale Icarus: how unformed, hardly conscious yet,
So young, you stuck the feathers on,
Compliant with the old magician's wish, faith in him strong;
Then flapped about to get the feel of your new wings,
Leapt finally from a peak, soared ecstatically
So near the sun you surfed the tides of superstrings;
Then felt the soft wax melt and run, thin rivulet,
Along each arm, an interesting feeling, drip from elbows,
Wrists, and fingers grasping through the heat to gather back
The scattered feathers, reveling as each new sensation grows,
Not sensible, as yet, you'd fall—There's no such thing as suffering—toward black
Inkwell, the canon of American and English poetry.

In Auden's Musée, for instance: where a reader learns
About the ploughman and the ship, not how it burns
To recognize the feathers held one up, and view
Abruptly, with new eyes, that suffering is sure as gravity,
As unrelenting as one's innocence had been,
And what an unenviable position one was in;
For this we'd have to go to school to you
Yourself, who made that splash so few would see.

by Dan Campion

Read more Parody

Support


------------------------------------
Dan Campion lives in Iowa City. His poetry has appeared previously in Parody and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and other journals. He is a co-editor of the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song. A third edition will launch in Spring 2019 to honor Whitman's 200th birthday.