ben starr
love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your miserable life
What am I selling? Silver coins rare as raindrops,
perfume with notes of my father’s abandonment, a body
pillow of your high school sweetheart: stuffed with
his real hair, lacking all those adventurous fingers.
Let me spit sweet somethings in your ear canal, sew
sonic threads through your tympanic membrane. Pour
sugar down your auditory tube, suck your cochlea
until your acoustic nerve quivers like a rung bell.
You bat eyelids at squirrels, flash skin for the mailman,
get your car washed just to kiss knuckles when you hand
over the tip. You’re bone dry, hair brittle, nails split,
praying to the lord you get sold hard and put out wet.
Baby, I’m selling magic beans. Now come on
over and eat them out of my breathtaking palms.
the lobster
I’m at the Golden Dragon, davening over a plate of braised yee mein and a side of fried chicken feet with oyster sauce, when a lobster absconds from his frosty neon aquarium. Clambered right over the glass like it was nothing. Like it was a waterfall. Splashing past steaming plates of tangerine beef and chipped bowls of forgotten sweet and sour soup, he heads south on Broadway, toward old theater marquees repurposed as shrines to late seventies pornography. At the light he waits, politely, like a tourist. Arriving at Bunker Hill he uses a quarter from a child’s wish to sail to the top of a lonely funicular and, upon reaching the summit, sits alone on a stone bench to watch spaceships coast gently overhead.
love in the time of $40 celebrity smoothies
Beau loves to love
but Love is sick
of his schtick and tells beau
as much in his DMs.
Beau took Love to cantalini’s
where Love ordered
the veal parmigiana
even though Love claims
to be a vegetarian.
Once, beau took Love
skydiving, and in the
cornflower amplitude of sky
Love sabotaged beau’s chute.
Broken, in a heap of split bone
and origami skin, beau
picked himself up, dusted
off his tangled spleen and
invited Love to his improv show.
Backstage, Love didn’t bring
flowers, just told beau to
keep up the, uh, work.
Then Love went home with Joy
who refused to “yes, and”
but looked eminently edible in a pair
of slubby denim like the deep sea.
A few months later, beau ran into
Love at Erewhon, near the tonic bar,
where they shared a smoothie
that tasted like Billie Eilish and
talked about the real housewives
of stockton, california.
Now beau is dating Regret.
They met at hot yoga, and
hopefully she is more his type,
but Regret has the attitude of
purple sea anemones
and hair the color of
rancid winter
why ginger never left the island
After the last of Thurston Howell’s Samsonites had been spirited away, Ginger stayed. She still had plenty of sequined dresses to wear, plenty of coconut water to drink. And the Professor, all that brain swimming in white poplin, had taught her to fish. Kindly layering his hand over hers on a bamboo rod sturdy as the sun. She ate parrotfish and snapper, fiery red like her dignified hair, and listened to her favorite bands fade away on the radio, sound waves crackling in time with her skin. No need to worry about that coarse casting couch, stuffed full of executives in brown suits, gnashing their prurient fingers. Or about how much that justified wrinkle, that well earned sag, that fresh pound would cleave from her salary. You must be thrilled to be home, would never be whispered into her deeply tanned ear. She did not worry. Because Ginger and her perfectly placed beauty mark only longed for a quick dip in the lagoon, to be buried under her favorite palm, its fronds spread as wide as a constellation.
Ben lives in Los Angeles with his wife, a high school teacher, and three extremely powerful little girls. Ben studied poetry in college and as part of the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Maudlin House, Eclectica, Club Plum and other journals.