
OXIDANT | ENGINE : Issue 9
Jon Riccio
We Say Hivemind, Negate the Honey
I watch Clash of the Titans with half my sight.
A yellowjacket colony upends the porch, Michelob
bouts from the couple upstairs, shouts louder
than the vulture thundering my chestnut VHS.
The lead’s married to a Real Housewife now, the
one who took a bee planetoid to her lips and told
them to venom the flesh. We say hivemind
thinking crowdsource.
My visual field exam came back: left eye 50/100,
right 67, depth nectar drained.
When the movie’s Kraken
goes from menace to petrified antifreeze I think
of Mildred Pierce, pulling for Veda even though
she is acrimony and hatbox glower,
a grifter Thumbelina with listeria mascara.
Many the hazards by way of
or perpetrated on
eyes.
Joan Crawford perplexed to the point of cigarette,
Eve Arden’s hindsight, noir lamé.

Jon Riccio is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers. Recent work appears in decomP, SUSAN, Wordgathering, and Word For/ Word. A queer poet living with acute macular neuroretinopathy, he received his MFA from the University of Arizona.