top of page

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

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. 

bottom of page