Toward the Comfort of a Spat-Out Spider

By MLA Chernoff

Love of life. In our living room, I quip that your mouth, like mine, belongs to the silence of relumes, a locale for flashed-face haberdashers who hawk skibidi toilets and caw of revolution indulted by a de-disciplined, tailed, drawn, and captured meow-meow that ghosts our shuteye of immediacy. The comforts of patricide and the imminence of flatulence are flatlining on perfection—untimely victories, ultimatums neither for themselves nor in themselves.

You quip it is difficult to slay and serve (cunt) of the literary variety when the spice of life has taken its hivemind out through the nose of hastily expired antihistamines that kinda-sorta stave off death's vapors. What is left to say but hello to the boundless excitations we have made of a marriage? Well, surely, there is everything to critique of the perilous purlieu beyond our window about which I mewl to the moon so sillily in crass similes.

You and I, lovence, we fear the teens, so wee and lush in the face with new betrayals; it is but a decade of staying put. Those teens—we scat harmoniously—they’ve been reared on nothing but shit and no-future, why should they care when we’ve given but an inheritance of immeasurable statures to bankroll their representatives? What stock may we take in youth when the market juts pennies, log-like, from the fifty-first floor of conspiratorial faction bans?

We sing the song of the cat, our daughter from the rise of the house of hope, a sweet little heaven hiding under the couch, a treasured treasure who jumps out so as to terrify, perhaps fossilize, my heart into sounder exits: mercy. Favoritism need not apply in the kitchen where the floor gets vacuumed either which way.

We fear all that’s theresome in its decomposition from the crisp autumn of couch cushions, where cozily we read of pasteurized disease, the flailing grade point average of loose-livered rebbes to whom funding pacts the spleen.

Lord may it be, the jowl buys the cheek; we toil to politely annex an elsewhere of lolling hillsides, where dead gods may finally go to die, a hamlet where no Google could lambast its cartographies or flush its enlightenment to baser rundles. Oh, that’s just adventurism for Costco-dogging preppers who would, first and foremost, pepper-spray the neighs of neighbourly love in perceived final hours.

You whip about probing some lad named Jeeves, the punchline being the mere fact of anachronism. Whereas my punchline is arachnid. From the pit of what has come pontificate as my King-Kong hog—a leady off-brand Stanley Cup—some corpuscle emerges to greet me with its proteins, bluffing as the backwash of all previous taken-for-granted meals we together did enjoy.

Yes, a yellow sac sacks my gullet, bungs it up with fearsome loathing and the knowledge that, in tougher times, this protein will spike only the delight of another day's nutrients. But now, in my gagging face-hole, this little guy, he strikes me as live chicken wire, curling all weary as I jolt along the loveseat in shuttered disbelief. I splatoon a spit take that no comedic genius nor slapstick enjoyer could imitate or luxuriate. You wish with every bone in the body to have dared me to swallow. He is a lost offering, turned to refuse. Thereupon, I Google fear, you jeer with Jeeves, then we then go to bed, relieved, relumed in our love of the present and its probable cuddles, the wet, crawling lad, I pray, is somewhere far from here, on the prowl for a more authenticatable mouth to append.

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​MLA Chernoff is a chronically ill, trans non-binary writer from Toronto. Their debut full-length poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2021. MLA is also the author of several chapbooks, including TERSE THIRSTY (Gap Riot Press, 2019), I'M LIKE THE GREAT GRANDCHILD OF MARX & COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY) (845 Press, 2022), and ESTRO FLUNKY (above/ground press, 2023). Get in touch at mlachernoff.com !!!!!!