PAUL CUNNINGHAM

MINESHAFT #1

In the mineshaft: hullway, hullweight. Boathouse tomb turned onto its sky-side, vomits gilded casts of matter, vomits straitaway the deskcast, the ladder trash. Yellow straitjacketed shit-sun, shining. The sulfur lamp of excrement: its branches flow from wooden anus, ropes of heavy flow from wooden mouth. The yellow interior of the boathouse tomb descends into brief evening blue-flow, into showroom exterior. Parts of the ropeflow appear charred, blasts of pahoehoe, a constantly changing atmosphere. Raw elements fusing with Ra atmosphere underwood, underworld.

MINESHAFT #2

In the mineshaft: the radiant ulcer, gutted sun resin. The grotesque halved lemon waits, its crystalizing rot faces skyward. The fury-pit puked upside-down Trans Am meat weldling of a 1979 Pontiac Firebird. Vibrant mucilage, its underneath swells like a sunken ship trapped beneath many centuries. The cast radiates outwards, like caking straitjacket sleeves. Heavy acid rain flows, lightning. Bright, jagged yellow, inside the ambulance of the sun.

MINESHAFT #3

In the mineshaft: first sled supports a sulfurcophagus of fart sweetness, yellow butter-brick of bitter armrest a wrecked. Reincarbohydrate, perpetual gluclose body absorbs until the starch all gone, sediment. Vehicular, the drive-shaft sinks heavy into yellow. The second sled supports the now bronzed rest of arm still protruding from stripped-down saltlick. Second drive-shaft sinks even lower, shoots a stream of white bulb. Pure casket tart, pearlish microscopics. The third sled goes soft, carries with it ghost.

MINESHAFT #4

In the mineshaft: in a damaged vitrine: a how-to rubblecock trio, flakingly wide-veined bursts of swelling bronzes of try. First cock spurts stucco from its gravelshroom, flourishes of graphitic smegma cascade it into non-cock. Second cock depends on vines of a meticulously needleworked bronze. Testicles, decimated into sterling roe. Final cock, namelessly engraved, mutilated into every direction, geoding erratically into something unrecognizable, sexless. Cavernous, the fullness of its perennial wilt permits a round rind of shaft to forever bob like a dismembered thumb.

Paul Cunningham holds editorial positions at Fanzine and Action Books. He founded Radioactive Moat Press in 2009. His writing can be found in LIT, Bat City Review, Tarpaulin Sky, Spork, DIAGRAM, and others. His translation of Sara Tuss Efrik’s The Night’s Belly (Nattens Mage) was selected as a finalist in the 2015 Goodmorning Menagerie Chapbook-in-Translation contest. His first print chapbook of poems, GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER, is forthcoming from horse less press this summer. He most recently received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame.