Lewis Millholland
Fresh-Squeezed Crystalline Corrosion
Look at us we are neon sugar rush supernova. We are glitter past its expiration date. We are the children of Walmart clearance aisles, acrylic paint lacquered on nails and chins and teeth. Watch our veins pop. Can you see the chemical rainbows? Step closer. Smell us. We are the irradiated, we are Lite-Brite trailer trash. We move one kiss justakiss slower than three hundred million meters a second, and when we do kiss we use tongue. We spray paint each other’s shits candy corn gold and don’t mind the stench because we would gobble each other up if we could.
And we have so much shivers. It’s unseemly to have this much money, gobs and skyscrapers of it and more money than you. We paid off all our own circumcisions. In cash. They come sniffing around, those Nature Valley crumbs of reporters, wearing bus seat upholstery as suits, wearing us down until we reveal the secrets of spinning toxins to gold. We should have been more suspicious. We should have known. But we swore we saw glints of M&Ms down there among the granola caught between their seats, so we thrust our fingers in and wiggled those little piggies. Halloween night, do you not bite into a marshmallow’s soft fat, all heedless of the razor-blades within? But then they slip up. The journalists, they snagglegrin through rows of grayscale teeth and quote Dylan at us: “Something is happening here.”
We all of us we flinch. We recoil. Jesus God! Our charley horses are knocked out all over the floor, there’s cancer in our sugarteeth. They’ve drained all the color from Oz. All of us we have lightning zigzags coming out our nostrils. We reach for each other’s shining pink uvulae, we pinch until it’s us again, until we’re retching our Fruity Pebble daydreams all onto Ms. and Mr. Black and White and Read All Over. Only then they are so pretty we can’t help but cry.
No reporters came back when we put genitals into our mouths for rent money. Back when we were broke as shit we put shit up our noses to make the city trains sparkle. Sometimes a sisterbrother train would whiz tear slur past on the opposite track and I had just one three hundred millionth of a second to drink in the faces. The single mom, the crone, the catatonic whore moon-facing back at me. Their profiles cast by emergency lights into phosphorescent crisis. That’s it—that’s the look. That’s where I found it, in the too-afraid-to-blink leftovers of God’s toilet. That’s the electric Plan B pout that never wakes up hungover, it never wakes up. That’s the suicide girl turning away in a puddle of gasoline. That’s the ultralight beam burned into you before one last and final supersonic blackout. That’s Fresh-Squeezed Crystalline CorrosionTM, new from Fenty.
Lewis Millholland is a D.C. native who hasn’t seen a thunderstorm in months. Professionally he’s covered small-town news, built video games, and worked a stint on Bloomberg’s news automation team. His writing has appeared or is upcoming in Passages North, NUNUM, and The Garlic Press. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at Boise State University.