Artwork © Eric N. Peterson

 

A Friend of Bill

The Spider, With A Snickety Snack…

Old long coat John Cabot in the chapel, frigid as death’s vicar, pale as forever snow, following a Columbian diseased wake, lost in an old world; bright moon behind a dusk cloud, watching. Choking down hot black coffee, third styrofoam cup. Before a biblically violent mural, sun touches the priest’s face and he is briefly mistaken for stained glass…

Snickety snack

What’s so funny? Not a snicker, not howling laughter but shriek cry sunset howl of wind… On the podium… Kenneth Bourbon, whose wife at this point in the story has left him, on the outs, vodka breath, lipstick collar, same old story, old cover story…

Kenneth Bourbon droning on his weird incantation…
& the snickety snack whatisthatnoise

You must know…

That Revenants and other vengeful past things don’t live out of ill intention, they do not cut to taste the blood… What makes shivering addicts circle like a snake eating its own tail is not evil, but rather the same thing that compels flowers to grow & wither, the same thing as the snickety snack of an old man’s cane hitting chapel stone sticking his withered head from the curtain, below the cherubim, right under the angel’s noses… He’s wearing a tattered friar’s cloak, fringed with knots. The earth must turn like stone-crack junkie sway, the father of the poet will burn the creation, and the Vicar appears. Someone must die.

(He will stick his head from the curtain and proclaim “Someone must die,” they will ignore or watch with confusion.)

Ned Flanders once said that gambling is a sin, so he doesn’t have insurance, the triptych of trailer-park and Pyramid cigarettes for 3.55, and the descendants of farmers on barren earth will be truly saintly.

 

Joan Priester (they/them) is a writer from Chicago. They are planning to attend the University of Iowa this fall for applied physics and art history. Their poetry has previously appeared in the zine What Whithers. Joan also enjoys Tai Chi, going to local punk shows, and acting, particularly.

Eric N. Peterson is from Atlanta, Ga. He’s been drawing cartoons all his life. He leans towards the absurd, imaginative, and the surreal, as that’s where all the flavor is.