Jon Riccio

In the Future, Everyone Marries for a Time Machine

Inspired by the 1946 wedding of “Mad Marshall” Jacobs and Yolanda
“Lonnie” Cosmar, atop a flagpole.


The positive connotation, Charles Simic was my gateway to Surrealism
contrasts with the negative: my dog’s Tupperwared whiskers

were gateway to companion-animal cloning that produced
a 1:4 ratio of humans to mice with people-ears grown on backs,

The Sound of Music’s “Lonely Goatherd” stymied by a tailbone
and a leap. Feeling bad for Leap Year births, I gave them discounts

at the party store, confetti hourglasses our bestsellers, punishment
perks apparent when mouthy time-traveler kids challenged

their penance with a refrain of You and What Continuum?,
quarks having summer-camp relationships with “In retrospect,”

the decade becoming a pair of flagpoled boxer shorts.
I switch to them at thirty-seven, flagpoles, because I want

couples married on felicitous groin, torso utopia nary an oeuvre
in a climate closed-Louvre. I love Colin Clive’s pronunciation

of lever as leever, The Bride of Frankenstein’s valves and value
judgements diagramming monogamy with molecular honeymoon,

the vows folks’ve yodeled now that footbath’s the new Niagara
Falls and big toe’s notary. On my next 1040—Daycare for Alphabet,

my supervisor twelfth generation von Trapp dropping collect
curtain calls. Faxline pouty, wormhole forecasts

as calibrated as the future’s cold feet.

Jon Riccio is a queer poet living in Mississippi. He is the author of two chapbooks, Prodigal Cocktail Umbrella and Eye, Romanov. A full-length collection, Agoreography, is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press.