Ramshackle Review

There There Now, Bus Buddy
by Steve Subrizi


In your last city, you worked at the downtown open-air market hawking
chocolate pasta to hordes of tourists, plus you were volunteering at the
natural history museum. You have never resided in the past, but you made an
excellent guide. You memorized simplified timelines and wore your hair tied
back for practical purposes.

Then you went the way of the buffalo—to that side of the zoo visited only by
the serious. If fed improperly, you may seriously buffalo some tourists
because you hail from New England. Local weather patterns fail to predict
you. On the back of your jacket reads vociferous praise for a prior release.

Your story contains changes; the dissonance sounds painless; you forced
those revisions.

Now you sketch your fellow passengers. You travel with a book full of
strange faces that are mostly sleeping and sometimes you sift through them,
an assortment of pinned insects, and imagine what land they must have chewed
in their invisible teeth.

Now I’m writing you a little note. Stop watching my pen. I’m holding my face
as still as I can hold it. If you can read this then stop watching my pen.






Steve Subrizi is a co-host of the poetry mic at Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has performed his work in such other venues as Mercury Cafe in Denver and The Green Mill in Chicago, and his work has appeared in PANK and The Legendary.