JON RICCIO

Issue Two

Étude in Nostalgia Minor, “You May Be Able to Help Solve a Mystery”

The reliquary of Tab lacks a chalice,

so puts a vending machine in confessional’s place.

What’s the ordinance that confuses proverb with parochial gene?

The implications were tax return or holy spirit,

travel agents leaving us pulpit-lurch.

Lichtenstein, what are your blue laws?

Andorra, has geo-sphagnum set in?

Who remembers Dennis Christopher,

thespian I’d load onto time-zeppelin

because Breaking Away does for rock quarries

what Robert Stack did for the update?

The best origami? Sybils of a cold case.

They crumple, but who said the future’s denim-proof?

Sadly, the Alcatraz memorabilia

industry goes south after the Bay

Extinction Act of 2043.

Cattle mutilation too.

Where pan-dimensional cutlets fail,

plant-based meats exceed.

Jell-O Hollywood signs tell me

saliva has stock value and taste

buds evolve en-lime,

gospel-tonsiling outlawed—

a monk sect with theirs still in

deemed vogue biologic.

Remember when oxygen was courtship

and retinas fortune-favored? Dennis,

your poster my hallway, glaucoma

mainstream. Everyone enamors

the sienna ampule, vision clinics

the singles bars of 2118.

About Jon Riccio
Jon Riccio is the author of the forthcoming full-length collection, Agoreography (3: A Taos Press). He teaches creative writing and literature at the University of West Alabama and Beijing Jiaotong University.