Spaghetti season, he said with a sigh. We heard it underfoot. You couldn’t tell if it was communicating with the others or just sobbing. Occasionally, Big Jon would stir it with a giant hook, forming glistening piles near the path. Near the Shadow Spaghetti coasts it’s especially intimidating. Little gnomes would use it as housing material, a titmouse would drink red liquid. We would daydream about the gentle burbles of soup season and it would just be spaghetti spaghetti slamming against the windows. Curling around the churches, the skyscrapers. It spilled down chimneys, into overpasses. That’s when you would run for your life, because even as strainers covered the landscape, spaghetti made its way through. Toxic, how it would stick to the walls.
Robyn Schelenz is from Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. Her poems are at Maudlin House, The Nervous Breakdown, Words and Sports Quarterly and elsewhere. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she works when not doing the bidding of her dog, Donut. Special thanks to Bending Genres and Benjamin Niespodziany for hosting the workshop in which "spaghetti" came about.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
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