Alleging Romance by Ken Poyner

You assemble the car out of ordinary things: cabinetry, dining room chairs, a bed worn out, three chickens and an old dog from Henley’s. Its engine is the heart of a bear. You draw the choke and the heart sputters, coughs itself into rhythm, pushes blood into the axles. You proudly slip into the barbed wire seat, pull a feather to signal you are entering the public street. On her porch, your future wife is turning over furniture, prying at loose boards – her long, rusting chain dress blindly seducing the broken porch light – her mouth worriedly wicking where oh where is my thundering bear?

Ken Poyner’s latest collection of short, wiry fiction, Constant Animals, can be obtained, digital or paperback, at www.amazon.com. He often serves as strange eye-candy at his wife’s power lifting meets. His poetry of late has been sunning in Analog, Asimov’s, Poet Lore, and The Kentucky Review; and his fiction has yowled in Spank the Carp, Red Truck, Café Irreal, and Bellows American Review. And both forms have been seen in the ubiquitous elsewhere. More to come.