2 Poems from “The Blue Cherub” by PJ Lombardo

Admiring

the pictographs

of animal life

blank faces prone

to imagine, like how

i see my children rolling

up the tombstoned driveway

holsters heavy where thighs meet hip

and i ask Whereve you been

and my children say Folding the sun shut and it’s no hobby this

discorporation, muscles shrunk

to spare their kinesis

for the eye which levels all outsiders

for courier pigeons their typhoid their food deserts plenty’s to admire

i twiddle inward

plentitudes collect like dust between

an eye and a brain, plentitudes

flutter down

as lightless statues

full of fissures whereby lives

waste themselves in envy

coweyed and hustling and spare

A Monster Riddled with Serenity
‍ ‍after E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born

Huddled grotesque inside
the bony grip of broken
chair, rapt

by a whirlpool of photographs Photographs
folding like shadowpuppet finales
inside the confusion
of someone
or some other

In the mill i watch
movies and the pistons
through which those movies clamber
their technicolor breeze and stop
motion gore
In the mill i picture blue vipers
wrapped around projector reels
Uncoiling themselves inside themselves

for sustenance, their own mouths
damp with flickers of hungry blood

Cannibal movies, i love them so much
False strangulation like a nap
under the bluing myth of a second sun

where i can prattle memories
at illiterate actors

rewind, roll, calming
calmer, clearer than any
of your impossible conversations

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PJ Lombardo is the author of The Blue Cherub (Cult House Press, 2026). He teaches English in Baltimore, Maryland and serves as co-founding editor of GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. Read his writing in Tripwire, Lana Turner Journal, KEITH LLC and elsewhere.