Crawling

by Marc Isaac Potter

A banana slug is crawling up my neck; a mother is worried about her two children, both of whom have had problems since birth. One child is autistic. The other child might have something called Blue Mysteria, which no one has been able to diagnose. Blue Mysteria is what you see when Down Syndrome comes crawling out of a jar of peanut butter.

Please remember that I have a mental illness. Please remember that I have five kinds of mental illness, and I can never taste them all at the same time.

 I’m gonna try to put on a different, more colorful shirt to help the baby, but I promise I won’t be able to do that.

Brown Slug. Is it the brown slug? Is this the banana slug? Is the Australian Victorian slug actually the Eiffel Tower slug? Grapefruit is likely. Two men are standing on their tiptoes, looking at a wounded statue of an ugly man.

Two men now navigate, forthwith: Navigate. Does your mind go crazy? Sometimes, two minds acting as one wandering around the hills of a rich community?

I am the dead son of a dead man. His name was Creed Potter. That man was a hard worker: “in family with his mind.” He was always mentally in World War Two, where he picked up parts of bodies and put them in his ambulance. He worked in England harvesting the dead body parts as the bombs came down. Why did you have to ruin this writing?

About the Author

Marc Isaac Potter (they/them) is a disabled writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their interests include vlogging and Zen, and they’ve been published in Fiery Scribe Review, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Poetic Sun Poetry, and Poetry Magazine.