When the circus came to play at the bar Stacey nudged me to say “He’s looking at you, girl!” I sidled over to the Tallest Man in the World and tugged on his pant leg.
Our caravan took off via Oklahoma to fields of windmills spelling “help” in semaphore, into a bird (its epitaph a faint spiderweb on the windshield), among the tumbleweeds and past ghost-towns, to the eternal Californian holidays and back again: Texas in the snow, Nashville and he liked the way I danced. Crowds looked at us in awe, hands over their mouths. In Arizona we drank tequila with water in plastic cups, stopped in Lordsburg where they gave him a crown at check-in and never asked for it back. I sang to him, I rubbed his sore feet, I climbed a ladder to kiss his face.
After some months he wanted me to sign a contract, so I did: Cynthia, Of Course He smiled down at me as I looped the Y with his quill pen. He said, “You’re in this circus forever,” then something happened in the sky: he was twelve feet tall, he was nine feet tall, he was six-and-a-half feet tall and outside a truck stop, clutching some juice. His hair flickered orange-red-orange in the sunlight while under his red glasses seethed his strange colorless eyes. “Do you love me?” he checked. The sun was hot and I felt exhilarated. I said “Yes.”
Kaylyssa Quinn lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Her poems have been published in Capsule Stories, Mineral Lit Mag, tinywords, Furious Season, Six Sentences and in partnership with Hades Wool.