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perhappened mag
issue 1: CARNIVAL

joining the circus was a mistake

KAYLYSSA QUINN
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.
perhappened mag
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header photo: parker gibbons (unsplash)

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