JB Mulligan
School Dance
Tsunamis of blood rise, exploding in foam
behind the ember eyes and the dull sunglasses.
Restless, feral, in jackets and ties, in frocks
their mothers helped pick out, behind the veils
of jokes and songs and languid conversations,
the nomads, the sweat-glazed packs,
small tribes settled in at ribboned tables,
all circle stealthily about the empty spaces,
caverns of dreams, hot breath, an isolation
polar-cold and-dark, and dense as stone.
"Animals," the teacher mutters, grinning,
tethered in age, his beastly urge
reduced to absently shifting his crotch with his hand.
Bio
JBMulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines, including recently, Angle, Bluestem, Jellyfish Whispers, Blue Unicorn, and Eighty Six Four Hundred, has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, and has appeared in multiple volumes of the anthology, Reflections on a Blue Planet.