Amy Wright

Cracker Apocalypse

There’s nothing left but the Composition
teachers and the Bic pens. Day is night
everywhere. The crackers are a bunch of soaks
and roll on the moss drying out.
There are several ways of looking at it—
one with hope and the others without.
At the green boxes, cracker children hang ten
toes off the beds of pickups, which magnifies
the feeling of being at the forefront
of everything. Behind them, eternity,
before them—cracker flash-in-the-pan:
innumerable roidy starlings that won’t go out.

Twelve cracker cheerleaders on a bus encounter a band of aliens

Thanks to Sammy G, the only disc jockey
of a local radio station, a team of young
crackers are called in to be filmed
for a believe-it-or-not show on alien sightings,
although the girls, who have unbelievably
trustworthy faces, have not themselves seen
the extra terrestrials. They don short-skirted
uniforms bought with candybar sales & gloss
their lips w/ Too Faced and Sugared Apricot.
When the camera rolls, they point wide-eyed
from the windows of a school bus
in a Piccadilly parking lot in broad day light
—at nothing. Between takes, they laugh
and read fortunes to each other from a box
of cookies that assure them they are well-liked
and everyone will come to their birthday
pool party. Each time they take their places
at the window, they prepare their expressions,
lifting their gazes to the supposed craftʼs coming.
It’s ghostly, how you can almost see them,
carrying so many crackers like pretty gunshot
before them.

Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and Zone 3 journal, as well as the author of three chapbooks: Farm, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, and The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip, which won the 2012 Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest. contact