CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue
You Have To Be Wealthy In Order To Be Great
You Have To Be Wealthy In Order To Be Great
I like to tell people it’s hard to get rich,
but it’s even harder to fill your body cavity
with golf balls and sell them to foreign
heads of state at exorbitant prices. It all
depends on alignment of dimples, learning
to hold clubs in your mouth without
chewing. You don’t get wealthy by accident.
It’s takes a lot of grit to flatter someone
on Monday, and then on Tuesday, feed them
to the cylindrical grinding machine I keep
in my luxury penthouse suite. That’s how I
achieved greatness. First, I’m rich. Second,
I’m entirely coated in plutonium. Third,
I’ve accumulated quite a collection of slightly
used penny loafers which I sell for very
reasonable prices at the Penny Loafers
Emporium. Come on down! Off I-34 by
the Shoney’s. My brother owns that Shoney’s.
He says kids under 5 eat free. Every Christmas
at Mother’s I try to tell him: no one eats free.
CL Bledsoe is the assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of sixteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the flash fiction collection Ray’s Sea World. Recent work appears in The Arkansas Review, Contrary, and Barrelhouse. He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at NotAnotherTVDad.blogspot.com
and, with Michael Gushue, at https://medium.com/@howtoeven
Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual Press, and he co-curates the reading series Poetry at the Watergate. His work can be found in journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Gargoyle, The Germ, and American Letters & Commentary and his books are Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, Gathering Down Women, and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood (“a shabby and decidedly unhip neighborhood” -New York Times) of Washington, D.C.
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