Suss: another literary journal

Follow the Law Regarding Sea Tablets

by Kathleen Balma

A man walks into a titty bar. Asks for a shot, gets one
in the chest. Yes, the breast god likes his irony.
Quick def­i­n­i­tion of prayer: two beings of unequal sta­tus
com­ing together with sep­a­rate agen­das, the weaker
one of which makes her­self com­pletely
____able to the almighty abstract. (Here,
as in any divine or bla­zon space, the pri­vacy gauge
is nec­es­sar­ily askew. At times like these
it may be use­ful to ask, “Am I a mas­cot
for my own body, is my body

a mas­cot for me?”) Another man, a strip­per groupie, takes his
knife to an after party, test runs the tip along an arm
and neck. (Her body has a mas­cot, in the form of a tat­too.)
Arriving at that place, for her, was easy
as four blown stop­lights. Leaving? Like rid­ing on
a bla­zon sad­dle. This event is akin to the one
in which a road sign said seat­belts, but from the cor­ner
of an eye looked like sea tablets.
“Sea tablets?” the reader said,
and clapped her throat in a gulp.

(Her body is a mas­cot for bod­ies in gen­eral.)
A foot­ball team, in des­per­ate need of a new mas­cot, paid
a mad sci­en­tist to con­struct a body
from raw ingre­di­ents. Her first words were: “I mean,
if I wanted to feel lonely at a social func­tion,
I’d go home for the hol­i­days.”
Sex: two equal bod­ies agree­ing
on some­thing, the ____thing
being done while they agree.
“People with big mus­cles remind me of steaks.”

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