
Tags: juke juice, lux interior, Nicholaus Patnaude, poison ivy, songs the lord taught us, the cramps

My son and I are doing a podcast about this game we’re creating called Yum Yum: A Scary Adventure Card Game. We’ve been working on it for awhile but having only just started sending out some snippets on postcards to a select few.
It’s been growing in pieces; it has been fun to find something we both like to do.
It seems to want to forge some connections with Paper Dungeon (another game I’ve been working on), and so their fictional universes seem to be joining in unexpected ways. We’re like, “Oh, hello, Ghouldria.”

I started a Patreon. There are tiers and chances to become emperors, junior wizards, and goddesses.
Some of the digital or physical stuff included with the transformation may include: new issues of Elizabeth von Dracula (a comic); Yum Yum Adventure Card Game postcards (a solo ttrpg my son and I are creating); Paper Dungeon materials (a solo ttrpg with some crossover with Yum Yum); Pink Midnight (zines about movies); Juke Juice (printed materials about music); and chapbooks (short stories; 1 per chapbook FIRM).
“Lost Teacher”
We might’ve heard
among things said
we could only communicate
through rumors, whistles
like you were struck by lightning
twice or thrice
or as if a windshield-smashing accident
could crack the road
these were explosions of our being
this was us: born teachers
the boyish athlete wanted to surge out of
you
were
complete,
on the evening of some talent show
on the same bases rounded
by Abbott and Costello
at blistering speeds, at amusement parks
in constellation school bus rides
to Misquamicut-washed twilights
who tied his bowling shoes
to telegraph poles and minimarts
a perfect evening spoiled
by the harpy cry,
of a movie theatre’s belittling dreams
as if to close his shutters
could renew a passion for theater
in the winking of a blinking
exit-stage-left-generous eye.

“Periods Beyond Pain”
A guided parachute wins ruined leaves
from a hunter on the verge
of sprouting deer wings,
incited by a chorus of blind serpents’
leggings crossed gloss our fish legs
tied to stirrups in a bottle of spirits
by a chipmunk’s skull
until a riptide of oblivion involves blossoms.
“Gifts of Essence”
I’ll swear by the jacket of your destitute
of hairs and flies and paramours
when long hairs stick to a murderer’s
white cotton cape, brief top hat
smoking mustache
ire destined for cannon-fodder
a grin to wedge past centuries
bikinis, at bottom, ferocious pests
and like snarling, staring into ore
long past microscopes
the gypped oath, chipping
along candy-cane lanes
legs for dollars, our sweethearts
when all dolls have laughed enough
gadflies or gallbladders,
one last innocent look,
before the droppings of coal
the ecstasy of rabbits
footprints in the snow
which shall hold no name
known bearers of the sun’s weight
barren as the pockmarks
shattered bullets in our lockets.