A pair of severed legs walks into a bar. Two severed arms greet the legs at the counter. Legs and arms don’t have mouths, so they play handsie and footsie. I’m sure you can imagine what it might look like. Plus, the legs still have their feet, and they’ve learned to point their toes. (Makes the exchange more efficient.) At this point in the story, I cannot decide whether to use the plural for the two legs or the singular for the decided pair. I could foreshadow and suggest the singular for the patchwork body, but then I’d have to get into how the arms and legs found a head and a torso, and that’s more than I’m supposed to tell you. And I wouldn’t want to tell you how the bar gets bombed. All that hard work gone to waste.
Joke
Olivia Rose
Olivia Rose was born and raised in San Jose. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Jose State University, where she earned the Alan Soldofsky Award for Outstanding MFA Thesis and served as Reed Magazine’s Senior Poetry Editor. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Red Coyote, The Ear, Scapegoat Review, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.