[POETRY]

[11/26/25]

Wendigos (in Love)

Five Poems by PJ Lombardo

New Year’s Eve Poem

Lit darts bisect the air
like two contradictory
mysteries I turn to her
with myriad questions like
kudzuleaves gumming
my breath’s grille

For an answer nuclear secrets leak
down the arctic’s sweating brow
into the fibers of every

She turns to ask me Are you glad now
I say Gladness?

not my passion
All I want’s
abuse, abuse,
big fat
car bombs, and abuse,
abuse,

and rainbowpainted
icepick scars
struck inside,
deep inside,
this new year’s scamming grin

I Love Modelling

Deereyes splotch against splashes of light
Her trillion lenses, myriad weapons
tonelessly tearing through walls of air
behind which thought was once
private, now it writhes

atop heaps of blemishless hyaluronic acid
atop a balcony off where
dutchblue lovebirds hock
tonsilstones of remorseless
radiation at the request

of the worm in our colon
who slunk through her eye

Opioid sandalwood adorns her gaze
while i stab serrated heels
through every family’s back door

I Love the Market

like flinging darts in a blackout
at three in the morning when the sun’s as dead
as any grandfather, pining after
inoperable pinches of time In new
york city where barrels of oil
pirouette and piddle upwards
her hands wrench soiled air
Her every move a droplet out
the gruesomest nostril
of sun and seppuku
If anybody might spare
seventy-five trillion dollars
her and i could found a planet where
robust horses bubble like boiling water and where
the apes shimmer and chatter in
unimpeachable harmony

Else we could purchase
a fleet of boats
stuff them tight with speculation
Mail them to weather stations
everywhere, like news of war
like natural gas
from your diaphragm to your brainstem

I Love New Jersey

Stuck hometowning above some passaic, her pupils
loaded with clouds
of tracerrounds, chrysanthemums
and oxytocin

There’s a camera on her right temple
into which crowds gander
across the woods, surrounding
manicured, doomed

Crowds say You don’t have to do this
Crowds say Spare us please today

but her forehead’s stamped already
with one neon response:

EVERY ROAD IS
ONE DEAD EXIT

so everywhere you go will lovely helicopters collide

and every neighborhood’s a
devilish helicopter
midsputter, illwired,
cramped barren with appetite

I Love Drinking Wine on My Porch in the Summertime

Baltimorean humidity encumbers
everywhere with its curse
sighing through the gaps
she clawed into the mill’s insulation

Porch furniture beat
indigo with stains
out which figures rise
cataclysmic intent aglints their pupils

Soon the rats will cave the steps, irascible with hunger
and soon the ocean’ll cross from
this porch to something
californian

more terror than breath
left airborne

For now we string
imperceptible spikes
all down calvert st
reet to watch the pileups crescendo

to glimpse the abused future as it crowns

PJ LOMBARDO lives and writes in Baltimore, Maryland. He serves as co-founding editor of GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. His first full-length collection, The Blue Cherub, will be released in 2026 by Cult. Read his writing in SARKA, Tripwire, Vlad Mag, Dunce, Lana Turner Journal and elsewhere.