Today I lazer-beamed Frank right
in his still-beating heart. In four
hundred days he would die
from it. Several days later,
sitting on Stacy’s bed, tying
his shoes, his heart would detonate
as exceptionally as a ketchup
packet. Stacy, convinced it was
from a lazer-blast she administered
two hundred and fifty days prior,
would wrap him in her
bedsheets and dump him in
the water-filled quarry. Later,
in a phone call with her lazer
specialist in which she discovers
there’s no way her lazer was
the cause of death, she would vow
to find and beam the man
who killed Frank.
Several hundred days later, people
would find effects of Frank. Inside
his sock drawer would be a note
in his handwriting: Dear World,
I’ve swallowed enough lazer pills
to fully die within the next one
hundred days. Goodbye. Love.
Frank. Depressed, outraged
over the loss, Frank’s octogenarian
parents would lazer-beam twenty
two people at the bowling alley.
In a phone call with Stacy one
thousand days later I’d tell her:
I think I killed Frank. I’d tell
her: I love you. Know that and this:
Frank’s back. He is alive and he is
lazering everybody badly to
death who he knew in his first life.
Daniel D'Angelo is finishing up an MFA at George Mason University. His poems have appeared in The Collagist, H_NGM_N, and NOÖ Journal. He is Poetry Editor for Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art.