Turds Beguile by Babe Winkleman

“But I also understood something else: In the fetid stink of manmade hell, which ran with razor wire between shell craters of pooled chlorine gas and dead bodies, far from this goddess of love’s beauty, far from the laser lights and dance music, back where artillery barrages threatened to suck the lungs from my chest in burning air vacuums and where men were mutilated into mushed gore while machine guns spewed tickets to hell upon the battlefields of a World War, I knew I had to deal with my mother’s death.
"Which is when I awoke. A raging boner felt like steroids had been injected into my penis, and there was a happiness in my heart. The humiliation of terrible jobs that paid me chicken feed, the America I had returned to that was built out of plastic commercial strips offering minimum wage and obesity that keeps one poor and swallowing depression with spoonfulls of enormous food portions and tv and anti-depressants…Within all that horror, I now felt a purpose.”

-Babe Winkleman, 2022