The silent assassins came floating down,
Tiny but deadly they came.
Two thousand dead mice,
Stuffed full of Tylenol,
On the island of Guam they deplaned.

To **** off the snakes
That are killing Guam’s birds
Tylenol should do the trick
A mere 80 milligrams
Can **** a grown snake
Or at least make them terribly sick.


I hope this works better
Than the Mongoose Brigade
We deployed on Hawaii’s fair shores.
They were sent to **** rats
But instead took long naps
And the birds are more rare than before.

once extinct in wild
Guam's territorial bird
Guam rail called koko

I ended up throwing the hotdog out and left it to the bag of chips to satiate my hunger. It was the first time I’d actually come across a park with those stone chess boards.
I didn’t have a set with me. Honestly I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to play anyway. I’d hoped I’d at least be lucky enough to watch other people play.
I got to my third **** and was getting ready to give up when I saw them. This little boy, probably five, walking with an old man. He was holding his hand in a guiding manner towards the tables. A very old looking case tucked under his arm and a solem look in his face. I couldn’t see the face of the old man. He had a scarf covering most of it.
They shuffled through the crisp autumn dead to the second table down from where I was sitting. The boy looked at me for a moment before opening his chess case. Just a blank stare but at the same time, melancholic.
He set the pieces up before the old man and sat down. He’d given the old man the white side so he’d go first. Figured I was getting a chance to enjoy a wholesome moment so I moved a little closer. “That’s close enough.” The old man grumbled without even looking to see how far I’d gotten. So I stopped. “You can stay. Just be quiet.” The little boy said. He too not looking at me. Just rocking his legs back and forth.
The old man moved the kings pawn two spaces. Fischer did this a lot. The little boy countered with his queens pawn. The old man snatched the boys pawn and slammed his down. The first blow had been struck. This should be if nothing else interesting I thought to myself.
The two of them set about their tactics. Setting up their offensive and defensive strategies. And the little boy was able to slay a bishop in the process.
It’d been about twenty minutes since they started their game. I got up to throw my trash out and I get an alert on my phone from my news source. Guam got hit by a tsunami. Expected death toll in the thousands.
Thinking nothing of it I return to my seat. People die everyday all over the world. No since in fretting over a place I’ll never go to and people I don’t know.
I sat back down in time to see the little boy capture one of the old mans pawns. The sky was getting darker but my phone hadn’t said anything about rain. These two didn’t seem worried and I was more interested in their game.
A few minutes later my phone chimes again. A massive earthquake has hit Venezuela. Nine point something or other. Didn’t read the article. After all, why wouldn’t the rules that applied to Guam apply to Venezuela? I noticed people scurrying to leave the park under threat of a thunderstorm but since these two were unfazed. So was I.
They continued with their game never saying a word to one another or even acknowledging me. Trading board advantages at what seemed to be a fairly normal pace. Each taking a few minutes or more to make their move.
The old man set his queens rook up for sacrifice. He was going to try to use his knight to fork the kids kings bishop and his queen. The kid took the bait and the rook fell. I get a text from my friend the tug boat captain. He’d been dragging barges down the river for the past two months while they dredged out the harbor. It’s just a pic of a shitload of dead fish with “***” written under it. I asked him if this was on the river he was on. He said yes. That the fish had all just died. By the thousands they were just floating to the surface. I figured it was probably a chemical spill somewhere on the river and told him my thoughts. He made a lame sushi joke and I put my phone away to focus on the game.
I wanted to bring up to these two what had occurred since their game started. The tsunami in Guam, the earthquake in Venezuela, the dead fish. But if they wanted to talk to me, they would have already. So I just lit up another **** and leaned back to watch the game.
The skies had gotten murky and seemed to stir. The birds had grown restless and confused. Landing and flying off in weird patterns. It looked like some were performing touch and gos. Others would either take off like normal and a few just crashed into the earth with fatal results.
The old man moved in once again to snag the little boys queen but ended up losing another pawn.
My phone chimed again with another alert. Much of Yellowstone was being destroyed by a wild fire that was probably started by lightening.
Suddenly the little boy was able to force a decision on the old man. He’d split the line between the old mans queen and his king. The little boy said with no enthusiasm and with subtlety “check”.
The old man could take the bishop but would lose his queen to the boys knight. It was then I saw the old man start to tear up. He wasn’t outwardly emotional about it and the boy made no efforts to console the old man.
The old man took the boys bishop and sacrificed his queen. Then he reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a kerchief to wipe his tears away. Then he hands it over to me without looking up and just says “run”.
I was confused at first but then the little boy turned and said “he’s right, you should run to something you love”.
I got up and watched for a few minutes longer. I realized they’d put the game on hold and weren’t going to move again until I left. So I went to use the bathroom there in the park. I didn’t need to pass by them again to leave the park but I wanted to see if one of them had made a move while I was on the *******.
As I strolled back by on my way out of the park I glanced at the board one more time. From what I could tell the little boy was about four moves from checkmating the old man.
My phone chimed, it was my news source again. The internet was flooded with images of the moon from the other side of the world. It’d turned a blood red. The pictures were almost too hard to believe.
Just before getting here. Every radio station went dead. It’s just static from one end of the dial to the other.
So here I am. And you can believe me or not. All I can tell you is every time that little boy won a piece, something bad happened. Maybe it’s the final battle between good and evil over there in the park. I don’t know. But here I am. At the end of the world.
And maybe I am crazy. But they did tell me to run to something I love.
So here I am.

Hymn to an Art-o-matic Laundromat
by Michael R. Burch

after Richard Thomas Moore’s “Hymn to an Automatic Washer”

O, terrible-immaculate
ALL-cleansing godly Laundromat,
where cleanliness is next to Art
—a bright Kinkade (bought at K-Mart),
a Persian rug (made in Taiwan),
a Royal Bonn Clock (time zone Guam)—
embrace my *** in cushioned vinyl,
erase all marks: ****, vaginal,
******, inkspot, red wine, dirt.
O, sterilize her skirt, my shirt,
my skidmarked briefs, her padded bra;
suds-away in your white maw
all filth, the day’s accumulation.
Make us pure by INUNDATION.

Published by The Oldie, where it was the winner of a poetry contest. This poem was inspired by the incongruence of discovering "works of art" while doing laundry at a laundromat with coin-operated washers and dryers. I was reminded of the experience while reading Richard Moore’s “Hymn to an Automatic Washer.” Keywords/Tags: hymn, art, America, Americana, laundry, laundromat, washer, dryer, appliances, clean, cleaning, cleanliness, clothes, clothing, underwear, god, godly, godliness, water, baptism, inundation, sonnet, analogy, humor