I see faces in the mold on my ceiling, a half-bitten apple in the fruit punch stain on my first Sunday shirt. Curtains drawn, bundled— folds like a Shar Pei’s face, a candle in the dome light hanging over my childhood park. Lena and Zeus—forced fertilization in clouds intertwined, my mother and father in squirrels bickering from tree to tree. A ballerina in the wet strands of my girlfriend’s hair—femme en rose— clinging to the plastic of the shower wall, a tobacco leaf in the rust of my neighbor’s 90-something beater. A burnt cigarette in the smoked-stained teeth of the parking garage attendant, scraped skin in the red bacterial colony of a Petri dish. A bent spine in a fallen branch, a hard cock in the exposed rebar in the rubble of a demolished building, fish scales in a roof’s shingles. Shackles in the swing-set chain, veins in the roots of a new garden plant, pulled from its plastic. A uterus in the angular bruise of a banana, a man kneeling in the grease of a pizza box’s lid, a pair of lips in the pink gum on the underside of a desk. Honeycomb in the crumb of freshly cut sourdough, train tracks in the zipper of a sealed winter coat, a collapsed lung in the deflated soccer ball out in the shed. A funeral procession in ants marching the kitchen tile, a blushed cheek in the smear of strawberry jam on toast, an umbilical cord in my phone charger, a rosary in the beads of water along a bathing woman’s breasts, a blood moon in the rust ring left by her shaving cream canister at the edge of the tub. A spiderweb in a shattered pane, a bowl in a spoon, dead teeth in a bag of unpopped kernels, a choir in a pack of Marlboro lights. Orzo in the fat of a dissected frog, a geisha in Jigsaw, a nipple in the cherry topper of a sundae, an “M” in a bike rack, a “W” if I tilt my head, a communion wafer in a bottle cap lost in the grass, fingerprints in the lines of an old vinyl 45, a birthday wish in steam pressed from a work suit, a seashell in the curl of a sleeping dog’s ear, a bird’s nest in fraying wires, a dildo in a billy club, a wishbone in her split ends, a bridge in an initiated barrette, peeled sunburn in a snake’s shed, DNA in the last licorice twist. A compass in a weather vane, a badly shaped beard in the shadow of a rooster, a soldier’s dog tag in a freshly struck coin, a crow’s feather in a mascara brush, a slack bike chain in a coiled snake, constellations in a freckled face.
About the Author Sean Brown is a poet and an MA student at Northern Illinois University, where he studies literature, rhetoric, and writing. He lives and works in the suburbs of Chicago.Pareidolia
