three poems

by Morgan Boyer

Hawthorne afternoon  

We lied on the living room carpet  

watching a rerun of The Amanda Show  

on Nickelodeon followed by bowls 

of Valletta, the “fancy” Mac n Cheese,  

with a navy-blue USS Marine  

hat firmly on his head 

and his khaki-clothed bum  

on his favorite plaid recliner  

as grandma fed Sam the ten-year-old  

Bichon Frise tiny dark-chocolate Hershey  

bars, unaware of the poison that lied  

within the sugar square that would lead 

to him vomiting under the coffee table 

two weeks before Bush’s second term   

DDR

Days of walking down hallways of lockers

pass by your weary pimply subconscious

as you focus your gaze on a plastic mat

freshly bought, unchewed

you cover your sweaty feet with mismatched socks

to avoid sticking to the neon arrows like Pam

being smeared onto a cooking sheet

you’re only on Light mode, your sister’s on Moderate,

and Amanda from the family that gives out sugar-free Snickers

on Halloween can do “Tsugaru” on Heavy and get an A.

Each “ok” feels like another locker slamming into you

as you come to accept the B you get on Waka Laka, and the B

you get on remembering to rinse the plate before putting it in the washer,

and the B on reading two chapters of A Wrinkle in Time,

the B+ you get in career-searching and the C- you get in love.

Trash scrolling 

scrolling through the trash, you come across

another April Fool’s celebrity death hoax

claiming Chris Hemsworth died in a car crash

graces your grandma’s Facebook page 

next to an AI of a shoeless black boy building

a sand sculpture of a jacked Jesus with no pecks, 

a sponsored post pretending to be a 2015

Buzzfeed quiz, a side banner whose pixels

failed, so it sits sadly as a framed empty canvas

the Internet, once the hope of the world, is now

riddled with waste like a garden grove 

      littered with discarded cigarettes and soda cans 

Photo of Morgan Boyer

BIO: Morgan Boyer is the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018), If I Wasn’t Sacred (Alien Buddha Press, 2025) and a graduate of Carlow University. Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Oyez Review, Pennsylvania English, and Voices from the Attic. Boyer was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2025.