Hattiesburg Missalette

Driving behind the truck that carries Ms. Pac-Man

across Mississippi, console a booth for ghosts.

My favorite Sunday memory? Tailing a pinball machine

as it bucked the maw of a moving van. Bride of Pinbot,

a Metropolis offshoot chauffeured past dorms and

church that housed a giant painted swan. Tinseltown,

your mission with apricot’s aid is to capture

the Christflap of big-tent religion using robots

deactivated since the Silent Era. Artificial

life will lead the blessing. Germany,

you may keep your kettledrum,

filmmaker Fritz Lang’s estate funding

the lederhosen symposium. Cyborgs, you

will Bitcoin the brimstone automatons tithe.

St. Peter accepts carbon, paradise loathe to

bolts—android, your First Communion photo

looking rather umlaut, the second coming

attraction sainted of corpus-focus. Ms. Pac-

Man hopes for robot reincarnation to negate

ectoplasm appetite because when Jesus

water-trods, His sound is strawberries

chased around the screen.

Jon Riccio is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers. Recent poems appear in Anti-Heroin Chic, Gris-Gris, Inverted Syntax, and The Ocean State Review, among others. A past Lambda Poetry Fellow, he received his MFA from the University of Arizona.