Prom | Sam Leuenberger

Title page with images cut from magazines and overlayed on a black background. The imagery features women's bare legs, their feet in high heels, which are surrounded by drawings of colorful butterflies and jewels. The text is composed of words cut from magazines; the header text reads "Prom" and the subheader text reads "FROM THE WORLD VIEW / TO FERTILITY CULT / TO THE ORDER OF TIME AND SPACE."

The text is composed of words cut from magazines and pasted on a black background: "To hell with Cinderella's carriage / your sun-drenched boobs collapse / on a frayed white towel / and in that instant it's snowing / and the Milky Way looks like / a bruise forming on the small of / God's back and you're fake-eating / low-fat peanut butter from the bowl of / a hypoallergenic lapdog from West Los Angeles / while some twelve-year-old in a pantsuit covers / Norah Jones on tick-tock at Burger King as / Alex the salutatorian is leaning against a flustered stag / painting a garish portrait of Kenny Rogers on an orange M&M while / Philip taunts a pixilated dolphin and / Julis bounds after a baby-blue corsage but then / Carly murders Mr. Johnson with her flip-flops in the teachers' lounge / and right when Yvonne walks by with half a bottle of codeine and / Liesel's acne medication and so you wander out onto the bleachers / to be alone when Molly yawns riding a breathy incredulous elephant / with the Sanskrit word for 'pink' emblazoned on its ass / bringing you back to the here and now where / the setting sun scribbles reddish equations on your back / and even though it's probably impossible to lock eyes with the divine / the littlest things do."

Sam Leuenberger’s fiction and poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Cutbank, The Spectacle, The Collagist, Kallisto Gaia Press, and The Gravity of the Thing. Once upon a time, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.