hero’s last-second super-strength

Vincent A. Cellucci & Dylan Krieger

no herniated heroes allowed

one                  ton                       or        ten

a limb caught     inside boulder crag          

                                        victim of her own beauty           helpless            perhaps our love interest    

                                                                 kempt in havoc

between several smashed vehicles

                                                                                         or a downed building

 ENTER a well-groomed hero               nonchalantly battling a dark bad guy   

                            the choreography              to perform            a la hercules

                                         what the hero does               

                                                                     goes 

                                                                             slug for slug       pinky-finger-forklift that shit

     erase what you know

                                        of the everyman               or the laws of limits

                                                                secure your borders     fortify the fortress

             and flex like hell

             raining down upon

                                                                               the power flop’s penchant  

                                                             for lifting tin cars off hotties

                                                             onto fire-fallowed fields of extras

PDF Download of a hero's last-minute super-strength

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Vincent A. Cellucci wrote An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011) and edited Fuck Poems: an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). Come back river, his first chapbook, a bilingual Bengali-English translation collaboration with the poet and artist Debangana Banerjee is available from Finishing Line Press. _A Ship on the Line, a battleship-collaboration with poet Christopher Shipman released by Unlikely Books in 2014, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award.

Dylan Krieger is a magazine editor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she recently earned her MFA in poetry and co-directed the annual Delta Mouth Literary Festival two years in a row. Her cats and warm jackets, however, still reside in the Catholic stronghold of South Bend, Indiana, where she was born, baptized thrice, and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame. Her first full-length collection of poems, Giving Godhead, won LSU’s Robert Penn Warren Award for best poetry thesis of 2015. Her follow-up project is a collaboration with her partner, Vincent Cellucci -- a book of poems that examines and satirizes overused action movie tropes.