"Uncle Loser The Knight of Swords" by RJ Equality Ingram

VOICEMAIL POEMS

My mother’s half brother wore a blue herringbone tweed jacket with padded elbows to her funeral / The kind worn by a caricature of a substitute teacher or traveling salesman or a freshly sober high school dropout / He told us to call him Uncle Loser & used to whisper to us in the back of his trailer the same three ghost stories every summer / The one about the man who underachieves his way back to the kiddie table when the adults start pairing themselves into euchre teams / The one about a man who drags a rusted shopping cart behind him as he haunts the parking lot of the abandoned shopping malls that line the freeway access roads / The one about his teenage classmates who drank themselves into their senior year & went missing while camping in the woods not far from here / Uncle Loser taught his parrot all the best curse words to use on everyone except grandma & his daughters / We thought that damn bird was gonna outlive us all but she died early from lung cancer / Family Tradition / For every set of us one must annihilate himself farther faster / Uncle Loser surprised his in-laws by looking like a goddamn college professor next to the cremains of my mother / My dad was so impressed by the burnout’s newfound glamour he offered to buy a round of drinks for them before remembering that side of the family was newly sober / Uncle Loser used to let me spin around in his daughter’s tutu in front of an antique mirror in the back of his trailer / He was glad someone enjoyed his embroidery. Ask Your Uncle to let you take a tutu home | Turn to page 2 Spin until “Genius of Love” starts to skip | Turn to page 3 ————————————– RJ Equality Ingram called us from Portland, OR. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems