Are you ready to RUMBLE!?
1. My name is KCHUNK!
I am a fistful of newspaper, balled up tight,
worn, yellowed and unreadable—
over each finger, I pour molten metal.
Fuse brass knuckles with old world bones,
solder them with rust-bit nails and glass.
Lace gloves with broken bottles,
heel my boots with axes, brandish angry sickles.
Fashion a shield from a landlord’s ribs,
bind wrists in barbed wire, anchor my spine with rebar,
rivets up my sides, carve a vow in tooth enamel:
It’s time for what’s next.
I think this while waiting for pizza at the Naked City 7-11
a day before the COVID lockdown.
As I back away from a man masturbating
on the El train, after I transfer at Howard,
almost bump into a woman eating cat food from a can.
When a coal slurry mudslide pushes
my grandma’s house down the holler.
My body is having a civil war,
not bisected in Shilohs and Antietams,
but chaotic stochastic terrorism,
a mass shooting in my spleen,
a car bomb in my appendix,
my toes attacking my fingers.
All festering wounds that won’t heal
until they are lanced, burned, cauterized,
scarred into scripture.
I spend my free time looking for a doctor
or a witch to heal me, cover my sores in balm.
If I got better, I’d win.
2. We are the rich, a riot of Bop Bags
Bop Bags were filled with air,
and weighted at the base,
meant to be punched and kicked.
The most famous was the Shmoo,
Al Capp’s magic creature of abundance
reproduced asexually and wanted to be eaten.
We are not so whimsical, even if we’re built the same,
our bases bloated with rare Earth minerals, our skins taut
with stolen air. We could feed everyone, but we don’t.
We cast Kaiju shadows that blot out the breath of the horizon,
as if we could privatize the air, claw at the sky’s belly,
shake gold from clouds.
We chew through tomorrow mornings
sharpen teeth on bones, swallow a century, vomit debt.
We thread chains in history’s spokes,
rewind time to melt Atec gold into crosses,
and then melt crosses into bullion.
The weird thing is that Bop Bags don’t have arms.
Like, we can’t really do anything.
But don’t tell anyone.
3. My name is KCHUNK!
I see cannon, tanks on the horizon,
but behind them, I see us —
a mushroom cloud,
a radium guillotine with lead blade,
a firework blooming from our throats,
compound-eyed war photographers,
cities razed that rise again in the shape of fists,
echoing unyielding chants.
We walk in the firelight of foreclosed homes,
smoke thick as the ink of old contracts,
swallowing deeds and names.
Ash settles soft as snowfall—
on the skeletons of schools and hospitals,
rust-eaten playgrounds and shattered chapels,
where stained glass windows weep colored light.
We strike the vinyl skin like a scorpion—
sh-KAH!
split the seam, scatter the bloodmetal,
deflate our masters.
wealth pours out like marrow from a shattered bone,
seeding a harvest to raise a house,
mend a street, pack a thousand empty lunches,
stack books high in libraries,
grow a roof where rain once ruled,
beat war drums on the skulls of toppled statues.
A red-green eye, gangrenous,
rolls down from my palm like a grenade
into a chasm in my chest— and blooms,
not in flame but in fury,
not in ruin but in reckoning,
not in silence but in storm,
not in surrender but in song.
And we are overwhelmed.
And we are rising.
KCHUNK,
we win.
Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 26: KCHUNK! Vs. the Bop Bags - mixed media collage and painting, digital prints, acrylic, stickers, graphite, wig hair, coffee, marker, ink, glitter, cotton and ash on stretched canvas, 48 x 60 inches (2025)
This poem originally appeared in the print edition of Locust Review 12 (2025).
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