Chris and Holly write under the heavy influence of music and a constant flow of uninhibited imagination. They share the same space (Savannah, GA), and are pretty sure they share half of the same brain, too. For more about them and their work, check out their blog, http://cantfightthewrite.blogspot.com/, or follow them on Twitter @Chris_and_Holly.

The Sweet Family Siblings

Chris Smith and Holly L'Oiseau

1.
The Sweet family parents
were masters in the field
of surgeoning hurt children 
and getting them all healed.
 
With four frightful offspring,
impossible to tame,
working long shifts
had put them both to blame.
 
For their kids’ only sweetness
was the Sweet family name.

2.
Little Lourdes Sweet, 
the youngest at seven,
dragged her cat by the neck 
and sent him to heaven.
 
Psychotic cruelty to animals
is a trait known in boys,
but she preferred choking cats
to sipping tea with her toys.
 
Ten tiny tombstones
marked each of her joys.

3.
Rory, who was ten,
liked to dress in drag.
He cursed out a passerby
while smoking on a fag.
 
He loitered at the street corner,
the cross of Fifth and Nash.
He flicked his butts at babies
and burned them with the ash.
 
He weaved a web of cuss words
even sailors would find brash.
 
4.
Darleene dreamt of being Daddy's girl,
though her love he would ignore,
so in his office she did creep
to steal a scalpel from his drawer.
 
She practiced on her teddy,
until she turned thirteen,
then went into marketing kidneys,
though for fun she'd take your spleen.
 
In place of her patients’ organs,
she'd leave them with gangrene.
 
5.
Marla Sweet, at sixteen,
was the oldest of the group.
She liked to use cyanide
to poison people's soup.
 
Her guise was with the homeless
for whom she'd pretend to care.
She'd feed you like an angel
and watch you keel over in your chair.
 
The police never batted an eye:
It deloused the hobos from their hair.

6.
Little Lourdes' prep school
took a field trip to the zoo.
When she looked upon the lion's den,
she knew just what to do.
 
She slipped through the bars
to tame the wild beast,
But she second-guessed her brilliant plot,
surprised, to say the least,
 
when the lions made a meal of her,
a little Lourdes feast.
 
7.
After being crowned Drag Queen,
Rory made his way back home
and collapsed into a pile of clothes,
too partied-out to roam.
 
On his polyester pile,
he lit up one last smoke.
The synthetic threads caught ablaze,
and Queen Rory started to choke.
 
He became the ashes he loved to flick.
What a fashionable way to croak.

8.
Her latest victim in a tub,
Darleene headed for the door
but slipped on a pool of blood
and fell upon the floor.
 
She landed on dear Daddy's scalpel;
her vein it did attack.
She died atop his OR table;
he could not bring her back.
 
They donated most all her organs,
though her heart was much too black.

9.
At the end of Marla’s fateful shift,
she sat down for a meal.
Upon spying Marla's meager serving,
sorrow a vagrant then did feel.
 
He shared from his own portion,
as Marla looked away,
and it only took a spoonful
for Marla to turn gray.
 
She fell down with her minestrone,
and beside it, she did stay. 

10.
Where there were once six,
now stand only two,
a grief-stricken couple
who think each death undue.
 
They know not of their children's evils.
Their ignorance is bliss.
But the townsfolk feel a great relief
for nothing more can go amiss,
 
though the graves still cause them each to shiver
and every cat to hiss.