Jerry Cove Road

Suburban surrealism takes a detour down Jerry Cove Road. A collaborative poem by Kerr Martin and Oliver Losinski.

---

Jerry Cove, the gardens slum.
Hidden by plastic grass
Above a dreaming coffin.

At night I danced in sewers
With flashlight eyes
claws like dull knives.

I hung on blue windows,
hearing screaming ghosts.
Kids clutched broken dolls
to let the evening fly.

Father beats his boy.
Mother starves her girl.

But so above, so below
And what is up below?
Beneath the shouting,
A choir hummed.

Beyond Jerry Cove,
Beneath the plastic grass and concrete floor
A factory, buried without clocks.

Gray clean walls
Tools without hands
Stalls without doors

Flat statues beneath
Silently singing
Silver,
Memories
Of death and rebirth

The night it happened,
I found prey
Bushy tail upright
Standing still
Waiting for me
I pounced,
Grabbed and bit
My fangs snapped
The squirrel was stone.

Big man with big stick grabbed me
Held me by the tail, his son in wait
They plucked my black fur,
Threw me in the air and
Hit me with their bat
Splattered me against the fence,

Blue blood found the ground.
My bones, broken like a clock.
I saw my own eye
Lying in the grass
A little girl came to help me
But ran away, scared of my black fur.

From the sewer grate
A boy arose
a collage pretending to breathe
Cut from the page,
skin stretched across nothing.
Spun invisible with transparent eyes.

The boy moved motionless to me,
and spoke without tongue
He told me meaning came like the electric bill,
A tiresome curse disguised as a gift.
But their curse was in the life above,
Mine was deep below.

Under Jerry Cove,
A factory, the one that made me
And the one made for me.

He reached his flat hands to me
Hands not intent on petting.
Betrayal with two friends in tow.

Skin erupts
from my feline suit,
Claws become nails
Fingers lengthen,
My eyes stay slit.
The rest bursts anew.

Paper men sing to me,
Hailing the concrete coffin
Below the plastic grass

Rooms with forgotten function
Waiting to be mine.
Writing walls made for me
With empty bellies and silent songs

I wait where the bus forgets them.
The children ask who I am
I tell them I have a black cat
They smiled with all their teeth
And never asked again.
I take them by my hairy hands,
Guiding them through tunnels of sweat
Into cold, narrow hallways

The paper boy below
Guides them to their pens
They hold each other
Like newborns blue
But the doors have vanished
And I have too.

The young pups in their crates
Sing for their release
Their barks awaken dead machines
Their meows push the levers
A blue haze simmers in the pale kennels.

They collapse with broken bones.
First their skin, now the flesh.
Squeezed together by deaf walls.
Black fur erupts from liquid flesh.
This pound is reserved for man.

Gaping mouths that plead for mercy,
I’ve seen what plastic builds.

Every act preserved in me,
as me.

A reflection.
An error.
A cat?
No, a man.

They scratch.
They whimper.

Fuel for the childhood kiln.

Let their salted flesh melt like
their creators by the mass below.
Rebirth them into a new God.
One that does not cry or bleed.
One that never left Jerry Cove.

---

This piece belongs, first, to my writing partner Oliver Losinski.

He didn’t come to me empty-handed but with this surreal creation already breathing. Tone, texture, and world only recognize when it was laid out in front of me. That’s rare. Most of my collaborations start with a seed. This was already well rooted and growing. He trusted me enough to step into his mind and meet it where it lived. That takes courage. Oliver understands that. He understands atmosphere, restraint, and when to let something stay strange and when to go stranger. So whatever this became when I got my hands on it? Whatever teeth it grew? It all started with him.

Thank you, friend.

An Actors Illness