J Pascutazz
STARRY NIGHT CREDIT CARD

Shouldn’t it let me buy everything
and pay with negative interest?
All those swirling golden stars
teeming, unbalanced in the sky
Since I was Vincent in a past life
I told the collector on the phone
A measured man. Had he dealt
with my unlikely work before?
I did the masterpieces everyone loves
now worth billions in museums
then shot myself dead in the heart
before I made a single cent
So I had unlimited credit—I
reasoned—with the starry dynamo
The nauseating spinning started
when Mr. Money didn’t buy it
He sympathized. I was unmoored
lost in a cosmos of pure color
I’d eat cadmium yellow orange
wash it down with turpentine
I threatened, before hanging up
I walked to the local park
scissoring the starry sky
into a million irrevocable
pieces, and in the dark
dug a hole and buried it
along with the bill
in the ultramarine
shadow of the Cypress
and went about my art

J Pascutazz is a non-binary writer with Asperger’s syndrome, a graduate of Bennington College, and was raised in rural Ohio. J is a resident of Brooklyn. J’s work has been published by Right Hand Pointing, Dime Show Review, Miracle Monocle, and others, and is forthcoming in The Fabulist Words & Art.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #29.