Falcon, your world would be different if Michael still lived. He would have followed your story from the beginning. He would have watched from his helicopter as the balloon floated on. He would have known the truth, because he would have sensed it, and he would have shaken his head, as he and your father’s empty balloon hovered.

Falcon, even when you’re eighteen you’ll have a hard time getting laid. Girls at school will not want to put your testicles in their mouth. They will not give you their underwear, because you won’t be famous. If you had kept quiet you might have been famous, or, better yet, if Michael was still alive he would have adopted you and bought you your own monkey. He would have taught you the moon walk and how to grab your genitals. But he wouldn’t have grabbed your genitals, because you would have been his famous son.

Falcon Jackson, if you were real the world would be a better place. The people in the world would be divided into two groups. The first group would be people who loved you. The second group would be people who adored you. Sometimes the groups would fight each other, but they wouldn’t fight long because you’d be able to fly. You’d be able to fly and you would have very strong ears. You would hear them from way above as you sped through the clouds. You’d be up there gathering lost balloons with your pet monkey who could also fly. This would be how you passed your time: You’d rescue lost balloons and you’d bring them back to the crying children who lost them. You’d bring them back to the crying children, and then the children and the balloons would smile. Then you and your pet monkey would high five, and you’d fly back into the sky. You would do this until you heard people fighting about you, and then you’d come down. You’d come down and you’d stand between the angry mobs of people. You’d stand between the people, and then you and your monkey would sing “Just Good Friends.”You’d sing all the Michael Jackson parts and your monkey would sing the Stevie Wonder parts. You’d also dance. You’d do the moon walk and you would grab your genitals. The monkey would not dance but he’d roll his head around like Stevie Wonder and put on dark sun glasses. Then the people who loved you and the people who adored you would stop their fighting. They would stop their fighting and they would have a party. At the party they would roast a whole pig. The whole pig would have an apple in its mouth. The apple would remind you of a balloon. You’d take to the sky before the pig was even carved.

Falcon, you would still be half Japanese if Michael Jackson adopted you. You would be half Japanese and all Jackson.

Falcon Jackson, your monkey would be named Shasta like the drink. Falcon Jackson, your favorite drink would be Shasta. But not Shasta the monkey, Shasta the drink. You’d be particularly fond of sangria Shasta, but you’d never turn down any flavor of Shasta. You’d like sangria Shasta, but you wouldn’t like sangria. Falcon Jackson, you’d never drink alcohol at all. You’d never drink alcohol, but you wouldn’t shake your head at those who did. Sometimes you’d drive drunk people home from bars, but you’d talk to them on the way. You’d talk to them on the way, and you’d let them sit in the front seat. You’d let them sit in the front seat, and you’d let them play with the radio. You’d let them play with the radio, and sometimes you’d even sing along. You’d especially sing along if a Michael Jackson song came on. Your favorite Michael Jackson song would be “Smooth Criminal.”“Smooth Criminal” would be your favorite song, but you would never hit anybody.

Falcon Jackson, there would be no attic in your house. There would be a door that looked like it was to an attic, but when you passed through it you’d be on another floor. That floor would also have and attic door that led to another floor. And the next floor would have an attic door that led to another floor. And your house would go on like that forever.

It was probably the white linen pants. I was walking behind him one day. We were going to KOHLS or some equally dreary space and he was wearing these white linen pants and the whole situation was very disheartening. I looked firmly at the white linen pants and wished then for a malfunctioning helicopter to descend on the parking lot and relieve me of what was necessary. We went in to the store and I imagine that he bought more white linen pants. From then on you would be able to find me in a very dark cinder block room clutching chickens and wine as though chickens and wine is a respiratory and a respirator is a liberator.

ESTABLISHING AN ALL-INCLUSIVE INTERNET PRESENCE

So you go to this strip club and Margie says to you “Grandma took the car away again. That stupid prune-fueled bitch threw the keys in the nearest lake.” I do not want your career services pamphlet. I want tacos with Sarah Doolittle. Tacos and new socks. Seven socks, three tacos. Blackened shrimp. You’ll be spitting red by 4AM if mother doesn’t wake up to the sound of red. Here’s my Latin malignancy: we wear jeans now to support the troops and play high-schooler smart boy girlfriend featuring recently trimmed bangs. But returning to Sarah; I haven’t seen teeth constructed on the roof of a church and her paint wears the latest scarves, spreading open smiling.

PARTY

After Ryan left him and moved back in with Aunt Liza he, not knowing where else to align, began sleeping with his books. He was bled limp after a threesome he had with Kathy Acker and Carl Hiassen. Carl got real rough with Kathy and he tried to step in and mediate but by then there was so much mess. Randy was called to the scene but his tater tots weren’t ready so that was all.

Paperclips. That was what he wanted to steal from the office supply cabinet today. Not just one, but several. Perhaps an entire box, a case, untold multitudes. He’d soon have a system that would allow him to pilfer supplies of gradually increasing value. He’d chart it in Excel.

“Can I help you find something, sir?”

He clanged the doors closed. Tricia. Tricia with the mail and crabapple knees. Boyish shoulders and legs thin as an empty coat rack. Her chest a percolation of asthma bubbles. “I need more,” he said.

“Of course you do.” She lurched forward and brushed past, close enough he could smell her morning shampoo. “You mean paperclips, of course. They’re right here.”

He backed away as he always had—careful, with propriety. It wasn’t getting caught that worried him as much as not being able to continue. Things had been left as expected in the cabinet. No item shifted out of place. Changes were coming but best not to trumpet alarm. He glanced around the office at others to see if any eyes focused on him at the supply cabinet. Suspicion was another body in all flesh, eager to muscle into form. He’d seen accusations made in the office about many things. Such warring was always done with boiling faces, clenched fists, the rutting posture of the shamed or accused. He tried to be above such flittering but it was always difficult to cloister one’s real desire so he remained alert for the raised eyebrow or the furtive smirk. Tricia’s fingers traced the letters on the box spines, feathering into the lower arc of an S as if it were the hollow of a knee bent in nakedness. Colored bracelets clinked on her left wrist, but still he could see the scar slithering between bands of color. For a moment he wondered what it would be like to grab her arm and bring that scar to his lips but Tricia handed him a box of silver paperclips, fingers curled up over the edge. She pushed the box toward him, shaking it in the air. “Are these the size you need? We might have…bigger.” Her mouth was wide like the grin of a fish.

He said they were fine. As it had been from the start, saying a thing made it real, so he talked as little as possible these days. Such language would return its ink to the air before the drying. Time was short, frantic. The future written already. If only he could find another way to keep the line moving. He carried the box into his office and closed the door. The remainder of the morning he spent shaping the paperclips into small animals and arranging them on his desk. A lion’s mouth. An eagle. The horns of a bull.

The hour tolled. Lunch was McDonald’s. He hitched his pants up over his belly with both hands. Diet didn’t really matter anymore. He’d be discovered, his actions observed by those few souls that still had attention. It was suspicion that fueled their witness. No more common element amongst men than suspicion, save lust perhaps, though that was almost always suspicion’s lighter shade. He’d seen it all in his time here. Cast away, his office now two floors lower then when he started. Of course he was on his way out. Had been for some time. This was his last chance before fading. In older days castigation was rarely done with such slow disdain. All the elder partings accomplished via axe and bloodletting. The modern ways, though cleaner, were more cruel in their intent. So, McDonalds, yes. Diet no longer mattered. Would it be bad, he wondered, to grow so monstrous that people cowered before him like they once had? So large he couldn’t be ignored? The double chin a necessary requirement for feared management. It had been so long since he’d been feared in that respectful manner. Fat men always seemed full of life, commanding. That was what he wanted more than anything. He could stand with his arms out in front of a tailor’s mirror, someone young kneeling, stretching the tape down his thigh, reaching around his waist to read the number, breath burbling in a stringy throat. He’d joke about needing a diet and laugh. He could be jolly. His neck thick. Wrists substantial enough that she would try to encircle it between her forefinger and thumb. She’d come close, all bony elbows and knees in his lap, the bright splash of her laugh warm against the plateau of his chest. He’d wear glinting cuff links and shoes that clapped down long halls, his shadow to dwarf the sun. Mere fantasy, this speculation. Useless. He thought again of her bracelets, how she couched her shame in such color. The scarless were dreadful and self-absorbed. The woman in front of him in the line couldn’t make a decision. The flesh of her wrists unmarred. Two crumpled dollars clutched in her fist. Fingers nervous. Her shoes flat.

“Just get the fries.” He leaned forward. “They’re on the dollar menu. There isn’t much time.”

He waited for the woman to make up her mind. No, the fat weren’t jolly, he decided. The fat were always the ones most wanting. Should probably have a salad. The woman scratched at her side, afflicted with some unseen pestilence. She wobbled from one foot to the other as she worked through the options, though she was thin enough that weight shouldn’t trouble her arches. The menus were garish with color, humming. Registers rattled at the harsh closing of their drawers. Hot grease foamed in a yellow boil. Loud kids romped and tired mothers picked at their salads, tried to hush their children, shaking forks. One of everything is what he wanted. To sample it all before the saying of it was done.

Three plastic forks and two knives. Fourteen packages of fancy ketchup. Eight straws. Nearly a palm full of salt packages. Pepper and napkins. He refilled his drink three times.

Near the day’s end, the office befallen with redolence, yet still Tricia typed on the computer. Instant messaging her friends. Little smiles bloomed on her face. It was as if she thought happiness a given, like time or air. The last few months she’d aged into herself the way a flower arrived at its full color, oblivious, unaware. Beauty innocent of itself was such a rarity. He watched her through the blindslats. A giggle at something on the screen. The scar would reveal itself in her movements. One flash would be enough to show that true body. Thus the forsaken pine for a glimpse. She picked up the phone and looked toward the window he crouched behind. The blinds snapped back together. His phone buzzed.

“Sir, the boss is on the phone.”

He told her he was engaged with a timeline project long in the making. Could she take a message, please? This had worked before.

Her pause longer than a breath. “Of course.”

Did she know? He opened his desk drawer. Pens, pencils, staplers, glue. It was all hoarded there out of sight for him. All for him. Mechanical pencils. Six blank CDs. Copy paper. Rubber bands. Rulers, neon markers, three forever stamps, pristine, and three already curled by saliva. Toner, trash bags, stir sticks numbering six. Creamer that could cloud the darkness from coffee. A note concerning a tryst. He closed the drawer. Perhaps he should buy a safe in which to keep all these things. There could be fire. All these items moved through her careful attention, touched by her solemn fingers. He didn’t know what to do next to keep his heart going, to keep the line moving up. His desk a zoo of ravenous, silver animals.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Tricia.”

“He was calling about inventory discrepancies is all. Nothing else.”

He couldn’t remember hanging up, but the light on the phone was dark. Breath slowed and caught in his throat. He’d been seen. Machinery hummed behind the walls, working toward goals. He watched the inch of light under the door for shadow stutter. The drawer weighted with the trinkets of his culling. To suffer through all the hours of all the days for this brief bliss. The window behind him large as the side of a ship, though he wouldn’t be seen. No one ever looked up here. The view opened onto a city that moved without regard for him. That didn’t matter. He switched off the office light and stood, trembling, dizzy with the sudden height. Forehead a cool oval against the glass, palms spread, fingertips squeaking. That glass shade of him loomed up unbidden, causing the buildings to quake. No, that was the mere shudder of anticipation. Breath splashed cumulus on the glass. The hour for which he waited approached. It felt near, but it always had. The city fogged and cleared before him, teeming, unafraid. That inch of light swelled to several bright feet as Tricia entered. The office darkened as the door closed. Her face slid up to his in the window and he watched in the glass as that scar rose to his mouth. He had hoped to find beauty before the end.

I have become the kind of person who can order biscuits over gravy but not the kind of person who can tolerate the true definition of a Constitutional—what is, essentially, bicycle chaos. The French grape suffers more than the Chilean grape and more than the Syrian grape, but does it suffer more than the Russian potato? The Walloons ballooned and the Huguenots tied they selves into Huge Knots. People say that they are Walloons, do people say that they are Walloons, people say that they are Flemish, afterall, as well as Phlegmish. Newspaper titles need to be more flexible. The North County Times, for instance, really should be recast as The North County Good & Bad Times. Whatever the case may be, Southern California has a higher percentage of Experimental Yogis than any other region on the globe. Speaking of which—said Yogis have much to say on the topics of globulization and Globular Warming. Meat eaters may swallow the fear of the animal but that doesn’t mean the meat eaters shall become fearful, in fact, it means that they will become Chicken Satay Robot. Some will become Drunken Noodle Robot while others will become Beef Pineapple Robot. There is no Moo Shu Pork Robot although there is Moo Shu Porkbarrel Robot and his name is Congress. After Tex / Mexy I was Lava / Tory and then I felt human again, i.e., I could, once again, Go for the Jugular or is that Go for the Juggler? The Sea Breeze came face to face with the Santa Ana and the result was When Microclimates Collide. A cute angle is obtuse, when you dream it, all angles are gifts, yours is I Sauce a Lease—Eye Saws the Police—Applesauce Please, dig it and “ridic” as in Ridiculous, Citizen, as in the Walloonie Bin.

TO KICK A MOCKINGBIRD’S ASS.

Days ago, during a muggy jog up towards the Cathedral, a mockingbird assaulted me in front of the Australian Embassy, while a uniformed Secret Service officer ate a submarine sandwich. He proceeded to alight in a distant oak, and did what mockingbirds do, he mocked me. He discussed the importance of swing voters in the presidential race, he spoke to me in rusty French, he submitted some poems for publication. He didn’t say etcetera. He said, “Recession.” He said, “Try pissing into a dixie cup during a Category Five Twister.” Then his song faded. A mockingbird could certainly best a Finch, even one that nested in the Atticus. Still, I agree with Harper Lee, in noting that a mockingbird should not be killed. To wit, we should kick its ass, instead, if only we could confront the thug where he alights. O, Lord: Why is there perch? There is perch, sayeth the Lord, to remind us of what a serpent is not. Why is there serpent? There is serpent, sayeth the Lord, to administer justice. Justice? What does the serpent know of justice? It knows not, sayeth the Lord. That’s the point. O, Lord: I’m confused. Take a seasalt bath, sayeth the Lord. Engage in the utility of lavender. Lord: why didst thine mockingbird assault me? Mine mockingbird, sayeth the Lord, assaulteth even me, that pesky son of a gun, with those dilly wings and that dilly tail. Tis why I createth the hawk, but yesterday I didst espy the mockingbird routing the hawk. We must soaketh the brisket over-night, sayeth the Lord, then leave it beneath the distant oak, for the mockingbird dost judge our fate. Huzzah!

LABOUR SAVING DEVICES.

I’ve heard of people wanting to be Spanked, but not always Lifted. Also note the Blindfold and (apparent) Electricity and (apparent) Distress. Good Gravy. What will we ask for next? To be Understood? To be Hiccoughed? Is there an Understanding and Hiccoughing Machine out there? Yesterday, in the unoccupied Fourth Floor Men’s Room at the Institution where I work, an Automated Toilet flushed, and flushed, and flushed. What ghostly arse was haunting that toilet? What ghostly turd was that toilet flushing again and again, like Sissy-fuss? For eternity. Or, at least, for Wednesday. Maybe it’s just the Advance Guard Toilet for Today’s Busy Professional: “Always Ready for Your Ass.” I bet there are some pregnant women out there who’d want a true Labour Saving Device, huh? Maybe even Gordon Brown needs a Labour Saving Device. Speaking of Brits, if Shakespeare lived today, he may very well have written Papaya King instead of King Lear. It would be a story about a man having to divide up his Hot Dog & Juice Empire among his daughters, and in the process, find True Love. In the end, all the characters don’t die, exactly, but grow complacent, due to all the Labour Saving Devices they own. It would be, Thus, a uniquely American tragedy, that would also involve Pizza Hut, Cable News, and dyspepsia. “It burns,” King Papaya would say, after eating an Oreo Pizza on the couch during election returns. “How now, Nuncle?” would say the Fool. “Dost thou have Heartburn or Acid Reflux Disease?” There ensues a pause. The pause is everything.

The moon has gone ape shit.

Sick of the tickling and the poking and the poetry.
“You callin’ me fat?!” She howls when men write of her bountiful glow.
“Your mother!” She moans as she throws waves over levees and land.

She makes the streets into fountains and bites her thumb at the sun. “Suck on this, bright eyes!”

Orion pantomimes a gun under his chin.
“I saw that!” the moon pulls to rip at his shoulders and now he laughs out loud at her attempt to pull away. She is a tantrum swinging fists to the body connected to the arm connected to the hand pressed against her forehead. “Say it to my face!” Orion reels back laughing, his horse teeth bared and his bulb nose glowing. “Your ugly!” she thunders, her body shaking, her fists, her nails making cuts in her palms.

She can feel it fall from the inside. The slow and careful collapse of everything holding her up. She has been dizzy, tired. She has been out of breath, made bad decisions. Blamed it on headaches. Blamed it on whiskey. Blamed it on the fact of being a giant rock, orbiting an ungrateful planet that insists on spitting rockets at her. Her whole body is being a brat, a cramping, creaking, groaning mess and she is grumpy and she is pissed off and she is sick of the kick stab pain in her gut. “Take a picture!” she snarls behind clenched teeth.

She feels the crumbling within. She feels the people moving around, all this time self-trapped. One thousand, two thousand, some million years ago, they fled the lights. Burrowed away as soon as the flashes appeared on the dark surface of the earth. Fled the men pointing and staring. Their telescopes getting stronger. The moon people’s secrets getting closer to getting out. They dug tunnels to hide away and now, lost, they dig tunnels that run into tunnels that turn into tunnels. Floors and ceilings fall into floors and ceilings. They dig to find a way back out and all this digging, all this time is causing trouble. A persistent pain that is making the moon a cranky bitch.

These moon people, these fleshy sloth bodies. Generations of digging, wrangling through the mud. Time has stolen their eyes. Turned their hands into shovel palms. These years of digging tore away fingernails, knuckles, bone. Made their hands into spades with sharpened points. Made their knees into rocks; round bulbs to hold their weight. Their backs bent arched and their shoulders low enough to touch ground. And those eyes that used to be Bambi bright and curious, gone, melted away. And now the children are born with dark beads on either side of their faces that twitch and shiver at the sounds of incoming rockets. Black beads that shimmy and shake for no reason. If light existed in these tunnels the children would be monsters. Gremlins. Gate keepers huddled so long under the arcs of the tunnels that their bodies have developed into the pretzel knot neccessary for those who only know digging.
One of these days they’ll run out the tape, they’ll make their way to the surface. And they’ll push their shovel palms right through a wall and into the big wide open. And they won’t even know. Their eyes won’t see the sun or the way the shadows and light get split. They won’t know what to do with all this room, with their arms, their legs. Their beady little eyes will shiver, their shovel palms will quiver and stab at the rock below. They’ll want to go back in, they’ll want to hide. But the inside is falling apart, is pulp pulled away. And the outside is just a skin made of paper, a strand hanging on. One more shake, one more shot and all of this will fall apart, burst wide open and these stupid little moon people, these dumb bodies that only know digging won’t even know that it’s time to stop.

Wayne doesn’t want to get into a shouting match over a baby again. But beside him the stranger’s baby in the flowery stroller is wearing a white bib and a blue hat. Wayne can’t believe his girlfriend keeps staring at the baby. They are in line for hamburgers at the Gigantic Burger Lodge, it is cold and damp, and winter is in the trees. The Gigantic Burger Lodge is a log cabin with neon green signs and only black people work there. Wayne has a thing for black girls which means he would like to make love to them. When Wayne sees them, at the bus station or the Laundromat, his body hurts and tingles at the same time. But that doesn’t matter until later because Wayne is about to snap if Lizzy says anything about the pipsqueak baby.

Is she going to talk to the baby? Wayne thinks. Is she going to take the baby? Nobody likes it when you touch the baby. Your mind is totally fucked, Lizzy baby.

There is a Home Depot hardware and contractor supply store next to the Gigantic Burger Lodge. There is a liquor store, a cinder block building with no character where two Pakistani brothers work the day shift, mopping the floors to muted soap operas on television. When Wayne pictures the brothers’ greasy bald heads drooping over mop buckets, Lizzy says, “Are you even listening to me Wayne?” Wayne is suddenly very worried she may be an E.S.P. gypsy mind reader with x-ray vision who can see through peoples’ faces, behind their eyes, straight to backs of their skulls where secrets glimmer then vanish like minnows turning in dark water.

“You watch too much T.V.,” says Lizzy. “All you do is watch T.V. and shoot up. You eat popcorn then shoot up again, drink cherry Coke. You don’t take care of me anymore.”

Keep your tentacles out of my mind, Wayne thinks.

The mother of the baby looks at Wayne, who, in response, shakes his head back and forth vigorously to indicate her child is extreme danger of being abducted. The mother’s eyes dim which causes her mood to darken. She pulls a blanket around the baby so he is secure. She tucks the baby and his feet into the stroller tightly.

“Wayne,” Lizzy whispers. “Look at that baby.”

Lizzy has spotted the baby now. She is looking at the baby, thinking about the baby. Stop looking at the baby.

But Lizzy sometimes thinks she has instant spiritual connections with strangers who are always uninterested and polite. Lizzy’s eyes fix on the stroller. She points directly at the baby by the take-out line and says, “It’s so cute, Wayne. Oh, I want to touch it. Steal it, Wayne. Can we steal it? I want to steal that little baby.”

“Stop looking at my baby like that,” is what the mother says to Lizzy. The mother pushes the stroller away towards the cars in the parking lot in the sun. She walks quickly, gets in her minivan and drives down the street.

Wayne says, “I don’t want to steal a baby. Do you know what you are saying? Do you know what that means?”

“Sorry,” Lizzy says. “I just think it would be fun to, like, own a little pink creature like that. We could wrap it up and keep it warm. We could sleep with it between us.”

Wayne dresses in a triple XL parka jacket with Hawaiian shorts, his skinny shins end in brown boots with no socks. The shorts fall down if he takes his mind off them. He pulls up his Hawaiian shorts and walks over the liquor store next to the Gigantic Burger Lodge, curses loudly to himself. The people in line, a few boys with colorful jackets over their pants, stare at him strangely because he cusses to himself. “Monsters,” he shouts. “Babies are tiny monsters.” Inside the liquor store he buys condoms and a six-pack of tallboys with a fake identification card. She wants to be a mom, Wayne thinks. “I can’t handle this one,” he says, shakes his head. “She wants to have a screaming baby around the house.”

The liquor store clerk’s hair looks like a huge cotton ball exploded with firecrackers. The hair is white and burnt gray with black traces, and his eyes, deep blue desert eyes, are cloudy or filled with smoke. He speaks from beneath his beard that funnels into a meager wisp. He says, “Don’t have any babies right now, my man. Baby free, my main man. That’s a good way to be.”

These are the wise Pakistanis who suffer over their mops with dreams of the desert, Wayne thinks.

“How many babies do you have right now?” Wayne asks. He yanks the wrapper from a pack of cigarettes.

“My children were taken away from me,” the clerk says. “They wandered into a minefield in the dark.”

Behind the counter, seated, there is another clerk. He is a balding pudgy man in a bright checkered shirt whose forehead seems to have collected all his worries like a sponge. The forehead, smooth and swollen, controls which way his head leans. He still smiles, and the smile gets bigger as his hands turn a woven wicker basket in his lap. He clutches a roll of weaving yarn between his knees as he gently rocks himself in the chair. He threads the bright red yarn through the brown wicker basket.

“Now all I have is my brother,” the clerk says. He points at the man who weaves. “And he isn’t good for much anymore.”

This is what Wayne knows about Lizzy’s family: Wayne calls her father the Horse Master because of the pony outside with brown hair in the fiberglass barn from Home Depot. The pony is for his daughter, Lizzy. The Horse Master likes to stand by the barn behind his house on the emerald lawn and look at the brown pony. The lawn is emerald green from the fertilizer he uses, also from Home Depot. The Horse Master is outside a lot, drinking after work while admiring the pony. The Horse Master has a name for Lizzy’s mother, his wife, like Wayne has a name for the Horse Master: Bitch on Wheels. The Bitch on Wheels calls the Horse Master a droopy dick. They each, the Horse Master and Bitch on Wheels, work in finance in Atlanta. It is a good life except they never speak to each other. Now the Bitch on Wheels lives in Corpus Christi by the shimmering Gulf of Mexico. The Bitch on Wheels is happy about the gulf. The salt water does wonders for her fifty-year-old skin.

The Horse Master isn’t home so Wayne and Lizzy do whatever they want.

They do it, have sex, in her bedroom. Through the window is the barn with the pony out back. Wayne has Lizzy in her bed. They screw in all the positions. Lizzy screams about how good it feels. Her screams carry over the lawn and past the barn where the pony is busy thinking about carrots or apples and staring at the fiberglass wall of the barn.

“The neighbors only sit in their houses and watch television all day,” Wayne says. “We can do it in the yard.”

This is what he knows about the neighbors: their names are Roy Johnson and Mrs. Johnson. And there is Patricia, Mrs. Johnson’s daughter. Patricia, the spoiled pre-teen, also has a pony. There are two ponies on the street.

Lizzy gets up to get another beer for herself. She pops the silver can and drinks the beer. Wayne is amazed at how much beer she guzzles so quickly. Her black hair dangles on her pale breast.

“Mrs. Johnson just had a new baby,” Lizzy says. “She wants to bring the baby over to ride around the back yard on my pony.”

Wayne laughs hysterically. He thinks very hard about a baby riding around the back yard on the pony.

“Tell her to use the other pony,” says Wayne. “The girl down the road has a pony too.”

But Patricia, the pre-teen with a sour face who also has a pony, is stricken with a gnarly case of dermatitis. She doesn’t let anyone else near her pony because it is her only friend. That is Patricia’s rule and she is very strict.

“You don’t want to see a baby on my pony?” Lizzy asks. “Do you want to see that?”

“I told you how I feel about babies,” Wayne says. “I don’t feel good about them. We don’t kill them because they have large, moist eyes. We can’t resist the eyes. We’d kill them if it wasn’t for that. And what the fuck kind of neighborhood has two ponies in it anyway?”

Wayne is from the rental-only neighborhood where all the black girls live. In Wayne’s neighborhood he has to watch out for people breaking in through the front door and the windows. Nobody owns anything like ponies. Wayne thinks, This boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is about to explode into a billion invisible particles.

“Wayne. It’s cute,” Lizzy says. “I want to ride the baby around on the pony. If you don’t let me do that then you can get out of my life.”

The hunger in Wayne, a stone in his abdomen, is back. He walks past the railroad yard into the cornfield where Lizzy doesn’t go, through the warehouse district where nobody works but ghosts over their shadows in negative light. Down the alley there is a musty room with an electric lantern and a mattress where they press the needles in. The needle back-shoots with a trace of Wayne’s blood, set to boil acid green like the seas of Venus. Right after the woods he finds the bad houses with peeling paint, ply board nailed over the windows, where the man walks down the stairs in his pajamas and a hot yellow wig, he has no hair anymore, Smooth Reece. Reece says, “Straight up dissipated into fucking outer space.” But nine times out of ten he doesn’t know what today is. He says, “Helicopters, man. Fucking helicopters.” And wherever Reece goes, the pig tails on his blond girl’s wig, the brake lights on his motorbike follow him. Where Reece goes he won’t be back.

There is a black woman, who Wayne knows as Keisha Bartlett, sleeping in Reece’s house. She lay in a bare room with frost on the windows and the rugs gone to the pawn shop. In the center of the room, a kiddy kitchen play set is scattered or turned over. A plastic doggy gate in the doorway is used as a baby gate to keep her child in the bedroom. When Wayne enters, Keisha covers herself with a loose purple robe. She looks at Wayne, intensely and painfully, her eyes green and burnt. Wayne ties her off, and they sit on the couch with needle to carry them away. But her hands begin to shake when Wayne takes it out. He tries to calm her down, but her fingers keep jiggering lightly over her lap. “Everything is spinning,” she says. Her feet jut out and her heels scrape the carpet. She lay on her back on the floor, becoming rigid. Her face is shiny and sweating. “Your shit is hammering me,” she says. She reaches and grips his ankles. “I’m going to pass–,” she begins shakily but doesn’t finish. Then Wayne decides to call an ambulance. He takes the phone to his ear and speaks to the emergency dispatcher.

“Take-out or delivery,” someone answers. It is an elderly Chinese man from a Chinese take-out place. “Happy Garden,” he says. But Wayne has never heard of it. He pictures the man working over a steamy wok. “Good luck being a commie dick-hole the rest of your life,” Wayne says, and re-dials 911. He speaks in a nervous burst, “Keisha is on fire and the house is burning in a raging fire with her baby on fire too. You’ve got to send everybody.”

“We’ll send everybody,” the emergency dispatcher says. “But I need to know where you are.”

On the floor Keisha slumps forward so that her head presses the carpet. She touches her lips with her fingers and rolls onto her back. “Where are we?” Wayne asks. But she says nothing because her mouth is wide open, her jaws agape.

“Forty-two Delray Court,” the emergency dispatcher says. “We’re sending the fire team with the ambulance, but it will take five minutes. Do you want me to stay on the line?”

“She’s not breathing,” Wayne says, and chokes on it. “She’s not moving and looks dead. I hate the way she looks.”

Then he hangs up and is silent until he hears someone in the street. He looks, hoping for the ambulance team. It might also be Reece on his motorbike. Wayne wipes the glass but the sleet thickens, blowing harder, and there is a dump truck passing along the road. As Wayne moves toward the door to call out he hears a creaking sound, and the baby gate opens behind him. The walker, in which the baby sits, crashes against Wayne’s shins. The walker is noisy with bells and noisemakers on it. And Wayne doesn’t know how long the baby has been trapped in the walker, or how he takes the baby to his chest.

His sweater says Radcliff in yellow embroidery. On his head is a twist of hair. He has enormous eyes like all babies except these specific eyes are brown. Wayne holds him tightly; the ambulance sirens are coming, but in the distance. He hurries down the stoop into the yard when he feels it; a small hand, a glowing pulsing imprint infused with life, on his cheek. The touch soaks through his muscle to the roots of his teeth.

In this moment it doesn’t matter that Wayne can’t imagine, not even for one second, being the kind of benevolent person skilled at raising a boy. For now, what Wayne knows, the most important thing, what matters to this frightened child, is that he takes him very close under his parka against his thundering heart.

Melody saw omens in everything. A spider crawling across the windshield, a withered flower swept out from under the refrigerator, an unsullied grain of rice in her curry. She received these little messages a few times a day, direct from the universe, warning her of danger or signaling her of good fortune, depending on whatever mood she was in.

It pissed me off sometimes. She sliced her finger open on the lid of a tin can and a drop of blood got into the cream of mushroom soup, beading on the surface at first, then popping like a bubble and infusing the gray chunkiness with a sickly pinkish color, like salmonella. That little vision got my driving privileges revoked for an entire week. I had to walk to work (5 miles across two bridges and up three hills) until she felt the bad vibes had passed. I asked if she had any idea when that might be.

Dunno, she said, the universe has a way of balancing itself out. Could be a day, could be ten years.

Do you think the universe would take issue with me riding my bike?

I wouldn’t if I were you. You’ll get wind all in your channels. It’ll stagnate your chi and you’ll throw your back out again.

I sighed and said okay, muttering bullshit.

I was backing down to these ridiculous orders a lot lately, and whenever it happened I’d imagine an open hand in the darkness. The middle finger would cross behind the forefinger and bend it back slightly, creating an upright oval. Secret sign language my high school friends and I had developed for the word pussy. Go home early to study, you get a deadpanned upright oval. Ask for a glass of water instead of a beer, upright oval. Let your lady tell you what to do, two massive upright ovals floating all up and around your face.

Regardless of wind that may or may not have occupied my channels, I still threw my back out. Which is liable to happen when you’re walking five miles everyday with a messenger bag that weighs more than all the collected chi in China.

She told me to hop up on the table when I came home, my back all tangled up like an extension chord.

Okay, I said, just don’t stick any goddamn needles in me.

Sometimes she gave me this look like her leg was caught in a bear trap and she was weighing her options. Stay stuck, or gnaw it off?

We’d been dating for almost four months—the time in a relationship where a man starts to realize it’s easier to agree with everything his woman says. I’d ask myself if I’d rather get into another three-hour argument over why I think her chosen profession of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine is bullshit, or if I’d rather just shut up and accept the treatment.

She unrolled a long sheet of tissue paper over the table. I laid down on my stomach and nestled my face in the padded opening.

Have you been experiencing any heart palpitations or irregular breathing, she said, like a mechanic asking if I’d heard any weird sounds coming from the engine.

No, I mumbled through the face hole.

She swabbed my temples with cotton ball. The smell of rubbing alcohol stung the back of my throat. She swabbed around my shoulder muscles, down my spine, then rolled my pant legs up and swabbed the muscles abutting my shinbones.

Can you just give me a massage?

You want your slippers too, she asked, or maybe some hot cocoa? How bout a hand job while we’re at it?

Then she told me to take a deep breath.

I did.

Aaaand let it out. Then the sound of a pen clicking, the sound of a small wire coil dragging along the edge of a tube and the feeling of a needle slipping into your back.

Hmm, she said, that’s strange.

What’s strange?

You don’t usually bleed his much.

I shifted on the table, the paper making sounds of fireworks in the distance.

Must be a sign, she said. We probably shouldn’t have sex tonight.

I said that was bullshit and a little string of drool escaped through the hole and onto the hardwood floors.

Seriously, she said. Blood can symbolize fertility.

Maybe it means you’re starting your period.

Or maybe it means I started ovulating.

You could count the days since your last period.

Best not to take a chance, she said. Pen click, wire coil, needle in my outer palm.

I sighed. I thought about how much you can let a person change you. One day you’re eating cold pizza chiseled off a cardboard square excavated from the dungeons of your refrigerator, the next you’re sautéing bok choi in a wok with a cranberry vinegar reduction.

Pen click, wire coil, needle in the back of my neck.

One minute you’re receiving a rim job that bends the outer edges of time and space, the next you’re letting a little spot of blood get in the way of some boring, mid-week, missionary style you’ve been looking forward to since Sunday.

And then I imagined a middle finger bending an index finger back slightly, creating the shape of an upright oval. She told me to take a deep breath. Then I heard a pen click, the sound of a wire coil dragging across the edge of a cylinder and I felt a tiny needle bore into my temple.

Not yet fall, orchard vines outweigh their fruit.

Some of these nights my son and I sleep
together, his small body and the September nights

too warm. All night long our arms and legs
spell out messages beneath the sheets—

the wrong language for each of us.

You, mother and wife, in your hospital bed,
dream walking, cradling your six month belly

with both hands and there is no end of hallways.
We are all restless.

Meanwhile, the vines govern what they can
across the orchard, an inelegant stitching

holding firm the earth itself.

I set out to write a poem called “How to Be a Bluesman.” This poem was to be clever and knowing and verging on funny. It would have suggested being born in the late 1800s to parents who might or might not have been slaves. It would have quoted W.C. Handy and Alan Lomax and you would have been impressed at my knowledge. It would have offered Mississippi or Alabama or Louisiana as an ideal starting point: some Southern state full of honeysuckle and cottonmouths. I would have felt a special connection to this section of the poem because I grew up in one of those places, where we picked blackberries and raised chickens. Also I can tell you about the smell of kudzu in the summer. It’s something like grapes, but not so lonely. This would have been that inevitable part of any poem where the tone changes from arch to sincere, and you as a reader would have been deeply moved. You might have yearned to have grown up in such a place yourself. Or you would have thought about your own childhood, and the tire swing that pendulumed off the pecan tree in your back yard and the fishbone scar on your side from the barbwire surrounding Gillespie’s pasture where you snagged yourself running away from a pissed-off bull, and the tender way the first real love of your life used to trace her fingertips along the scar’s question mark shape, over and over, in bed on lazy afternoons in one of those grad-school apartments in Tallahassee or Athens or Knoxville, and you would ask her what she was thinking, and she would smile and say nothing. Of course, she wasn’t the first love of your life but of mine and she’s years gone now, first loves never stay put in poetry or blues songs and not anywhere else, either. Thinking about the oatmeal-fleck freckles on her face made me so goddamned wistful I stopped writing and turned on some music.

Obituaries

He was good to his dogs but lost interest in baseball.
*
His face was difficult to read — the inner surface of a turtle shell.
*
Cowbirds were drawn to her back yard at sunset when the bloodmaples shimmered dark and alive like an oil spill.
*
He always felt most comfortable in Alabama, in the yawning days of autumn, teaching others the secret to keeping beer cold in a brown paper sack.
*
She outlived her usefulness but not her passions, her symmetry but not her beauty, her lover but not her husband.
*
He married a succession of ever shorter women until the last fit neatly in the pocket of his favorite leather coat.
*
He will be remembered for his knuckles: very small animals trying to escape from walnut shells.
*
She wrote letters that spoke of snow and sometimes sex.
*
He sold out young.
*
Her life revealed the shortcomings of my own.

The Wolf Testifies on His Own Behalf

Here are my only sins: I know
the short cuts. And I encourage
the young women of Western Civilization
to embrace their sexuality – face it,
that’s what we’re talking about here.
You didn’t think Little Red Riding Hood
meant a little red riding hood, did you?
Think about it. I never understood
why you’re all so afraid
of your own flesh and blood.
Innocent until proven lupine.
I hear what you tell your children:
do not stray from the path
or set one foot amid the goldenrod,
milkweed, forget-me-not –
tarry not in the deepest woods,
where the stones are black
with mystery and the air
has the taste of saltwater,
I suppose I should be glad
your warnings are as meaningless
as mist, here in the dark
canopy of tree cover. What you fear
is not that I will slit their throats,
or even that they will taste blood
and like it, but that they will discover
that once upon a time
you yourself wandered here
of your own accord
to see if it was true – if desire
could never be slaked,
if it’s your own hunger
that makes it impossible
to live happily ever after.

26 Stories About Kissing in a Small Town

After the water releases the mist, a swan unfolds, seraphic in the flint light.
*
Before, the taste of early winter.
*
Cigarette mouth on a high school girl, breathing smoke into my body.
*
Downtown behind the Dairy Shack, we float music in the salty sky of November.
*
Even the river knows our future.
*
Finding, to my surprise, your flesh willing but my spirit weak.
*
Go, and come back when you’re afraid not to.
*
Home is where the hunger is, the hunger greatest in the rain.
*
I sometimes wake cold and unable to remember your name.
*
Just as flesh finds flesh, want seeks the place where want is lacking.
*
Keep my lips in a pocket close to your breast: a souvenir, physical evidence, a way of telling time.
*
Last year, two years, a decade ago, what difference?
*
Missed opportunities make strange bedfellows.
*
Night before last, I dreamed of meeting you Christmas shopping.
*
Only you pretended not to recognize yourself.
*
Probably things that happen when we are seventeen don’t matter.
*
Quickly, find a doorway and wait out the storm in the warm halo of my breathing.
*
Regret, or not.
*
Someday, someday.
*
There’ll be time enough for sleeping when you’re not in love.
*
Under the Sixth Avenue Bridge, a man watches us while he fishes for trout.
*
Victimless crimes of the heart are his specialty.
*
When I open my eyes, I see yours have been open the whole time.
*
Exactly when were you planning to tell me you’ve moved on?
*
Yes — yes.
*
Zoom off into the sunset, go ahead, hop into your convertible and scatter my plans like flowers along some forgotten highway out of this place — but that swan, that swan, forgive me.

There are more than 2000 hash marked lines on the beltway between my house and work. I get off at 5 a.m. and the only way I seem to get home is by staring at the hash marks off my left front fender. I count them and I stay to the right of them.

I don’t mind my job. I work nights at a security booth for a gated community. The pay is ridiculously good for the work, because the community residents place such a pompous regard on getting into their community. They value my ability to keep people out. But I don’t keep anyone out. The gate does.

There are two hundred gated communities in town. If anyone really wants to get into a gated community to kill people in their sleep, rape and pillage the women and children, steal the pool table imported from Italy, or drive really fast up and down the streets being obnoxious, most likely they will do it somewhere else. My job is easy.

Mostly I get huge tips from high school kids to write down a time in the log book ten minutes before they were supposed to be home. Some nights I’m convinced the parents moved to the gated community just for the log book. A third party to settle disputes. More often than not in the early morning there comes a mother in a silk robe driving an SUV. It screeches to a halt behind my booth, and she shuffles up in slippers to scrutinize my entries for the past twelve hours. I don’t mind. I like the kids. But kids shouldn’t be tipping that kind of money. And no woman who’s a mother should be wearing that kind of robe.

More often than not after midnight there is no one. And I sleep.

If I can’t sleep I look out the glass and stare at the gated community’s sewage irrigation fountain. Every community has one. A little pond. A pretty fountain. A sign not to swim or fish.

If I am asleep it is the sound of Mr. Hawthorne’s running shoes which wakes me. He lives at the back of the community, 10974 Eagle’s Wake Trail, Hawthorne M & N. He runs to the front of the neighborhood and then stretches near the pond. My last duty before I am relieved by the computer is to release Mr. Hawthorne into the world for his run.

He is gray-haired and sweet. He always smiles as he goes and shouts, “Thanks Annie!” with an arm thrown up to the sky.

———————————————–

“Ann. Ann!”

I’m sitting in the garage, in my car. I can hear my husband calling. His voice holds so much. He thinks he’ll be late. He’s convinced that it’s my fault. He was up all night with one of the kids or the baby. If I was any kind of mother I would have been the one there for them. After all they were calling for me not him. He can’t find the shoes he wants to wear. He forgot to pick up the dry-cleaning so he doesn’t have the shirt he wants. If I was any kind of wife I would be the one ironing. There’s no food because no one went shopping this weekend because we had to go to that stupid christening/wedding/high school graduation party/50th anniversary celebration/work picnic/Christmas gala and why should I miss the game just to get groceries?

Him calling me says all of this and more. It doesn’t always say I missed you, I still love you, I need you to work so we can pay for the tree house that we bought on credit and then destroyed in the assembly process. And it never says, “Welcome Home, Dear. Did you have a good day at work?”

I don’t tell my husband about my tips. The tips go to the lunch room at Chateau Neuf with me alone. I thought once about taking Katrina my oldest girl for some special mommy time. But I knew her sweet innocence would reveal all to her father. So I let her have special time with him and I keep Chateau Neuf for me.

———————————————–

I hear myself say, “Welcome Home, Dear. Did you have a good day at work?”

“You would never believe these assholes.”

His voice trails off as he walks down the hall. He keeps talking for two hours from this point. Everyday.

It’s not that I don’t care about his work. I guess I do. I certainly should.

At the first hour into his monologue there always comes a single line. It doesn’t vary much from this:

“If I got a decent night’s sleep once in while I could handle it.”

We settle onto the couch. We turn on the TV.

What my husband doesn’t realize is that for all he knows I don’t sleep. He has never seen me at work. He must assume I am working. And yet he never sees me sleep at home. So the gall of him even uttering this line in my presence is unbearable. I hear myself say, “I suppose so, honey.”

———————————————–

There is one woman who comes to my booth almost every night. She wears her robe and slippers. She comes with a thermos and a radio and a deck of cards. Her husband is having an affair and her children never obey their curfew. She sits with me in my booth and we have a great time. She watches them pull through the gate. She writes down the time and then we play cards until she passes out in a heap on the cement floor. She has an air mattress that she stows in my cubby booth. Rarely does she bother to inflate it. When she does it fills up the entire booth. She sits on it like a chair with part on the floor and part going up the wall where the door is. It is hysterical. She always brings her stainless steel thermos. Sometimes she brings coffee but more often it is filled with white godiva liquer, kahlua and three cups of vodka over ice. She calls her thermos the Stealth Bomber.

We laugh a lot about the thermos.

I have never known her name. Her address is 12488 Peregrine Falcon Lane. Her husband is William F. Fessner. She told me once that she kept her maiden name. But she never told me what it was. Interesting. I worry sometimes that I will read in the paper that a certain woman has committed suicide. It will be her and I will never know from her name.

———————————————–

I am on the couch, reading a magazine in a moment of peace. The front door opens. Two feet stamp away the slush collected from his effort to make it to the mailbox and back before coming inside. Duty begins this way all the time.

I was eating candlelight, gobbling it whole as it flickered from the ends of burning wicks, five or eight candles each night, in a consumption habit that proved addictive—no amount of twelve step groups curbed my appetite for the light, and such was the rising price of candles that my addiction wrecked havoc on my bank account. Real meals of the steak -and-potatoes variety meant nothing to me. Friends, the few I had, noticed I was losing weight and drastically so, the caloric count of even the most luxurious candles being negligible. They asked how I lost so much weight, my friends did—was it Weight Watchers? or was I working out? I shrugged, afraid to smile for fear that the vast quantities of candlelight that I snarfed nightly would seep up from my intestinal tract, giving away my secret.

On the day before Thanksgiving, the woman the next desk over at my insurance job lit a long-stemmed tapered orange candle, ostensibly to create a more festive atmosphere. Although I was already in a relationship, Michelle and I had been exchanging glances for months and, what, with her actuarial acumen and propensity to wear snug red sweater dresses, I thought she was kinda hot. No sooner did she discard the match used to light the candle, the candle’s pumpkin scent already filling the air, than she peered over at me.

So what do you think, Michelle asked.

How was I to know the candle was not a love offering? I snuck over to her desk and stood over that candle, my mouth open to catch its delicious light.

I bought it at the Yankee Candle shop. You know, down at the mall, she said. Do you like?
Never had I tasted candlelight so smooth. Contrary to rumors, it tasted nothing like chicken, the candlelight, but like the buttered marsala sauces that accompany veal cutlets at the finest restaurants. Care must have went into molding the candle, for the light shone brilliantly—even with the flame cupped within my mouth and me gulping down its delicious light, I saw the glow it reflected on her computer monitor.

Um, what are you doing, Michelle asked.

The phones had stopped ringing in the office hours ago and people were knocking it off early for the holiday, sneaking out the back door or just kicking up their feet on their desks and devoting their afternoon to goofy youtube viewing. I was slurping it up, the candlelight, and already wondering how to go about asking if she had another candle we could light when this one was consumed.

Are you, like, felating a candle?

Huh?

Michelle shrieked. Oh my god, you are, aren’t you? You’re like, sucking a candle! she said, her voice suddenly loud. What few people who remained in the office shuffled over to her desk. Oh my god, this is really gross. Have you no decency? You’re such a pervert, going down on a candle.
I knew how it must have looked: me lowering my mouth over the candle, its flame licking the inside of my mouth and causing me to drool over the melting wax that trickled down the candle’s stem. I should have stopped myself, but a candle like that did not come along often, or such was my sad experience. Michelle was screaming, frantic, in tears—she was witnessing what she thought was a sex act perpetrated at her very own desk, which apparently was too much for her snug-red-sweater-dress constitution to endure.

Two guys from our firm’s vice president’s office grabbed me from either arm, yanking me off the candle. There must have been ten people gathered around me, all of them aghast. Michelle crawled to her desk chair, sobbing and disconsolate, and I just knew there would be no decent way of asking if more candles lay hidden in her desk drawers. How was I to explain myself? They hauled me into our personnel manager’s office, a smallish cubicle abutting a dreary window that looked out over the company parking lot, and the next thing I knew was that I was being told to vamos with all my kinky desires into that parking lot and never return, and when they booted me into that parking lot, gravel scraped my hindquarters, and all I could think of was the three inches that were left of that silky candle and how I would never get my lips around it again.

That evening, I explained what happened to Amy, my frown-fraught girlfriend of three years. We were seated in a booth at a no-frills Korean place, the Hok-i Dok-i, a candle at our table, while we waited for our noodle dish appetizers. The candle did little to bolster my spirits, for after experiencing the joys of a long-stemmed Yankee Candle, this small votive candle on the formica tabletop brought to mind nothing so much as the slick cakes that are tossed into urinals to keep the odors at bay; it was not a candle worth going down on.

As much as I tried to explain myself, Amy did not understand. Screwing her eyes, she flicked back her head, nearly whiplashing me with her long black hair. You did oral sex with some slut in your office?

I did not have oral sex with her. I had it with a candle—and here I became defensive—and anyways, she’s not a slut. She’s a very nice woman.

She is?

Yes, I said, nodding. She is.

Which apparently was not what Amy wanted to hear, for she picked up her handbag and stormed away from the booth, leaving me alone with a candle that even I wouldn’t suck.

I slept on a park bench that night. We had been living together for six months, Amy and I, and I was in no mood to return to our apartment. Nor, suddenly jobless, could I afford checking into a motel. Though it was late November, the temperatures were mild and it was almost possible to think of myself as a something of a naturualist, a camper, a seeker of fresh air and clean fun in our jaded urban environment as I drifted into sleep.

Somewhere around midnight or one, or thereabouts, I woke up beneath the starry cloudless sky to a fluttering sound that I could not instantly place. Light that I had consumed throughout the day was radiating from my mouth, emptying me, yet the night-chilled air flowing over my teeth tingled in a refreshingly good way. The more I opened my mouth, the louder the fluttering sound around me became. I was exhaling candlelight, and great quantities of it, enough that I could see the flapping wings of the moths that I was attracting. They were dining on my candlelight, their little moth tongues slurping it up, and I envied them deeply, for I knew there could be no more candles to satisfy my hunger.

Cover me in filth, for I have lain down with pigs.
Toss me like a salad in silt and grime.

Dig a ditch and bury me up to my neck.
Pelt me with mud pies dark as fudge.

Withhold water, soap, exfoliant, and loofah.
Cleanse not my polluted flesh.

Anoint me with sediment and mineral deposits.
Make me a landfill in some desolate spot.

Abandon me to the sleazy hotel or Econo-Lodge,
for I have performed the deed of darkness.

Lay me among the potatoes.
Shroud me in a shirt of loam and peat moss.

Send an army of leeches, slugs, and maggots.
Let me be the final supper.

Baptize me anew. Christen me your own dirty girl.
Immerse my body in weeds and worms.

Break me with your shovel, backhoe, and tractor,
for I have abandoned the garden and cursed this earth.

Happy Hour

The chunk of day we appropriate
for happiness, when we will be happy
because that is the appointed hour.
We pour out of offices, factories, and vans.
We gather in gin mills to guzzle
our foamy, pungent, throat-burning
joy. We hoist a few. Some of us crack
jokes. The rest of us toss our heads back,
laugh, and down shots. We order gimlets,
martinis, and Cosmopolitans.
We tell work stories. We eat peanuts.
Our happiness is exponentially increased
by the sudden appearance of chicken wings
for which we are almost unspeakably grateful
though each yields no more than a thimbleful
of meat. We toast each other, our health,
better luck next time, and here’s to Jackson,
may he rest in peace. Our joy is multiplied
by two while the price of drinks is divided
in half, thus allowing us to drink twice
as much and thereby double our pulchritude.
Someone buys a round for the house.
We drop quarters into the jukebox.
We swing and sway. We stomp on shells.
For sixty full minutes, we are locked
in friendship and love for human creatures.
Our troubles left in the parking lot,
we linger at the bar qualmless, high
on life, some of us so high we levitate.
We raise our glasses: Here’s to the gin mills
of America, the taverns, bars, pubs,
road stops, cafés, saloons, and the shot
and beer joints. Here’s to the bartenders
and barmaids. Praise to the convivial genius
who invented Happy Hour. Saluté!
Down the hatch! Bottoms up! And cheers!
And if there is weeping, let the tears
be tears of joy. Let the engines idle,
the dark roads remain untraveled.
Let the hands of the clock hold us.

Why I Won’t Have a Full-Body Massage

This doughy flesh
does not want a stranger’s fingers
kneading it.

This body turns its back on the squeeze,
stroke, and thump of therapeutic hands,
pods of fingers at vital points, pressure points,
points at which I might capitulate.

Each pore of my hyperkeratotic husk closes
to creams and balms, the ooze and glide
of lotions and gels.

This sorry sack of skin refuses
a stranger’s gaze, my naked, dimpled sins
exposed, declines the lure of improved circulation,
chakras cleared and balanced in perfect polarity,
the rush of nutrients through muscles aching
for touch, won’t allow fingertips to prod
the soft surface zones.

Every dermal cell says No to aromatherapy oils—
peach and mango, scent of sea breeze—
says No to the slow slide of warm stones
over hills and valleys of flesh, the rock
and roll of knuckles and palms,
hot packs strategically placed along the flint
of spine,

on fire again, all sparks and flames,
each muscle burning and rising
towards the familiarity of tender hands
kneading it.

it’s a love poem you say,
as you stab out your cigarette on my appendix.
[vestigial, only suited for the stinging
caused by the eyelids and cityscapes of ex-lovers.]

***

lachrymose, pulsating
lakes shoring up diary pages.
[i pray for a groundswell to hemorrhage the ink,
to leach her from your repertoire.]

Deviation of the Chaste

I. somewhere along the line, i realized that
a. purity feels like inattention
b. i am an animal full of rhythm
c. i twitch like ashtray grave
clinging to dead cigarettes

II. pornographic intent leads to pockets full of enlightenment
a. the restless fulcrum softens with impatient breathprint

Because your husband is far away. He is in another country, and you don’t even want him to be your husband anymore, but you can’t say that because he’s a soldier. To say that is un-American. And this is why you stay with your parents now, in your old twin bed, while your house sits empty and silent thirty miles away in a town where you don’t know anyone. Because your husband is far away.

There is the issue of the magic powers. That you think you have them. You ride your bike, your old red ten-speed down the middle of the street in the middle of the night and you feel like a kid. You pump and swerve around somebody’s old Toyota parked on the curb where it shouldn’t be overnight, and for a second there’s the flight of doubt in your belly, the feeling like you are falling, that you’re about to fall, that you’re about to lose control of everything.

You could lose control of everything and the powers would not leave you. What you do with your body, say with your mouth, even think, it shouldn’t matter. But it’s like you’re in the center of a tight web, like everything you do reverberates out on some other tough string, vibrating. Way out, where you can’t see it. Someday, you think, it’ll kill your husband. It’ll be the string that detonates the road side bomb. Most of the time, it’s the string that unhinges your brother.

Because he too lives at home. Not because his wife is far away, he doesn’t have one. And you wonder how long it will go on like this, the two of you home, hovering around thirty, with the mother and the father under the same roof, a nuclear family, just aged, bigger, older than it should be. If your mother will start driving you both around in the station wagon again. In her folded down ankle socks, Keds.

You are looking for a job. Your brother Lee is looking for a job. He plays your grandpa’s records, Dorsey and Prima. You watch Home and Garden on mute. Your mother plants geraniums in flower boxes under all the windows. At night you ride your bike to the intersection, leave it stashed in the bus shelter, and then walk to bars. You stay out til four. Or when it’s just getting light, the sky a color that exists only right then, changing from black and white to Technicolor with a slow leak over the tops of buildings, a Burger King, a bank, a dollar store.

You went to school for art. How you ended up with a soldier is beyond your parents. That the men in your program were dick-wads does not quite explain it to them, either.

You go to the bar and test it. You don’t go for a few days, and then you go back, to test. You order blue UV and lemonade in a tall cup with a straw. It takes about two minutes for someone to talk to you. He is tall, but not dark, or handsome. He has a goatee. Asks what you are drinking.

You offer the straw. You don’t have oral herpes, do you? you ask.

I have an oral fixation, he says, licks his lips. He sips. Too sweet, he says.

Then you can’t handle me, you say. Tonight, you drawl. It sounds right.

You tell them you are different things: a nurse, a teacher, a travel writer, a lab technician, an interior decorator.

I’d like to decorate your interior, he says.

You fuck in the parking lot, in between cars, leaning on one of them, near but not under a street light that is yellow, an energy saver, or a bug light, not bright, but sick looking, and mosquitoes bite your legs, up high, near your ass, and around your ankles where the skin is thin and the blood is right there. You do it for nothing. You could at least be making some money. But you don’t. You don’t even face him.

See ya, you say.

I hope so, he says. But you won’t. You go home and wait, for letters, for the military to come to the door, but in two days it’s your brother Lee who doesn’t get out of bed. Your mother sends you to the store to get his meds, because they’ve run out, because he doesn’t pay attention to the dwindling supply until it’s too late. You have to spoon it into his mouth like a baby, the tiny two-tone capsule tipped into his mouth. You have to hold his head, make him drink. When he lies back, his eyes close and the lids are purple, are webbed and frail and thin like light can shine right through them.

You think about what it might be like to fly out of there, to float up to the ceiling and out the window, like a slip of paper through a mail slot, out over the yard, where you and Lee ran through the sprinkler, and then down the street, over the elementary school, the grocery store, the bars that you go in and out of, the parking lots. From there, the parking lot’s a grid of perfection, straight lines, right angles, swept clean, black and yellow and hot and smooth.

If you go back to that bar, you’ll be somebody else, a nurse, a teacher, and if you see him, the tall unhandsome one, if he recognizes you, if he tries to talk to you, you’ll say it was someone else. Your imaginary sister. Or  your fucked up friend, totally unpredictable, or else completely predictable, going out all the time, never know what she’ll do or say, or who she’ll end up with, what she’s drinking, dancing to or saying to someone to get attention. You’ll shake your head a little, blink, real kind. Yeah, that wasn’t me, you’ll say. You’ll have to start going someplace else. And it’ll feel just like flying or like you’re the only one on the moving sidewalk, moving without effort, gliding past the slow trudge of everyone else around you, on and up over the bank and the Burger King, into a color like ink. Like the center of a deep bruise.

Speaking, in our company auditorium, of the smokers’ tendency to seek higher ground, he said, Of course it will all be fine in the end, so long as we can keep them off the rooftops. Turning then to the subject of our personnel and its collective intellect, he beamed: You are all so worthy, he said, you are all like perfect little neurons in a smart animal’s brain. Following this remark there was a great deal of applause, and the audience, pleased with itself, failed to notice a minor betrayal perpetrated by one of its own, a supercomputer stationed towards the back. Meanwhile, our leader’s next topic was the future, and even before he clenched his fist his Adam’s apple said it all. An end was very much in sight, and this, it did not please him.

Let’s Defenestrate the Pope

Enough’s enough, Lyndon said crossing his arms, let’s phone in some favors and shove the guy out a window. But none of us knew a soul in the Vatican. We had to make fast friends in the Holy See. To start we hung around bars at closing time—all that got us was laid. There was suggestive throat-clearing in the marketplace and Lyndon cold-called from a payphone, combing the white pages for names with that conspiratorial edge to them. All month long the police dredged bodies from the Tiber and the Corriere della Sera ran editorials claiming Roman blood ran cold. At last we met a kid who’d vandalized the Sistine Chapel and he recommended we turn on the TV. We did; on the all-news-channel a deranged woman had shoved the Pope to the ground as he processed into Midnight Mass at Christmastime; a bishop had broken a femur, the Pope wore his winter Papal mozzetta and Lyndon wept until he dry-heaved.

False Start

Then Ricksy, who requires white noise to fall asleep, tells a sick one in which the girl’s vagina falls out of her like a sock used to clean an oil dipstick. Beer foams out of those newfangled wide-mouthed pop-tops and I laugh my ass off until I remember about the cancer.

Hours pass without incident and I’m debating pawning this old pogo stick in my garage when I decide instead to ride it. Wow, dude hosing down his lawn says—no one’s got those anymore. Every time it hits the ground I go blind in a different eye. I’m keeping it, yeh, not because of how it took me back when I needed to go but because of what he said about it. That and the curve of his green garden hose, which was and is still dumb.

Friend-o’s Unprompted Romp

A man in an orange jumpsuit leapt something made of barbed wire. Not so fast, a policeperson said, and requested to see his license and registration. The man pointed out to his credit that he was not in a vehicle at the moment. The pair took turns with a twelve-gauge and gamboled through a series of oblong parking lots. Gulls scattered and returned; higher still, frequent flier miles were frittered away. You’ll pay big dividends, friend-o, the policeperson said. I can’t do long division, the man said. His laugh was the kind they use to remove bone marrow.

Tax Dodge

Sitting over divinity fudge and a caramel macchiato already too cool for his taste, Getty bemoaned the death of the public intellectual as an institution. His conversation partner was his allergist. The allergist made house calls to patients whom he trusted to tip liberally.

Getty believed he would have excelled at public intellectualism. I’d number among the best, he said, if such a profession were still viable in the stifling idiocy of today’s cerebral climate. The allergist readied a needle chock full of cortisone to inject in dear Getty’s arm vein.

Just a quick pinch here, said the allergist, who admired the granite countertops of his patient’s kitchen even as he saw elitism in its absence of a microwave.

Getty winced and relaxed his triceps. This is deductible, right?

What for, asked the allergist.

My occupation requires that I be free of allergies, Getty said.

Most do.

Supinating his forearm, Getty said, I’ll just write this off. Do you think that’s OK with Uncy Sam?

The allergist worked at a piece of divinity in his molar and prepared another syringe, cromolyn sodium with a little something extra. What do you do? he asked as he inserted the needle just below Getty’s elbow.

Getty answered, after a long pause, by continuing not to own a microwave and frothing very violently at the mouth. Seeing no possible objection, the allergist leaned back in his chair, lifting its front two legs from the floor, putting his feet up on the granite without removing his shoes.