7.02 / February 2012
The Mothers
I worry about what to say to The Mothers.
Once I asked them: Do you ever wish you could eat Vietnamese food with the taste buds of an infant? I read on the Internet that babies have extra taste buds dotting their cheeks, but that time and chemical shifts and various [...]
Crowds
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It’s a lights out kind of thing with strangers gathered naked all around you – clasping each other’s hands and genitals; a glowing growing around their eyes because there you are too – nude, tiny, suddenly feeling like a child, but for what? These are instances of [...]
Arrow
ARROW (1)
An arrow, even Cupid’s, carries a slant of sorrow at its tip.
ARROW (2)
The thump it makes when hitting mark is felt across the space: an arrow straight to the heart.
ARROW (3)
In the space between the letting go and arrival there is grace.
ARROW (4)
The longer the shot, the greater [...]
The Lights
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The lights have been with us a long time. We have all decided what they mean.
In groups, when first gathered, we receive direction. We are asked questions about lights. The lights we like best will be mirrored by one hand rising into the air. Our bottoms will [...]
Graduation
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The old man flew in from Florida and is staying with the family. The old woman drove from Omaha and gets a cheap motel room. Their daughter is happy to have them there for her son’s graduation but distraught that the old woman will not sleep under [...]
Two Poems
epitaph #17
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here lies a man who once stood beneath an orange maple on a day in mid October when the National Weather Advisory had proclaimed that there would be winds and low humidity and therefore the perfect conditions for fire, and right there above the deceased’s head, [...]
Breeding
“The secret of improved plant breeding,
Apart from scientific knowledge,
is love.†So said
Luther Burbank one morning while strolling
The nursery grounds of Gold Ridge Farm
with that curious, bemused
Technician of consciousness, Yogananda. They’d
Been friends for many years, and were discussing
His attempts to produce a spineless cactus. “You have
nothing to fear,â€
he would tell them. [...]
Babymaking
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Season One_______ ___________________________________________________________
The Pact
Three middle school girls make a pregnancy pact. They are bored and they want attention and unconditional love. The first one, Bridgina, does it with Wendell, her boyfriend of two weeks, on the school bus. A few weeks later, she pees on a little [...]
The Sex of the Stars
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That cluster of stars over there-and when I say “cluster of stars†I mean a set of stars that are not clustered at all, but they appear to be a cluster to a human viewer on earth who can’t see perspective in outer space-
-anyway the stars in [...]
Life on the Dead Tree
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They were not reptilian, though from time to time they did flick their tongues. They were a boy and a girl, resting in the forks of branches: brushing their hair with twigs, ripping bark chips from the source, always with the tree tissue, the mineral deposits under [...]
Sex Education
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It was spring in Indiana when that man raped
the gray-haired lady who went to worship
with us. The one who wore purple skirts
and sturdy tan shoes like loaves of day old bread
my father brought home for us. The man snuck
into her house, tied her with a phone cord, [...]
Three Poems
UPON LIVING WITH A MAN NEWLY RELEASED
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A friend watches me spoon a soggy chunk
of my childhood and fling it
somewhere between my Brooklyn sink
and California. Her thoughts brake, as if to judge
the remains of a six-car pileup, or the sink,
jammed with crayon drawings of my father
in jail. Father, [...]
Say When
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if you are a man made of birds
if you are a bureau
if chest, if cage
if you are a lovely weather
worn out, say when
if the space between us makes
a dog named vacancy
if I contain all possible crimes
if I pay attention, if I stay very still
if I notice how [...]
Blue Alyssa and the Sad Gray Crab
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“Thursday’s child has far to go…â€
We called it the Cape of Flowers, but for every bug-eaten bloom there were forty thorns and twice that number of saw-toothed weeds, and a grit-patch mined with sandspurs made the only path to the sea. The sun was [...]
What Hangs Up, Must Come Down
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Peter orders his eggs over hard so he can assure himself the pleasure of clean cuts and small bites that never endanger his shirts or hands of a yellow yolky smear. When he orders them, he is fully aware that some people think that he might be [...]
The Tragedy of Tragic Men
This is the time of the tragic man, not the drifting cloud. This is the time for all tragic men to come to our aid and for drifting clouds to just move on, move on. They stood in a line to shake his hand, the first and most successful tragic [...]
Speak
After we go to the doctor, Momma waits until Daddy comes home to tell him that my sister is deaf. We watch The Little Mermaid in the den while she and Daddy talk at the kitchen table, hunched over a hearing test marked with Xs and Os, lines connecting them [...]
Five an Hour
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My first day on the butterscotch line, they tell me I can eat five chews an hour.
Frank says, “That’s more than on the taffy line.†Frank works across from me. He and I box the butterscotches, fifty a box.
“If they’re so worried about money,†I ask, “why [...]
Hikikomori Romance
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“The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as people who refuse to leave their house, and isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months.†-Wikipedia
I- SEDUCTION
The girl, animated, big eyes on TV late-nightly, the one you took for wife [...]
Three Poems
Cotopaxi
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-After Frederic Edwin Church
I ask the campesino where he got his hat.
I have trouble understanding his response
as he rushes past pauses and breathes between
his words, chest heaving, his accent slanted north.
I do understand that he is confused,
is trying to find his way back to Sonora.
He doesn’t [...]
Little Rubber Houses
I didn’t mean to make a habit out of sitting naked on lemon meringue pies-or split watermelons. I’d watched this soft-core sex show called “Fetishes of the British†and thought food foreplay would make my husband laugh, relieve the four-year itch.
I’m on my way to London now, non-fetish business. Lana [...]
The Price of Luxury
My mother and I lost our house in Darien, Connecticut after my father left us. He just disappeared one day – no packed suitcase, no missing cufflinks. I was only seventeen, and my mother didn’t tell me what happened for months. He’d been stealing from his company, for years as [...]
The Showrunner
But it’s okay that I’m an unemployed screenwriter still living with my parents, because one day I’ll turn this into a great sitcom.
Like the episode where Hal McCallum (my TV alter ego) convinces a girl his parents are living with him and not vice versa, but after several comical mishaps [...]
Ancient Steps