He sucks in wheat fields and spits out dust bowls.

ALL POETS ARE GOOD-LOOKING!

2011-09-20T00:22:00.000-07:00

All poets are beautiful!

All poets have delicate fingers!

All poets have dimples or have emotional dimples!

All poets have clear sad eyes!

All poets have bodies that are the right size,

or else their bodies are the wrong size for poetic reason!

All poets are wonderful listeners!

All poets are wonderful lovers!

All poets make accurate assumptions!

All poets develop stunningly accurate first impressions of you!

All poets get that faraway look in their eyes!

All poets have eyes that reflect the fog or the sea!

All poets make meaningful decisions!

All poets are composed of salient images!

All poets learn from their failures!

All poets are romantic, lonely, and romantically lonely!

All poets stumble eloquently when they are looking for the right thing to say!

All poets can float!

rose

2010-12-17T09:43:00.000-08:00

found you on the bdfm stairwell hanging not far from a friend

very whole very forgotten picked you up

never gave you to anyone brought you home dropped you in a glass of water

with a toothbrush that tasted like hands there were bubbles

but the number of bubbles declined quickly as you

rotted you had been smooth and round but you were now

wrinkled you had been red now brown and speckled like a faun

thought to throw you in the trash with blood and snot and paper

brought you instead to the window where you lie doomed in a cold sun

will drop your shrunken petals ten five one down the fire escape

and you will be in a place in a shape you never were before

A list I found

2010-09-22T18:17:00.000-07:00

SWAN $50

2 -- 1/2 + 1/2

3 -- club

1 -- pineapple

1 -- watermelon

1 -- cantaloupe

Ent. Donuts

The Proposition (Pushkin)

2010-04-26T21:45:00.000-07:00

Tried out something kind of cool with this one: transliterated this and turned the sounds into what seemed right. Here is a version of the original (didn't read it until after I wrote mine). I recommend this trick to people who want to depart from their usual styles.

The Proposition

Here, poppyseeded, tulip-rooted girl,

I've brought you something your myopic eyes can read.

No more running between pools of hot and cold water,

no nestling myself within your three houses.

The cabbage still quivers in the springtime fields;

the round jingle metal hum leads to summer;

my loyal pinto plays the existential philosopher;

and thieves scavenge like yesterday.

But, cream-filled bundt, we pair in the ranches

repeatedly, you so close to the hairs on my body.

We've built our own philosopher's farm for golems

with my bulbs and your mineral-rich tears.

Together we are the rushing of the river over the rocks,

and January cannot freeze us, we are May:

holy in the cellar stairwell, holy at the dusty crossroads,

holy rooms, holy boxes, holy honeypots.

So if I proposed a new Wednesday education

and nudged you toward a voting booth

no more could you run me with your arguments,

no more would I nestle in your three houses,

and I would pay you back for mud and seriousness

and chalk up the velvet, vulgar words you make me think.

And in your maroon chair, open this letter,

and look, and read slowly, and consent.

Eyjafjallajökull

2010-04-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

We can't ever fly with silt in our wings,
or in our lungs, so we hold our breath
when wind mates with ash and makes clouds of dust.

Grounded again, our bones are steel,
at least, but everyone on the wrong side
of their oceans is counting and recounting the grains of salt

à la plage y la playa, everyone is finally
buying a converter, nobody's cell phone
works in this fucking country and the keyboards are confusing,

with accent marks and punctuation in
all the wrong places. And everyone really
just wants to go home but they'll have to board a ship or something

because the skies are down,
but the world is still up
and without our drones they can hear the bees humming.

Edison's Song

2010-04-14T10:12:00.001-07:00

There is something bewitched

in the flick of a light switch.

Fingers feeling towards illumination,

and the way we'd clap, like trying

to catch fireflies, burst them to brightness

with a squish. This flicker of life

encased behind plastic and glass,

trapped, dying, a high-pitched knell

that squeals itself white:

the spins, the dims fought off again,

this every-night sacrifice

so we can see color in the dark.

Under the Arch

2010-04-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

Hey mister, anybody ever tell you

that in a long, tall glass of water

you're the chunk of lime?

Legs like legends, unspooling,

and your concentration's blurry

and your clothes are ironed sharp,

all lines and angles and

protractions, a whole made up of fractions,

mathematical, leaning precise

in the decadent magnolia air,

in the bowed mahogany sound,

in the softness of spring

you are clear as ice, cut right

and reflecting the starlight that

no one else looks to see.

Muse, two thousand and seven

2010-03-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

pictures of you again, and they call back your animal

smell, the softness of the flannel you wore, the softness

of your voice, I always had to lean so close to hear

that your soft hair tickled my face. Jason's wool.

Your paint-stained hands, great thumbs, the stink of your

great white feet, beached whales. the celebration

when we came to an elevator, when we came to the

ice-cream-vending-machine

(that deserves its very own line); fantastic; your manic eyes

like animals, like animals, but somehow

each day you were in clothes, buttoned right. it was like

a miracle, or maybe like a sin. You and your clumsy limbs,

the gawk of your height, golden-haired giant, monster, muse, me

moving always closer to you, me drawn always closer--

phoenix, phantasm, there's something miraculous

about the fact that your long eyelashes and mine

collided, July, our shyest sleeves kissing,

about the fact that I ate your radishes: you taught me

that anyone's learnable, even a prophet,

even the least earthly prophet.

Union Square

2010-03-20T11:13:00.001-07:00

All trampled in

footsteps, chess boards, agonized

phone calls, cigarettes, harassed by

Greenpeace, cornrows, dreadlocks,

little children singing these are a few of

my favorite things: sunglasses and high heels,

iced coffees, marketing, we're going marketing here,

plastic flash shopping bags cash flow,

man on a horse peering over us, me and you,

new bride bursting in strawberries

and cream, shotgun wedding,

ravished Union Square.

AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE

2010-03-15T15:27:00.000-07:00

After the earthquake I think that Orion

readjusted his belt; it seemed to hang lower

on his waist. I mean, it might have been the change

of seasons, an adolescence. But

the tropics seemed nearer, warmer, and

my tongue wanted to unhook his stars,

and I wanted to see the world unbuckle.

I wanted to see the sky exposed

and shaking. I wanted his bow and his arrows,

unslung, vulnerable. I wanted the tides

to tug him down, down, until

he would topple and fall.

John the Baptist

2010-03-03T11:28:00.000-08:00

Unknowing, unknowable boy,

and me with my wheelchair clairvoyance,

I try sometimes to penetrate

the seven veils that separate

us. Your eyes are the color of something inedible.

You play the teeth, torque the locks with your

knuckles, big and precise and white;

you are a shadow preaching

within tobacco fog again. Your eyes

are the color of something inedible.

If I licked them they would taste like chlorine.

You are covered, too, in a blue tarp

that has been collecting leaves since September.

You have been collecting leaves since September.

Mannahatta

2010-02-26T11:18:00.001-08:00

My great borough, Manhattan,

city of profitable bargaining, city of economy,

city of the flow of money, city of business,

city of hard work and pay earned, city of opportunity,

city of converging lives, city of many disconnected bubbles,

city of soap-bubbles, city that gleams rainbow,

city that shines in the greatest compromise between commerce and art,

city greater than everything put together, the hub of the human universe,

city of neighborhoods, demanding, curious, incurious,

maintained, maintained, scrubbed and rebuilt, scarred by ubiquitous entropy,

I am yours, city, I am yours, I will always be yours.

Windchill

2010-02-21T16:23:00.001-08:00

The cold breath of the wall at my back,

and you're the only one I ever wanted as a doorstop,

hiding the chinks in my coat.

The Whisperers

2010-01-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

Are you attracted to those with quiet voices,

soft speakers that make you lean

closer to hear their words? Their breath

beside your ear, they will not amp it up

because they know you want to listen: those,

do they bring the iron in your blood

up to the surface, creating bumps,

creating tingles, blushing thumbnails?

Do the stentorians push you away

with the gusts their lungs create?

Do you crawl on bleeding palms to reach

these whisperers, unconsciously self-confident,

shyness turned to charisma, like

a closed rose you know will open in the sun,

or even, naively, under a reading lamp?

Venus of Willendorf

2010-01-31T12:06:00.000-08:00

She dangles

from your pine branch,

porous thighs generously slabbed,

her eyes germinated, her braids, her hands

small and forgotten and grasping.

You never touch her in anger,

but anyway her fat

would act

as a cocoon.

Soon

her shrine will crumble from decadence,

weighted down by gold, by lard:

spitted, rapidly charred,

her hoard

will melt and resolidify into wax,

her skin cracked.

Easily, reverently, she will be

ignited.

Black Irish

2010-01-25T21:47:00.000-08:00

Your limbs are choppy: elbows that stutter,

and nervous, Morse-tap knees. They spell

our names in Ogham, incomprehensible.

And your eyes have been rinsed out again.

I should have guessed. You have mislaid

your ragged-winged umbrella, your mascara,

again, and I think again you lost your rings.

Crow, rasp your resined bow so that my down

jumps on edge, my teeth raze my words and then

we intersect again. This macadam, it begs

our cataracted soles, the starless scrape

of our cab's brake, our fingerprints, partings.

2010-01-17T02:45:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, when I want to say something that I care a lot about, it's hard to physically shape the words and push them out of my larynx and oral cavity. It's like my body wants to shelter them, kind of like they are an egg that I want to lay but its shell isn't on yet. My body will only let the words out if the shell is on the egg, that is, if the words are protected by misdirection and not saying exactly what I mean. Because that protects the emotions inside, which are the yolk. I don't know, but it's hard for me to say things when I really mean them.

first snow

2009-12-06T12:23:00.001-08:00

held in, not fully

formed until born,

spat out in shapes specifically and

caught

on hair coats gloves concrete so quickly melting:

this sleet, fleet

impermanence

The Squall

2009-12-02T22:15:00.000-08:00

Unclarifying, merely muddling,

puddling,

I'm weather that never

ends, only pauses

like the whine of a newborn.

Sickly, almost sticky,

and pairing with wind to ram skins,

I am slick

and slippery, can be

insidious, residual. I

change all into fuzz and rust.

Eye-catching shine,

and those black wings I've snapped

broken. I'll wait

'til you think I've left. You forget

and go out without your boots on,

foregone, and

I'm not gone at all!

I make raincoats gain a hazy glaze

like snails;

I leave sidewalks undrained,

beating down

(downbeat).

And the buildings drip like sides of meat.

Tauromachy

2009-11-01T00:29:00.000-07:00

Drag me up the roofs, bull,

push me through the floors;

I will break the boards,

stain the wood,

and when I try to shape my mouth

I blow a bubble with right angles:

I cannot speak but with my hands,

those roving birds that court south.

Oh, you are yoked, you are rooted,

but I have seen you chase vermilion,

your twin horns balancing oblivion,

your nimble hooves confused

and accidentally crushing.

I may spill the pail,

empty the grail

and still you will never end up with nothing.

Why would you need the filling of a lover?

I will be the one tipped over and cracked,

perhaps,

as your toes stay wreathed in clover.

10 Washington Place

2009-10-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

Here are yellow curves,

orange cubes, a floor of suede

and dimmed reflections on the floor,

marbled. The stairs drop

like a Jacob's ladder. One wall

is shapely, the other bricked;

trios of lights harmonious,

seven suns, black-and-white and glorious.

Columns hold up the ceiling

like verbs, attached to phrases

at both ends. Speckles and

moving squares like adjectives,

decorative, and I can sit on these

nouns as if they were couches

and chairs. The walls glassed.

(Language, here, is glassed.)

A hushing building, the air filled

with invisible words, unyelled.

washington square after a rain

2009-09-27T17:29:00.001-07:00

somehow the benches are dry,

somehow the world is pastels

and the clouds are soft, the

air is soft; somehow the

quiet pervades, pervades;

dogs are walked, smiles

are swapped (some brighter

than others, some bright

as the hiding, peeping sun);

and when somebody has a

diabetic seizure while he's

playing the guitar, cover

songs, the paramedics

come in the sleepy calm

of after-rain and move

unhurriedly, professionals

don't hurry... and meanwhile

the two men on the bench

next to mine, one white

and old, one black and young,

talk, too, unhurriedly; they talk

of children and of bedtimes

and of how no one wants to

have a seizure in the park when

it's such a nice day.

Yoga

2009-09-19T11:03:00.001-07:00

New Age music is on in Coles and

the flabby women soon to be draping naked in the

locker room splay obscenely with heavy

rotten breaths beside you, cobra,

cat, pyramid, hold it --

breathe in, breathe out like a

moron -- nothing further from

exotic Gandhic philosophies thought up

in a language you don't read.

Perhaps if it were done

in a world pretending to be India --

asanas on East Fourteenth Street or on Canal Street,

put in the street vendors but

pay them to yell and to hawk,

arch the bridge in the middle of the intersection of

Houston East First and Avenue A with

taxicabs honking and bikes swerving surprised at the veering shapes of the street --

breathe in, breathe out.

2009-08-10T02:58:00.001-07:00

Know that love can only be reached after you leap the channels of risk.

Man in a White Hat

2009-07-31T00:23:00.000-07:00

Our lives

seeds in maracas, tapping...

Aged eyes, crinkled skin, black

man in a white hat, I

saw you helping the shrunken white zinnia, I saw you in

the library, I saw you again walking by;

when you said "hi" I felt nervous though I'd already smiled

that mouthless smile of glass girls five feet tall,

wallets uncasually guarded, black

man in a white hat coming from somewhere, feet leading, eyes watchful,

looking classy in that white hat.

While you are dreaming

2009-07-26T22:48:00.000-07:00

While you are dreaming,

While you are awakening,

While you are standing on glistening tile,

While you are brewing,

While you are switching on the vent,

While you are reading headlines,

While you are filling in the two answers in the crossword that you know off the top of your head,

While you are stopping at a stop sign,

While you are running a stop sign,

While you are turning right at a red light,

While you are tapping your fingers on the steering wheel,

While you are reading the personalized license places,

While you are finding a song on the radio that you know,

While you are humming along because you don't quite know the words,

While you are parallel parking,

While you are working,

While you are worrying,

While you are making a call,

While you are laughing,

While you are looking at the menu,

While you are ordering,

While you are calculating tip,

While you are paying with your debit card,

While you are checking your watch,

While you are checking your email,

While you are feeling the breeze or lack of breeze against your cheek,

While you are thinking about the one you never called back,

While you are smoking a cigarette,

While you are whistling,

While you are driving home,

While you are narrowly avoiding an accident because somebody else ran a stop sign,

While you are cleaning your windshield with the wipers and the fluid so convenient,

While you are fumbling with your keys,

While you are microwaving,

While you are doing the dishes,

While you are flipping channels,

While you are examining hairs,

While you are undressing,

While you are unmaking the bed,

While you are making love,

While you are praying,

While you are sleeping and dreaming again...

All the while Niagara runs,

All the while Niagara falls,

The water changing color when it vaults into the air,

The roars of nature's forces colliding and combining,

Sometimes making rainbows, always making mist,

Greater than time, the celebration, the power unending.

Sagittarius

2009-05-25T01:35:00.000-07:00

The way he grazes, unattainable,
Fingers clean and callused.

Running unbridled, walking on tiptoe,
Sleeping standing up.

He is a singer, he plays the guitar.
Neck so wide,

Calves so hairy, teeth so frank.
He rolls the joint, chews the roach:

Lazy glow,
Breast braced in the wind.

interlude : 3 poems by noah cicero

2009-05-03T00:29:00.001-07:00

Noah Cicero's blog is one I've been following for a while now. It's worth checking out for his political views and extrapolations as well as for his unique, Youngstown voice in the world of writing.

The following are three short poems that Noah wrote; enjoy!

Obituary

Noah Cicero got a check
for 130 dollars
instead of buying food
he purchased cigarettes
and starved to death

Fortune

I once had dreams
of being a great man
now I dream
of fixing the fuel pump
on my car

The present

I'm overwhelmed by the present
some poets are overwhelmed
by boats
and juniper trees
but right now

I don't wanna talk about it

Auto-da-fé

2009-04-28T22:36:00.000-07:00

A year has passed. This summer's a lot hotter
than the last. Do you remember when
you turned eighteen? Now I am eighteen, too.
I did it without you.

You ran out of butane not long ago, stopped
lighting me afire. I require
something greater now, something monstrous. I am leaping
into the pits and opposites of pits:

The city will sift me to ash.
The lasting flashes will reduce me
to a girl of marrow.

Cross-scheme experimentation from a few weeks ago

2009-04-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

Sing out, whistle a tune for the world's end:
it rings in echoes, ripples and then fades,
like small things dropped into a well and watched
until they're gone. Zing! Beats like bent lightning bolts,
jagged, unsure, strings sent across a line
in different ways; sent strings, crossed messengers,
the lyric bent and limed, zinged in weird ways.
In a well-mannered way, the things behave
and then watch it all fall. The bells ring tolls,
end everything. Ragnarok. Muses, sing.

Dreams

2009-04-08T12:04:00.001-07:00

This morning I wrote through to the last page of a notebook, a rare event in my life.
This notebook contains a couple of poems, raps, stories, and journal entries, but what it is primarily comprised of is dreams, transcribed in that half-awake, incoherent, coherent state of morning.
Paging through it, I found this entry from February 20th:

I lived next door to James Joyce. He had just recently died.
I woke up and water was lapping all the way up their house, halfway up my own window.
Huge waves.
It was just the Joyce house. I watched for a little bit.
I was going to call 911 but it didn't happen, but someone else eventually did.
I think the pets drowned.

old school, cold war

2009-03-29T23:41:00.000-07:00

Peach pits sat in your lungs, your kidneys lingered.

And you were unlettered,
you could never read or write back to my letters.

Thumbing from your friends,
you skinny-legged child of bums and guns,
you never knew when you were wanted.

Sleeves too wide,
you eyed the hammer and sickle,
cocked the pistol,
let your fingers win it.

(a rewrite of this)

2009-03-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

I tossed a rock onto the sand.
The moment it left my hand

I gave it up. It made no splashes,
settled before the crashes,

but when the sparkling water rose
my pebble changed Neptune's flows.

We trip gods with our crumbs.
The sea is moved by a slip of the thumb.

The waiting is over.

2009-03-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

This is hilarious....
and probably what my life will be in about nine months.

paul newman is dead

2009-03-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

*

"Pick a color: Red, blue, orange, green."

"Blue," said Diane.

"B-L-U-E. Pick a number: one, two, three, four."

"One," said Diane.

"One." The cootie catcher's mouth moved sideways, like a shark.

"Pick a number: five, six, seven, eight."

"Seven," said Diane.

Woody opened the flap. "You will meet the love of your life," he read.

"When?"

Woody shrugged.

"Cool," said Diane. She popped a bubble of gum. The mole on her shoulder was still intact, large and fascinating.

*

Gabo is alive. He wakes up every morning and has coffee and takes a siesta every afternoon in his hammock and looks at his typewriter every evening with a hand-rolled cigarette in his hand. He is thoughtful. He has more than eighty years of wrinkly experience inside him. He thinks in lyrical Spanish.

*

On the last day of her life, Sylvia put the butter back into the fridge and she realized that by the time the butter hardened again, in the cold of the fridge, she would be dead.

*

More than once Davie looked in the mirror and thought that he probably had Down's Syndrome. Probably no one had told him because they were embarassed, and because they wanted to protect him. Whenever Davie got a bad grade on his math test, or failed an art assignment (an art assignment!), or tried to do the English reading and watched the words turn into Pacman and the little ghosts and blobs, he thought it was probably his Down's acting up again.

He would practice widening his eyes, practice straightening up his smile. Standing tall.

In later years, seeing himself on television, orange hair and creased face, he often wondered about that secret. Perhaps it had never manifested because no one had believed in it enough. Perhaps it was lurking in his system, like TB, waiting to strike when his defenses were down.

That was not at all how it worked, but Davie thought it anyway.

*

One day, Dakota will go to prom with a boy who will slide a corsage onto her wrist and smile for the pictures that both of their parents are taking. Or maybe she will go with a group of friends, and they'll go out for Thai beforehand and then all flock to the bathroom to redo their lipstick in the mirror.

One day Dakota will be at Long's buying toothbrushes, concealer, and disposable cutlery, and somebody will recognize her and she will probably have to sign their receipt, she will probably have to smile for a picture taken with somebody's cell phone, a picture that will come out blurry.

*

Emilys

2009-02-27T23:50:00.000-08:00

Which Emily is the real Emily?
The lines of their hands are the same.
They speak chunks of sweet peanut butter,
cookie batter. Their knees are shaven.

Which Emily is the true Emily?
Teeth dusty, breathing internally,
their ribs uncracked, skin marbled.

Which Emily is the best Emily?
Their stars, their eyes offer no clues.

Train, again

2009-02-25T21:12:00.000-08:00

I never wanted to die in my sleep. I wanted to die with my eyes open, to know that it was not a dream, to witness the world shifting.

He sat next to me, his head crooked awkwardly in his shoulder. He was leaning heavily, perilously away from me. I looked at his open mouth, the precisely formed upper lip, the forgotten scruff below his chin. I wanted to tickle him. I pressed my nose against the scratched-up glass instead. Anonymous, unvarying trees barreled by. When I thought about it too much I felt a reliable vertigo, like when you sit in your parked car and somebody is reversing right beside you. Like the world is going in a different direction than you are. It made me sick.

I was listening to the Shins. That year I was always listening to the Shins, and sucking on cough drops to distract myself from the cigarettes I wasn't smoking. I played three hard and fast games of iPod solitaire. I touched his shoulder. He felt felted. He felt soaked in the dripping glue of unconsciousness.

We dove underground. I put my head against the wall and felt everything rushing by. We were in a tunnel. If everything around me disappeared, I would have been sucked down quicker and quicker and I would have shrunken into nothingness. I took his hand. It was slack and flaccid. There were dark bristly hairs climbing from his arm and wrist up onto his hand, past his knuckles. I wanted to tell him he was an ape. I had never seen him shirtless and I wondered, again, if he had back hair. It frustrated me that he kept himself so private.

I wanted to get out my vitamin water but it was down by my feet and bending down would have wiped me out of existence. I was barely corralled in reality between the wall of the train and his round, uninterested hip.

Four more stops.

I decided I would wake him up after Canal Street. I was feeling nervous and impatient. We were rushing through the tunnel and all was fluorescent light. Everybody in the train looked sallow and distant. We were all in transition. Nobody ever sat on the train just to be on the train. This had never happened in the history of the city.

I squirmed for my phone and scrolled through my contact list again. There was no reception, of course. My mouth felt dry. He looked so uncomfortable.

The train squealed to a stop. Three more until we got home.

I made myself cough. "Adam," I said softly. Then again. "Adam." I felt bolder now. I reached over and snapped my fingers in front of his face. "Adam."

He shifted a little. Then he opened his eyes. Blinked at me several times, like somebody nearsighted, and closed his eyes again.

"Adam," I said, taking out my earbuds so that the overhead buzz of the train wholly took over, "it's almost our stop. Come on, wake up."

A woman reading a book looked up. I cowered.

He arched back to a sitting position, cracked his knuckles, looked thoughtfully at me. "How much longer?"

I shrugged a little. "Five, six minutes." I felt hyperactive, nervous, now that he was awake.

He rubbed his eyes, blinked again, and looked at me. He was pulling down one eyelid so that I could see the inside of it. His eyes were the color of moss in August.

"Okay," he said.

Harvard's Ode

2009-02-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

Brass, anglican, your eyes are
pupilless, your toes are pennied.
Lucky as a rabbit's.

O, justice, she is running
in slow motion, but you are immobile
and cannot catch her.

They pose, and when they smile
you cannot smile, your face held proud;
yes, always your face is held proud.

not quite lupercalia

2009-02-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

This, sneaking into you twice, creeping,
anointing boys you forever denied,
boys similar in height and eyes and sadnesses,
chaster boys, with cracked voices and fragile lips--

is this, maybe, love? Wanting it not for yourself,
but for them, wanting to be
their whiskey, joyful and sparkling all the way down?

AIOLOS

2009-02-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

My senses are restless,
leashless, giggling, battering, lapping
with echoed smells, tinted with myth.

They pause not at Persephone,
quicker than Hermes.

They whistle palm-ladders for Hermes.

I am chapped with keeping them,
my fingers skinless, I read in Braille,
but when they wind home I leach the world from them,
voracious, vicarious.

slings & arrows of outrageous fortune

2009-02-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

i am published here (breadcrumb scabs)
you can download it for free
i am the first one in the issue, so you don't have to read the whole thing
however, if you want to, it's worth reading
most of the poetry is good and interesting
i recommend joseph reich's piece

Aisha

2009-01-30T20:04:00.000-08:00

Walking back to the car I saw a woman I remembered. Settled, with flaky orange hair, drooping features. Her name was Aisha and she had been in my sign language class. The class had been taught by a fantastic, sincere guy named Mo whose parents had both been Deaf. Most of the students were there trying to escape oral language courses, with the three notable exceptions. There was a couple, a worried brunette named Elaine and her partner, a sweet-eyed, intelligent Iranian; he was going deaf. And there was Aisha, who was going deaf too. She was in her thirties and she spoke almost normally, but she couldn't say her R's, and it made me wonder if losing the ability to hear also lost you the ability to distinguish between R's and W's.

Once, in class, we'd been talking about the pros and cons of cochlear implants and she had spoken up in her funny crippled voice, said she was considering getting one but she was undecided, she was "scaiwed shitless," and there had been a sort of stabbed silence, all these home-schoolers and hipsters too cool for Spanish and older people trying to pick up another skill and me, a high school junior with half an aptitude for language and half a desire to listen to that exotic voice of people with no voice, all of us sucking in a little, unable to imagine sound growing duller each day, the big chunky plastic hearing aid palpably less effective than it was, the workings of entropy spelled out in the gradual obvious muting of the world....

I saw her crossing the street, her movements impenetrable, unrevealing. I could not know if she had chosen to get the implant. Irreversible, unlike any decisions I had yet to make. Me, still unbetrayed by my curious body.

On the way home I drove along the cliffs, twenty miles per hour. I was driving a different car, and I was still unused to the engine's quiet. The sea was exquisite, shimmery, echoing a periwinkle dome, rippling with light, opalescent. And the sky just above it was tinted orange. I drove and looked and felt like I would die of beauty.

And within meters and moments it had changed. The orange had faded peach and the contrast was lesser and death was postponed, again.

JANUARY

2009-01-14T17:13:00.000-08:00

Mixed-up trees stepping in orange leaves,
Skin blessed with affectionate breezes;
Blues, greens, warms, silk feathers,
A crime to drive in this weather;
Bright shadows, flown smiles, limbs bared,
May-in-September-in-January;
If global warming takes me this peaceful way,
I won't revolt, I will obey.

the future is infinite; my future is finite

2008-12-26T14:48:00.001-08:00

a drop of water
knocks off
a drop of water

MONEYLAUNDERER

2008-12-19T17:22:00.000-08:00

The soft clink of metal parts well-oiled. It used to wake me up in the middle of the night, I would see him looking guilty in the grainy light, his hands sticky, the weapon dormant and controlled in his hands. Now it lulls me.

He is a messy eater and he gets into fights. He wears red shirts, black vests. They don't stain easily but viscosity still crusts and I have to scrub it off, scratch at them with my fingernails in the warm soapy water.

There is ash, too, he smells of ash, once he pretended he was going to put his cigarette out on my arm and I didn't talk to him for an hour. He was repentant. His mouth has a layer of smoke inside of it.

He is disorganized, he pays for Italian dinners with nauseous Benjamins because he can't find anything smaller and he can't bother to look. I pick his bills out of his pockets, pluck off the lint, he does not even check before he puts his clothes in the hamper.

He takes shots like it is suicide. A somber drunk. Carnivorous.

The Lion Tamer

2008-11-28T13:27:00.000-08:00

Yeah, her fur like bloody saffron.
At least she ain't got a mane.
The girls are fiestier, though,
got more bite in em. More bitter.

Hello, how's it going? No, stay, she won't bite my hand.
I know how to deal with these. You get em
up against the walls, corner em,
make em feel scared.

Yeah, look, see-- that's how you do it.
Like you're Dole and they're goddam
pineapples in a can.

007's horoscopes

2008-11-15T22:29:00.000-08:00

With Mercury in retrograde, your life may begin to feel like a generic action movie, with no shot lasting longer than about five seconds.
A nemesis might be a pretty damn good actor, but strangely absent from your main conflicts.
An old friend will be absent from your surroundings this month, along with his super sweet gadgets.
Look forward to a cool, visceral falling scene in your future, as well as some good chases and scenes full of things blowing up. You will also kill a lot of people cold-bloodedly, so get your guns ready.
Expect really lame and cheesy place labels soon to tell you that you are in Italy, Bolivia, etc. On the other hand, you will get to go to Italy, Bolivia, and some other countries.
If confused about twists and turns in your life, look into the past; Casino Royale will be a crucial chain of events to keep in mind. Even so, however, prepare for some confusion and misunderstandings.
Unfortunately, an important relationship will not be consummated anytime soon, but don't lose hope. Next movie, maybe?

I want Bob Marley, need Bob Marley

2008-11-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

November 5, 2008

2008-11-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

I should be working on a novel right now, but I'm feeling, contradictorily, both woozy and euphoric.

The woozy part can be explained by my attempt to donate blood today. 80 grams below the required amount I got a hematoma and fainted. Fainting is a pretty disorienting experience. Yeah.

I'm also pretty bummed about the Prop 8 results. There is nothing worse than giving people rights and then taking them away. The "yes on 8" people put on a huge advertising campaign which, while composed of mostly lies, seems to have convinced slightly over half of California. We'll have to overturn that shit soon.

However, I couldn't be prouder of the United States today. We manned up and made the right choice, and honestly, I still can't quite believe I'm not dreaming because this seems too good to be true. I feel like I'm living in a fairy tale right now. But what we're really living in is history. November 4, 2008 is going to be a date people remember for a long time, and Barack Obama's upcoming presidency is going to change the fate of not just the nation, but probably the world, in a hugely positive way.

Thanks, everyone. Here's to the new first family.

(Novel excerpts might come up sometime. Maybe. Don't count on anything.)

Train

2008-10-18T23:34:00.000-07:00

I dreamed train.

Every time my tongue hit the back of my teeth it was small wheels rolling and jangling against the railroad tracks. Bread and butter slid along my mouth like grease along the intimate inner workings of that mysterious machine. When I exhaled white puffs into the air I was making the clouds that train made out of coal. Every grimeless cell in me yearned toward train.

It was hard for me to fall asleep in those days, and my thoughts always would drift to train, the lulling motion of it, the constant motion of it, the idea of getting somewhere. Train meant Chicago, train meant New York, but train also meant crossing countryside. Train solved paradoxes: you could travel without moving. You could be sitting, or sleeping, or writing a letter, and all the time the motion would be going on around you, and you could not even feel it, but you would wake up one day in Ohio, the next day in Indiana, the next day in Illinois. You could do two things at once without even trying. When you were in train travel was like breath, equally unstoppable.

I went and had my baked potato and didn't say anything at all and went to bed and thought my veins into railroad tracks, the capsules of my blood into a billion red boxcars. My heart was the grandest and centrallest of train stations. The skin of the potato was ground up into hunks of coal that little men, sweating, saving up, shoveled into the fire.

Imaginings

2008-10-12T00:37:00.000-07:00

Gloaming.
The skirr of the birds almost inaudible, if I wasn't listening so hard.
Light leached from the sky, into the sea, foaming and booming eternally against the less eternal rocks.
My bones are clamped, granite nubs my knees.
Gums sucked, head raw.
There is a wind smacking my leached cheeks, and my fingers burrow.
When I squint my right eye shut everything is a Monet blur.

I've been sick. But more poetry class stuff.

2008-09-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

It's now official: my poetry "teacher" is a dumbass who I do not respect a single iota.
However, this doesn't mean I can't glean something from the course, right?
Here's a sonnet I wrote today in class which I kind of liked. The assignment was to write about a block you know really well or something. I totally blew it off and wrote about a scene I came across earlier today. Mostly I guess I like the way it fits the form; less sure about the content.

WEST CLIFF SONNET

A white-hot spot up on my beating right.
There is a tree which flattens to make shade,
and here two gossipping old ladies walk,
and hear a shy musician try his trade.
A flock rolls by. Twentysomething women,
all pushing plush and multicolored strollers.
The carted chat drifts by: Today she slept
so well. Today he ate. And how is yours?
They look at me alone and unstretchmarked
and I shift to the water, blue and brighter
than any baby's eyes, its glitter-ripple
always alive, always alive. I'm lighter,
but should my helium be weighted down?
Unburdened, I still dream of greater towns.

Poetry class

2008-09-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

I've begun taking a poetry class once a week, which means (theoretically) a lot more output.
So here's a draft I wrote last Tuesday which I kind of liked. The prompt was to write a "poetry poem" starting with "A poem is...".

POETRY POEM

A poem is flowering across you, mossy:
Slap it off your face and smack it down
onto a page. Or don't; I'll peel
and steal it.

In the air it comes to life.
Crusty letters crumple out,
origami polaroids
and maybe it's not ours anymore
but your crease is there, mine here. We're
makers, or something, shaping the ashes that land
in our hands,
our palms charcoal.
Can we breathe now?

THE HANGED MAN

2008-08-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

You'll be still in bed, teeth
bloody, lids taut
over the contours of your peeled-egg eyes and
you'll get that
falling feeling
you sometimes get
when you are still in bed and
your body forgets about itself.
Miles will rush vertically
past your ears.
Your fingernails will trowel.

You will tell yourself nothing
has happened, just your brain
losing its equilibrium for a second,
but you will feel displaced,
hanging floating somewhere in
between your bed and the floor,
and you will remember suddenly
sixth-grade insomnia,
imagining you could feel
the world turning beneath you,
great gears grinding.

Time zones away, people will be
swimming, going to movies, mugging each other.
And you will be here,
uneasy on your square feet
of earth, and what if gravity will forget
about itself and you and
the lava malt
beneath the surface of it all will
become one?

Banks

2008-08-18T13:59:00.001-07:00

Shimmers spooled, a tumblefog March.
Koi cues in Jews' pockets, collars starched,
tulips a-bobbling:
which winner is mobbing
dawn-dozers hosed in dew, chlorophyll wobbling
to claim potent, pregnant
wealth lumping out of its bed,
run down by a too-oiled head,
eeling at middle age, not dead
yet, but its spawn will be fire-red ants?

Out of town again

2008-07-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

I am going to be out of town for the next nineteen days at a writing program which will take me to exciting locations. This mirrors the month-long trip I took earlier this summer with my family. There are benefits to being financially dependent on your parents after all.

When I get back I hope to be a much better writer. I will maybe blog something that will showcase this.

In the meantime, this is the most recent thing I wrote.

Were I hollow

Were I hollow
inside of me there would be no sun,
just the dusk's leftover light,
lapping on a tranquil bay
lined with soft small grained sand
and not crags.

Inside of me there would be seasons
and they would change in weeks instead of months.

There would be three seasons:
the season of peace
the season of unrest
the season of plagues.

And in the season of plagues (mercifully short) the skies
inside of me would rain rich red
and the rains would nourish the croplands and the peoples.

And in the season of peace there would be eyes
of baby birds, bright, black, filmless,
and the birds would have soft beaks like soft shelled crabs
and the yolks of their eggs would be a pure luminous green
and flawlessly round.

And where in another universe
bone could be
would be solid marble columns
built under the name of some almighty figure
and where my ribs could be
would be a viney jungle
frosty instead of humid
with Christmas wildlife instead of shrieking
toucans and parrots and myna birds
and beyond the atmosphere tarp of my skin
there would be--

impenetrable worlds,
each its own vessel.

Mortality in four parts

2008-07-16T12:41:00.000-07:00

One.
When my feet are drenched in sun,
or the luminous mermaid-light of
purringcontent machines, sometimes there is nothing
in my head but that which was placed there,
and the fireworks that go off every hour on the hour
mark no turning points, no mile stones,
but graves like magic, an arrangement of rocks
that your soul might never see. I
don't stop because they, dry and dusty,
weigh me down.

Two.
And when, in Capernaum, I feel your spirit
(claw of cancer singed with the wick of you,
tall strong and filled with light)
is it really you or is it my
memory of you, a subconscious
risen from a part of me
(handful of cells) that has become
an imitation?

Three.
Is a dead body like a chrysalis
wrapped in a white sheet, sleeping for eternities,
eyes shut, mouth shut, blood no longer running?
Entropy worked its way in and stopped your heart's
ticking, stopped your cells'
breathing. Intangible,
what was you is left,
seeped from the holes of the brick your body is become,
not a hollow shell, but solid unmovement.

Four.
Matter for the worms and bugs, a reward
for digging through layers of wood and cloth,
rot.

West Cliff

2008-07-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

[this one is for the voice]

Blue eyes, smile like mine and
I'm having a hard time
with words that rhyme
but I bet you'd never guess so many are my type
Long hair, guitar, a bike
I don't gotta be a dyke yet
there are still so many
fish in the Pacific,
swallows in the field they
all fly up when I walk by in my heels from
Manhattan, the black is scraped off from the city streets
I feel fine in Times Square the motherfuckin' place to be
knowin' millions would kill to feel this summertime heat
you don't like the rain well 5 bucks got it beat
say hello to the masses find someone to greet,
hey hey look at me looking fine at 5 feet.
So don't get superior with your 2 inch head start,
at least I show my heart without playing a part,
at least I can pretend I don't still have dreams
obscene with their optimistic sunny hopes & scenes
fucking up but with luck like in a romantic comedy,
when in reality I pray for his eyes to register me.
'Cause when he plays I die and am reborn a different me,
minus some self-confidence plus a desperate ability
to stand at the stop signs and pretend the cars are stopped for me,
to smile with my teeth closed and to pretend it shows sincerity.
But fabrications of strangers and friends-turned-strangers aren't reality,
inadequacies,
a million stories I won't know.
And when I want to point and look who do I have but you to show?

I'm the biggest boss that you seen thus far

2008-06-08T15:50:00.000-07:00

mouth filled with smoke of fires i did not start,
eyes clogged with imaginary rages of foam, my fingers
swell with rings, my subjects bow
in cobweb net. clamor for my love
+ i'll anoint you with expectoration. sacrifice
black widow + the summer is assured.
king of sequoia, king of lonesome dust,
i sing for rain's return, my reign to end.

NEPTUNE

2008-05-29T22:02:00.000-07:00

Beat me: my blood is yours
Slap me: my eyes belong to you
Swallow me whole & I will try
not to die so I can sing your praises
when you in your gracefulness let me out,
my mouth wet with you, my hands dripping you,
all of my cells alive with the stinging
kisses that are you--

They don't understand why I stay with a man
who cups crimson pain in the palm of his hand,
they don't know, they don't know what it is
to grab your gaze. An instant
is worth my life. Your power
could harness tides.

My inner universes hang separate from the outer airs

2008-05-12T18:13:00.000-07:00

Nausea and I been grappling for a few months now.
Mid January she snuck thru my window and
laced her way in between my greased ears;
I woke up not quite retching, not quite gagging, but almost.
I haven't vomited once but she is snaked around the flask bean that is my stomach.

I learned to live with her quickly.
Don't get up too fast.
Don't twirl in your chair.
Eat anyway.
When you are bored in class think about how sick you feel, puff out your cheeks and sigh, imagine projectile vomiting across the classroom, imagine feeling bile rising in your throat running to the bathroom and barely making it in time, not caring who hears you.
I've always had a strong stomach. I can beat her any day.
But she is always lining my mind like furry black velvet.
When something is startling or terrible and my mouth is empty she fills the spots between my cheeks.

I swallow chins like that green eyed gray eyed Henry in that nightmare lynchian film.
I pick the skin off of my thumbs.
My legs are thinner than they've been in years.

It's strange remembering what life was like without her.

I can't remember if there was more color in the world.
Maybe it just seemed brighter because
it was winter then and meant to be gray; now it is May and might as well be March.
My spring, where did you go? Did Nausea steal you away?
Tell me it ain't so. Tell me you are not roiling in my stomach
right now. I know you are not
because if you were I would feel splinters
of sunlight and birdsong and the fragrances of flowers would
come out my nose.

(Yesterday I saw two plump red breasted robin, fearless.
Yesterday I saw several of those awful black rooster with spiked mohawks on their heads, bird I had never seen before this so called spring, are the starlings listening to the Sex Pistols or are these demon offspring something entirely new?
Yesterday there was a very small cat without a collar looking at me also without fear and then there was a very large cat with the same markings crouching guarding its land polishing a great rusty rifle in its paws.)

This is late spring as late spring would be in a sadder universe than this.

Them parasites would die in my conchae.

Play what is not there

2008-05-04T02:18:00.000-07:00

Air isn't always a silent thing. Sometimes it calls attention to its existence. Sometimes I am holding my breath hard and the air is tangible, tangible because it is not there; I feel it pressing against my skin like a million invisible tapeworms or, practically the same thing, a million invisible universes.

Frogs can breathe through their skin; people can suffocate if they hide it all. What do I need lungs for? My mitochondria can power themselves. If my skin was better I could power my heart with oxygen I would suck through my pores.

If I tried harder I would be a transparent wafer and the light would shine through me.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. -Aldous Huxley

2008-04-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

I'll spill in trade for a pinprick of trust.
I'll lift my arms if you'll pretend
you see my ribs, the cage exposed.

We could build a campus on our coke wounds
and charge forty thousand dollars a year, the
buildings ivory. Yeah,

but your teeth are whiter than mine, you butterfly
emerged from the cocoon of canker metal
I never entered, and never shrugged off.

The new moon on my nails. You have enough
stars for the both of us, if you're
willing to share.

stress

2008-04-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

it makes my pulse hammer and
my stomach hurt

Cut

2008-04-12T19:37:00.000-07:00

My father's parents' parents escaped the Holocaust
by going to Brazil, & now there is
a redhead Eastern European branch
of my clan in São Paulo.

the rest is up to you

2008-04-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

Sugar cocaine rots a hole in your brain
the old man told me and I
listened:
because I trust my information when it comes from the mouths of sources

..........with experience--

& who knew you could sing so loud

2008-03-30T00:23:00.001-07:00

& who knew you could sing so loud until
the house was deserted and the will
power was in, power was out?

crack the window just to feel
daring but tone it down a
thousand notches when a couple walks by.
crack the other window &
sing along to the ipod playing really loud &
spin on the chair until you are dizzier than
tuesday night and sink to the ground & be unsure
if you are seeing the light spinning or not because it is so dark
& bump against the guitar on your bed & hear it greet you
& then get up and jump to the drum beat of the song
because nobody is on the floor below.

yes. yes. yes.

Penny

2008-03-16T21:49:00.000-07:00

There is a dirty copper penny inside my mouth
hovering in my upper lip &
clinking when it hits that part of my
tooth that juts out, sharp, always braceless :
there is a penny there large & round & I
trace Lincoln's face with my tongue, I
lick Lincoln's face.

Darklands

2008-03-13T20:03:00.000-07:00

Rats stampede-- buffalo wild-- rampage
in pipes tar black and right-- angling as
venomous basilisks-- reverse spawn of Lucifer--
evening's child heralding the dark-- the
rats scurry in this night.

ooze, sludge, ooze down nowhere holes
fill the nooks put out the coals and

don't tell me that
I look sick cause you look
sicker, honey, and the kind of bees that
eat this muck are only queens, and the
ants are crushed by pools of
solid waste, is this place a hell under the earth, or is it an
Eden for Hell?

Tiger

2008-02-25T21:07:00.001-08:00

Tiger's eyes unfold as he wakes up. Tiger rolls his muscles. Tiger practically purrs.

But not quite. It is a sunny morning and Tiger is ready for some ack-shunnn.

Tiger is ready for some prime time exercise.

Tiger walks out to the course. Tiger's muscles roll when he walks. Tiger feels good in the sun. He feels ready to do some pouncing.

Tiger's back is heavy with weaponry.

The prey scatter in front of Tiger, obvious white on soft green grass. They roll slowly in the grass and it is easy for Tiger to catch them.

He whacks one. Whacks another. Watches them fly. And he grins.

Tiger kills for sport.

DUGONG

2008-02-21T22:17:00.000-08:00

I.
A sea-parrot has skin
instead of feathers.
A sea-parrot chews on coral
when it is teething.
A sea-parrot does not
lay eggs.

II.
The pirates with mouthfuls of
jaw fill the sea with your
blood sacrifices to their
unholy pagan gods.
Black and white they do not
see things in shades of grey.

III.
And is your milk as
worthy as a maid's or a
long lashed heifer's?

Do your babies learn to sing
when they are weaned
so that you know always where they are?

.

thoughts approaching valentine's day.

2008-02-11T23:24:00.000-08:00

In the tenth grade I had so much energy.

I had so much energy for trying for relationships.

I felt like I was in love.

I felt unconditionally.

I tried so hard.

I would call him a lot.

I would try and hug him a lot.

I would make a huge effort to talk to him at school.

It's hard for me to believe now the amount of energy I had for things like that less than a year ago.

Nowadays if I am interested in somebody I will be cautious.

Maybe I will flirt with him.

But I will not call him on the phone a lot.

I will not try and get his attention all the time.

Maybe it is because I am not hugely interested in anybody at the moment.

Maybe it is because it didn't quite work the first time.

I am a little bit interested in a few people.

But not very interested in one in particular.

I have not had dreams about boys I know in a while.

There is no boy's number on my phone that I linger over.

I no longer have the rash self confidence to talk to somebody who isn't part of my group and think maybe he will give me a chance.

I'm starting to take the passive side.

I admire my self from last year.

In a way.

But I feel content about my current approach too.

It would take a lot for me to go through that again.

(Whether you are in love or not you should check out this poem: http://youtube.com/watch?v=c5WgmbMW7Ek&feature=related.

It is adorable.)

Night Owl

2008-02-10T16:54:00.000-08:00

(This is a rewrite of a story by a guy named Brandon. You can find links to all the versions on the left of the page here: http://www.brandon-alien-fine.blogspot.com/. I read them all and then took about half an hour to forty minutes and wrote my own version.)

Night Owl

It was Friday night. I was laying in my bed with my laptop in my lap. I was watching a music video. The gmail window was open and as I was rating the music video four stars I saw the tab change from Gmail - Inbox to Gmail - Inbox (1). I clicked the tab. The new email was from a guy I had had a crush on once. It was a link to a youtube video.

I finished watching the music video and then I clicked his link. I closed the other youtube window. I watched the video he had linked me to. It was some kind of British comedy thing, skits with one dark haired fat British man and one weaselly looking British man, but it wasn't the one with Hugh Laurie. I thought about how much I liked Dr. House.

My housemate came in. I paused the video the second that I heard the door open. I always felt nervous watching things around people. She peered at the screen and was looking at the square that was the paused video.

"What are you watching," she said.

"Some kind of British comedy thing," I said. The title of the show was in bold print right above the video square but I didn't read it aloud to her.

"Do you want some wine," she said. She gave me a glass before I could say yes. I looked at the wineglass and thought how classy we were to have wineglasses. It was a little too full to look classy so I had to drink some of it. I brought down the amount of wine to the correct level. It was cheap white wine but I pretended I was Jackie O anyway.

The clock on my laptop said it was 10:26. The laptop was really warm on my legs and I imagined my legs charring under it even though the blanket was a barrier between us. I checked my emails one last time. I wrote a one-sentence response to the guy I had once had a crush on. I felt like I was telling him I didn't care anymore because I didn't use any capital letters. I closed the lid of the laptop and lay it beside my bed. I got out of bed and put on some pants that were lying on the floor. They were jeans that rode up a little too high. I wanted to put on a long gray sweater I had had for years that always made me feel classy. I looked around my room for the sweater but I couldn't find it.

I went downstairs and found the sweater hanging off of one of the chairs. My housemate was sitting at the table doing the crossword puzzle. She could even do Friday puzzles. I put my sweater on and stuck my hand in the pocket. My wallet was in there. I knew I had at least fifteen dollars. "I'm going out," I said.

"Where are you going."

"Like a party or something."

"Okay," said my housemate. She didn't care that it was Friday night.

"Bye," I said. Then I put on my shoes. It took an awkwardly long time to put on my shoes and I had already said goodbye to her. I hurried out with my shoes partially on and got into my car and tied my shoes in the car. I turned the car on and listened to the Cure on the radio. I felt lonely. It was dark and chilly and I felt a little excited in my bubble of car.

I drove over a bridge to a club I had only been to once. There was plenty of free parking space around the club and I started feeling nervous that nobody was there. I parked half a block away and texted someone in one of my classes. "Are you going to the thing tonight on River." She didn't respond and I got out of the car clutching my wallet in my pocket and walked to the doors of the club.

The lights were on inside. It didn't seem very loud. There was a man at the door wearing a sleeveless shirt. "Seven bucks," he said. I got out my wallet. I had a ten but I wanted to keep the ten. I had a twenty. I gave him the twenty and he sighed and looked for change. He found change. "Stamp her," he said. "Go over there," he said to me and moved his head. I followed the movement and found a girl on a stool with long dark hair. She was Asian. I held out my hand and she held it professionally and stamped the back of my hand. I looked at the stamp. It said "INSECURE." I was confused by the stamp. I felt branded. "So can I go out and come back in," I said.

"Yeah," she said, "just show us the stamp."

"Okay."

I went inside. There weren't a lot of people there. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket and looked at it. My classmate had texted me back. "Maybe," it said. I felt dissatisfied. I went over to the bar. The bartender looked familiar but I couldn't quite place him. He narrowed his eyes at me unpersonally. "Can I see some ID," he said. I blushed and took out my wallet and gave him my driver's license. People still thought I was underage. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. He nodded and slid it back and said, "Thanks. Can I help you."

"I'll take some white wine," I said. It was the first drink I could think of. Immediately I regretted saying that and wished I had asked for a pina colada instead. A pina colada was a real party drink. "Actually can I have a pina colada," I said but I said it very quietly and he didn't hear me. He was doing something with his hands below the counter, I couldn't really see. I felt like I was blindly trusting him for no reason. He brought me a glass of white wine that was a lot too full. I didn't want to have to correct him. "Five dollars," he said. I gave him five ones that the man at the door had given me. I sat on a stool and drank the wine quickly. I felt a little bit sick. I texted my classmate. "You should come," I said. Then I texted her again, "It kind of sucks but I feel lonely." I am basically the only girl here, I thought. I almost texted that to my classmate but I didn't. There were a couple of girls dancing and they looked like sluts. I felt too un-slutty and thought about going home and putting on my housemate's clothes and coming back. But I was too fat to be a successful slut.

A guy sat down next to me. "Hi," he said. He was stubbly and looked like that actor from Sideways and Spider-Man 3. I looked away. "Hi," I said very quietly in case he wasn't talking to me. He downed a foamy beer and tried to make conversation. I spoke a little bit. My hand was on my wallet in case somebody would try and steal it or it would fall out of my pocket. He gave up and went over and started to dance. That was unsuccessful, I thought. I watched the dancers. The music started to skip and the DJ had to go up and put on a different song. I wondered if anyone in the club knew the Soulja Boy dance. If they played Soulja Boy would anybody know the dance? I thought about how I had looked up the meanings of the slang on urban dictionary and how disgusting the lyrics were. I wondered if any of the sluts in the club had ever been "supermanned." I had drunk my entire glass of wine without noticing. The bartender came over. "Can I have," I said. I hesitated. I wasn't sure what to ask for.

"You don't look like you need any more," he said gently. "Why don't you go dance."

I felt embarrassed and went to the dance floor and pretended to dance for two minutes. Then I left the club. I looked at the INSECURE stamp on my hand and felt outed.

I went to my car and drove to Safeway near my house. It was a big Safeway and they had a sandwich making stand that was still open even though it was like one or two AM by now. I went to the sandwich stand. "Can I get a vegetarian sandwich," I asked.

"Do you want this," said the server. He was small and dark. He pointed to rye.

"Yes," I said. He picked it up and I thought about sourdough and didn't bother saying anything. I didn't want to correct him.

"Do you want this," he said. He pointed to mayo.

"No," I said.

"Do you want this," he said. He pointed to mustard.

"Okay," I said.

I paid three fifty for the sandwich and then I took a basket and looked along the shelves. I bought Ritz crackers and shampoo. I looked at the makeup and acne medication and decided not to buy any because I didn't want to be the kind of person who actually bought that stuff. I didn't want to be caught with it even though I felt like I was breaking out. I bought a 7-Up. I saw an opened thing of bread and I took out the end piece and ate it right there in the store. I felt a rush of adrenaline. A fucked looking blond man walked by and I turned away. I didn't want to get caught. I felt fucked under the flourescent lights.

I went to the place where you pay for things and put my things on the black belt and put an orange separator thing after I was done putting my things on there even though there was nobody behind me. I paid for them and took the bag and went back to my car. I didn't feel drunk. My mouth was dry from the illicit piece of bread.

I put my key in the car door and drove home. I parked badly outside my house and went inside with everything.

When I woke up the bag of things was lying beside my bed. I couldn't remember coming to bed but I was in bed. I was still wearing my sweater. My phone had died and I stuck it into the charger. The sandwich was still in the bag. I had never eaten it. I remembered dreaming about how the weaselly looking British man in the comedy had been operating under the impression that he was Hugh Laurie and I had had the responsibility of telling him the truth. I had had to "let him down easy."

Super Tuesday

2008-02-04T22:07:00.000-08:00

Unresolved tensions buzz out their slogans.
(15 promised hours & I still repent.)
A dog barks lonely in the night. he don't
know who he stand for. &

I sing the Kennedy name in my sleep
I sing the Kennedy curl in my heart
I sing a Kennedy endorsement in my
........young-old idealist soul;

-- & maybe an abstract campaign trumps one
of crocodile tears and desperate lovers
-- & maybe the world will bring back the dollar when
it sees us thinking clear
-- & maybe 100 years in an abstracter war isn't
the quagmire I'm looking for
(-- & maybe those young doomed transplants sink in
the quagmire you're looking for)
-- & he's someone I'll refuse
to regret electing if we don't
neglect electing him.

Now You Know Where I Stand. & Take Your Pick.
Democracy's a fruit I can't quite taste
But you know your ballot could be the drop
That carves the weakened cliff of expectation.

Salt lick quartz

2008-01-21T17:30:00.001-08:00

Salt lick quartz, a long translucent sip of mountain, I am
speechless in your crags. A mile away I
know the sea is roaring. The rain
attacks me even here.

Little hails of ice melt into your peaks and
shimmy down your slides. My mouth
tastes of oranges and strange white
powders. Too many teeth in
one crushed mouth.

The shine in you imagines some
petrified fairy, preserved in you like preformed amber,
pointed toes poised pointed wings flick'ring.
And who's to say impossible in a
once-world where metals melted and
crystals were unformed crystal?

Sometimes

2008-01-18T23:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes work will exist.

(Being in high school is hard work, thought the cactus.)

(It looked out the window at the street and saw the cars honking by. It concentrated very hard on its spines and tried to gain sensation in them. The cactus had a primitive but persistent belief that if it could gain more sensation in its spines it would be able to move around.)

(The cactus sneezed. Bug, thought the cactus.)

(I am sick from all the hard work I am doing to fit in in high school, thought the cactus. I wish I could just be in college already. I am sick because I am trying to maintain a set of difficult friends while still acheiving enough to get accepted into Johns Hopkins University.)

(The cactus had a dream, a goal. The dream, the goal was to go to Johns Hopkins University and study astrophysics with a minor in mechanical engineering. The cactus loved to gaze at the stars alone at night.)

(It watched the sun set. There were beautiful fragile tinted clouds in the sky. The cactus watched for stars emerging in the atmosphere. An ambulance honked by and the lights from the ambulance disrupted the pretty scene a little. The cactus felt disappointed in its community.)

Sometimes a community will exist.

in the dark

2008-01-06T01:36:00.000-08:00

.twist the sssss
pine. .sus
pense. ?yeah? .i
think so.
.twissss
t.

.bug-eyes of abaddon lumi
nescent in half cloned dark.
.wiggle hairs.
.cloven a
scent.

.yer teeth sharp in the
back of yer mouth. ?yeah? .i
think so.
.ssnip.

(step)
((step))
(((step in the dark)))
((((in the dark))))

in the dark

!!pungent crack of
yellow marrow!!

Throw Down Yer Books And Run
Give Up Yer Guns

saul bellow

2008-01-03T15:50:00.001-08:00

i am struggling through a novel by saul bellow

the novel is thick

it weaves abstraction through realism

the dialogue serves to further the plot

the main character is an asshole

an abstract asshole

the only thing i like about the novel is when adjectives are listed without commas

are all saul bellow novels like this

please tell me

thank you

The Eternal Stranger

2008-01-02T21:49:00.000-08:00

Dawn-bringer, bearer-of-morning-light, his
Cytherean masculinity thirty million miles away
is echoed here
in the undercurrent of doubt,
in the questioning of love,
in what distances you from me...

And this poem could never get nowhere
because neither of us really believe
in that neverending quarrel between good and evil.

Dawn-bringer.
Maybe after all
both sides are bright.

In different light.

hair

2007-12-17T19:43:00.000-08:00

Underneath my bed I have hidden a chest.

The chest is filled with the curls of my relatives.

There are the curls of my sons.

There are the curls of my nephews.

There are the curls of my cousins.

There are the curls of my granddaughter.

They are carefully clipped curls and they are all almost a uniform color of brown.

Dark brown like the wood of the chest.

I cannot tell the different curls apart sometimes.

They all lie together entangled in some intimate embrace of hair.

They smell clean.

I clip them from my relatives after washing their hair.

I am good at cutting the hair of my relatives.

Their locks close cut hug their round heads.

Their doe brown eyes framed with long lashes.

Their eyes are wise.

But their eyes grow duller with age.

The brilliance of childhood is lost with age.

I have preserved their curls from babyhood.

Those hairs contain wisdom.

When I die I would like to be burned in a pyre made of the curls of my relatives.

I would like to burn in an implosion of that wisdom.

The stink will hover miles.

poem on a shiny silver gum wrapper

2007-12-07T19:37:00.000-08:00

gray desolate days the
clock running slower than
swirls of lazy sweet potato water in your plastic stained
bowl your red handled
paintbrush is sodden with
the wetness echoes of
color

somber tinted air with
out perfume sprays
the long eyelashes of ex
haustion our
symptoms

december, month of
dulled attempts at
summer's cheer, Xmas
Xmas is almost here, but
our cars are dusty with
winter.

sunset indoors

2007-10-28T18:29:00.000-07:00

His mouth is sicky red, cheeks flushed and riding high, skinny nipples twice dotting his chest. Sweaty curls crest his forehead above the fine fragile brow. He has fever.

I look at him detached. He was never my lover. There is a long ugly scar along his goosebumped hip from some internal external war now encased in past. There are streaks of pen on my hands from writing letters that do not mention his name. Outside the sun is gorgeous setting, colors I have no name for, fire-golden linings. I am in this chipped room with a stranger.

Burroughs's junkies were less than human. Is he? His veins punctured, teeth gritted against that overwhelming morphine need. Pale lines on his fingers where heavy rings once nestled. He'd punch the Man in the jaw with them, break teeth, until their opium worth trumped revolution. The family crest pawned.

One of his toes is a stump of infection, nailless and blind. Even his feet pitted with injection welts. I cat's-cradle my hands and look at the gray blanket he lumped off. I keep my eyes off his shoulder skin pulled tight.

Some tall innocent puts his tan hand on my back and I shudder. "You don't need to stay," he says, surfer-white teeth and gleaming generous muscles in his neck, the scent of outside gloam on his tailored wool coat. "You don't owe him anything."

I nod, not sure what I mean. We all owe him everything, this dying man-boy boy-man propelled and floating through delusion, his blood running fast to catch up, his heartbeat thrumming like a mouse's. A bubble stretching and popping in the corner of the thin red mouth.

"It's nothing to do with you," says the pumpkin-grinning outdoorsman.

I twist my fingers. I stand my ground.

the weather

2007-10-22T23:42:00.001-07:00

It is late.

I cannot sleep.

I am thinking of my friends and the wildfires.

I am thinking of my friends in Southern California and the rage-roaring wildfires subsuming and exhuming their homes, the anti-flood, no salvation on a rooftop no more.

I am thinking of my friends' clocks and calendars and yellow high heels melting in blaze.

I am thinking of their acrylics and temperas and long handwritten pages sparking in puddles of oil and sprinkle-crumbs of char.

I am thinking of fleeing in a hot bright night gunning up the car quick and running.

I do not know fire.

I know the forgiving fog and blue everchanging water of the bay, but I do not know fire.

I do not know the right way to imagine it.

I imagine my fire like the fire in film, car explosions and Gone With the Wind.

I live by the bay but the air is hot and stagnant with eight-minute sun.

I live by the bay but today the air was hot and stagnant with eight-minute sun.

The smoke drifts up a little.

The sun through the magnifying glass that is our ozone layer.

In late October.

Winter can't make up its mind anymore.

Seasons are crossdressing and giggling in poison lipstick.

Cigarettes in the Refrigerator

2007-10-11T21:44:00.000-07:00

My eyes are crusty. I close them. I open them. They are crusty and everything is a little freckled. My bare skin is freckled through my eyes. I am naked sitting on my couch and the maroon lines of the couch are pressing into my skin and the downy hairs on my skin. There is a line of dark stubbly hair traveling from my navel to my crotch. My navel is chafed. I look at my navel and at my hollowing stomach. I have not eaten in several days. I look at my legs. My thighs are covered in dark hairs that stand out against my pale skin.

There is stubble on my face and my jaw. I lick my lips and I extend my tongue to feel the sharp dark hairs cultivating on my upper lip. There is similar hair all down my jaw. I get up and walk and shake a little. Light shines. It is between morning and afternoon. I stand in front of my refrigerator and stare at my refrigerator. My refrigerator is not magnetic. It is a shitty kind of refrigerator that is not magnetic, and whenever I look at it a childhood memory is stabbed in the ass cheek. I am saving up for a magnetic refrigerator but I keep forgetting to save up. I accidentally spend my allowances on rent, recreation, and food.

Out of habit, I swing open the door of my non-magnetic refrigerator. I have been doing this every thirty minutes or so for the past few days. There is no food inside my refrigerator. There is a mostly-full bottle of mustard and there is a mostly-full jar of mayonnaise and there is an unbranded packet of cigarettes. They aren't mine. Ted smokes when he wants to get drunk. He thinks there is nothing classier than an alcoholic who smokes. Ted wants badly to be good at mixing drinks, but he is shitty at it.

I look at the mustard, mayonnaise, and cigarettes. I let the cold air blow onto my face and nipples. The refrigerator hums loudly. It sort of buzzes. My body is cold. I think about eating but that makes me want to throw up. I shut the bare refrigerator door. I open it again and take out the packet of cigarettes. I shake out one cigarette and put the rest back in the refrigerator and shut the refrigerator door again.

I look at the cigarette. I am dizzy and lethargic. I leave the cigarette on the counter and go to the pantry and get out a bottle of wine. It takes me a few tries to open it and I almost give up but I get it in time. I take a swig and the bottle is very heavy and I almost drop it but I don't. The taste of the white wine goes to my head immediately. I feel like a sheet of paper. I run my hand along my upper arm and my upper arm is the temperature of marble. My skin is soft and goose-pimply and covered with fine down. Ted's arms are covered with wiry rusty hair and he has a raspy rusty beard. He secretly thinks it makes him seem more manly. Ted goes through phases of trying to hide his homosexuality. Right now he is convinced he is bisexual. He has gone on a cruise to meet women. Ted is secretly less aroused by women than I am. He thinks he can hide it, but he is wrong.

Thinking about Ted makes me feel feverish and I want to throw up again. Teaspoons of acrid bile slosh in my stomach. I feel like the bile is going to burn thruogh my stomach lining and up my esophagus and burn out my larynx and down into my lungs. The bile will explode in my lungs and splatter my lungs with acid and quickly burn through them. I need to soak up the bile in my stomach with white bread, but I have no white bread. I go to the drawer and get out a spoon and open the refrigerator door. I hold the jar of mayonnaise and unscrew the cap of the jar of mayonnaise and I scoop a spoonful of mayonnaise. I close the refrigerator door and then I eat the mayonnaise. The mustard is too acrid to eat.

Eating a spoonful of mayonnaise is like eating a liquefied tumor. The raw calories go to my head immediately and I feel them settle on top of the layer of white wine in my stomach. Jesus Christ. It is an infernal swamp in there. I lurch and hit my knee against a chair and my knee throbs but does not bruise. I want white bread badly. I lurch to the bedroom where the telephone used to be. I know my cellular phone is somewhere but I don't know where it is. I sit on the stained mattress and I pull at the fine dark hairs on my legs.

Enemy combatants

2007-09-22T23:43:00.000-07:00

Give me your tired, your poor and I'll grind them
under my toes. their hair blacker with blood, an
anointment. if they're beaten e-
nough they'll succumb to truth, that
terrorist trash they'll take my shit
and keep their mouths shut they'll
never tell 'cause they know no one cares no one pays
attention I'll make them talk I'll
make them fucking scream for mercy if I want,
over and over and over til the records

break, they're naked with their faith,
and bareness is now. let me humiliate
your boys and my boys. let me take.

he's in movies

2007-09-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

There was a man all in black. Ageless, blond, nose red with cold, hat cocked. The folds in his pants were crisp. He walked long and tall and lit upon a bench. He didn't look at the ocean, though it was sunset-blue and ripply gorgeous, a gift of ever-changing lights and motions. He didn't count the flaps of pelican wings, exhausting communication of flight, breathing only during the brief respites of gliding. He looked at his wrist.

He waited.

If he waited long enough George Clooney in a moustache would come up behind him and give him a mission. He was dressed like the kind of man that George Clooney would come up to. It was going to happen, it was fate. I trembled with wanting to go over and talk to him. I had goosebumps. I was wearing a long pink hippie jacket and I knew he would not take me seriously. I was not George Clooney in disguise. I was the opposite of what he was.

I looked at the pelicans and thought, "fuck, I already forgot my poem." I looked at the man again. He attracted me. Mystery.

I looked away again, at the contained self-reliance that was the sea, and then I looked at the clouds, golden spun. Eddies of angel motions, I thought with a feeling of epiphany. The breeze felt nice but smelled like rotten fish. I moved farther from the sea, and soon it shifted and began to smell like figs instead.

I looked back at the man. While I wasn't looking he had folded. His head in the hat slumped between his knees. "Shit," I thought. "Don't give up. George Clooney will still come for you." He was edging close to giving up. Or maybe just wanted to look like it. (In these situations George Clooney likes to wait until you get desperate and do something stupid before he saunters over. "Sorry, I was hijacked on the way, terrorists." "Some preteens wanted my autograph." George Clooney is full of excuses.) If the man had thought of this, he was probably playing it pretty clever. A master's hand. Black bishop. The man was still.

I was in sandals and pants that were too long. The hems of my pant legs were getting grimy. I looked at the man, all alone on the bench. I had been sitting on that same bench a while beforehand. I had picked up a rounded piece of yellow old insulation that had been on the ground and placed it onto the seat of the bench. I wondered what the man in black thought of the insulation. It looked a little bit like petrified wood, but it was soft and smelled strange, artificially clean. I wondered what the man would do if I went and sat next to him. Or stood behind him, George Clooney in disguise after all. "This is your mission." "Can I ask you a personal question-- why are you here in a black hat?" I couldn't remember the name of that actor from the old time movies who wore that kind of hat. It began with an H. Humphrey Bogart, that was who it was. "Why are you here in a Humphrey Bogart hat? Why are your creases so nice?" It could be that he had been expecting a date of less professional status, maybe some girl had stood him up, but I did not think that a girl would stand him up. The back of his neck, where the yellow-blond hair almost the color of the insulation met the paleness of his skin, looked very benign. I did not think he had a gun inside his black collared coat. He was probably not a mercenary. Probably he was the kind of man who worked with papers to find out who the moles were and which Russians could be trusted. Then again, if that were so why would he be sitting by the beach?

Figs in the air, wet ashes in my mouth. My ears were cold and I tried to pull up my collar. Wishing I had brought a scarf after all. Briefly I entertained the idea that the man was a sorcerer from another world, had conjured his way here for an important meeting and found himself the victim of a mix-up. Tragedy. I let this run through me only because I loved the word "sorcerer." (Though I would love it better were it spelled with two o's.) But the fancy of that theory spouted away without taking its time. I wondered how contrived it would seem if I went and sat beside him. There were two other benches, empty. Could I sit at another and still talk to him? I got the impression it was only George Clooney he wanted to hear from.

I stood shivering and watched him. He was like an origami swan. He was so uniform. "Next time, maybe," I told myself. "Maybe every day we'll be silent together like this. Until someday when he will tell me all of it."

He never seemed to see me. Looking in the wrong direction.

Poem for Clara

2007-08-12T23:37:00.000-07:00

In Paris we
screamed to see her, 17
49 and a hot bright
summer, we thought she
was a u
ni
corn the marvel with one horn
armored like a beast of the
...(k)night... they fed her
bread and hay and
examined her
nostrils with an air of
ex...cavation, the whole of
Europe entranced with this
blind tame creature
from someplace new and
exotic though she did
not smell of curry spices,
the one proof of a world bigger
than ours, worth saving
weeks of payment to see with out
own blind eyes.

Kill the Carrier

2007-06-28T23:06:00.000-07:00

What could you do?
The ring was sweat and glory,
joy in your muscles, all strength and
testosterone, knowing you looked
a fool, not caring, because you could
wrestle him into submission.
But home was
all tight and quiet.
The boy
wouldn’t talk
(he would never follow in your armsteps,
you knew it, there was no hope--
all Nancy’s fault).
Your bed
was off-limits; she
relegated you to the couch
unless you had just won a fight, or if
the boy had had a good day.
Your blood ran fast and
furious. You knew
you would regret it, but
you did it anyway, clouded by
a desperate rage.
No blood, no gore. But their expressions
haunted you for hours, and so you
hung
by your own weights.

On the off chance anybody's interested in what I've been doing all June

2007-06-24T02:08:00.001-07:00

Well, I've been writing a screenplay.
And it's been fun.
And now I'm done with it! (20,029 words, according to the site's official word counter.)
You can read it here, if you're interested.
Happy June!

In the Bathroom

2007-06-19T02:18:00.000-07:00

“What are you doing?”

She felt a little insane.

“Jenna, are you nuts? Answer me! Jenna?”

She leaned against the bathroom door, the mirror pressing into her back, and listened to Olivia, frustrated as hell on the other side.

“Jenna, unlock the door.”

She wouldn’t do it. She would just sit there forever, until Olivia went away, and then maybe run to her room and sit naked cross-legged on the bed and pretend nothing had ever happened. She would burrow under her comforter and suffocate half to death, maybe knock herself out in the stifling heat, although outside it was December. Create her own deadly summer under the covers.

“Jenna? Jenna? Have you fallen asleep in there? For fuck’s sake, Jenna.”

She looked at her toes, wiggled them.

“Okay, Jenna, I’m going to come back in an hour and you better be out of there, okay? I want to watch a movie with you. We got some good ones at Blockbuster’s, me and Katherine, I mean.”

There was a pause, but she knew Olivia hadn’t gone anywhere. She could sense her one-hundred-and-forty-pound prescence breathing behind the door.

“Brian wants to come over and watch a movie with us if you’re okay with that.”

Brian-- oh, Brian! Too jovial, too wide-mouthed, too disgusting when he put his hands around Olivia and squeezed.

“Okay, Jenna, I’m going to go make some calls, I’ll be in the living room. Okay?”

Another pause in which she held her breath, held still as anything, until she heard footsteps padding away, quietly, oh, finally! She wanted badly to scream, but she knew Olivia would hear. She was so confined here. She wanted to climb somehow out of the little screened window and run, run, run away with branches scraping her thighs badly. She would step on every sharp thing on the way, of course, and then she would make it to the highway and lie there just on the side of the road and feel the wind of each car rush past her, listen to the thrumming of wheels on the concrete, listen to the honking whenever somebody spotted her, just a moonlit body splayed triumphantly on the beautiful ground. That would be wonderful.

Olivia was really gone. Good. Jenna pulled herself up, holding onto the doorknob, and stared at her reflection critically. She needed to lose about six pounds. She could see stretch marks on her hips. And was that another sore on her mouth? how could she ever go outside again until that thing went away? Her life was so small, so small, so insignificant, and here she was, right now, doing nothing with it, standing alone in her bathroom with the door locked by herself looking at her own body. Children were starving to death right now-- men were dropping by the dozens in war zones-- all her high school friends were out partying, getting drunk and having casual sex, the way they had all promised each other they would do once they graduated. And here she was, twenty, a college dropout, living with a couple of more successful friends. If she were to die right now, nobody would care. Maybe her mother would care, but she had Isaac. It wasn’t like Jenna was going to carry on the family name or anything.

Her head felt tight with boredom. She wondered if anyone had died of that. Probably; people had died of most everything. She closed her eyes and stretched up and thought that she would never do anything worthwhile in her life. The realization that right now she was doing nothing, nothing at all, was so frustrating. Dimly, she could hear Olivia in the other room talking softly on the telephone. Olivia was social networking. Jenna was doing nothing!

She spotted an electric razor (Brian’s!) on the shelf over the sink and grabbed it. She didn’t even need to shave, she had done that yesterday, in a better mood. But she felt like destroying. Maybe if-- but she couldn’t-- well, you know what, fuck it.

She knew she would regret it, but, like a Jeep in drive pushed down a mountain, there was no stopping it now. Trepidation boiled in her stomach. At least it was a feeling.

She took the razor to her head.

Turned it on.

Gioventù

2007-05-12T16:26:00.000-07:00

Thumbing from your friends, you
Nothing-legs child of bums and guns, you
Never knew when you were wanted.
Peach-bullets settled in your lungs,
Dapper chestnuts in your cheeks,
Renal cortex scar-pitted, you were
An ovelty for autopsists.
Sleeves too wide.
You marched before shadows and
Stared cockeyed at Communists.
You led the Kennel Club and
Pissed in Eddie's boot; your
Pockets were navels and your brain stem was nervous.
Lined up in wince-rows.
You never read those papers. You
Never jawed those letters.

Machine of Death: Angelina Jolie

2007-05-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

http://machineofdeath.net

Brad called. "Have you seen the paper?"

"No," she said, yawning. The baby had been crying all night and she was tired out. Brad was off shooting a movie in Monterey, and the nanny had gone to a wedding and Angelina had decided to stay (counteracting the Babel their lives might have turned into). "Is there something about us?"

"Front-page news. Go look."

"Tell me what it is, babe." It was cold out.

"I have to go," he said, too quickly. "Love you."

That intrigued her, though it made her stomach drop sharply too. What had the papers found this time? Pictures from Hugh's party last weekend? Oh, God. She put on a pair of slippers, shuffled down the stairs and out the door.

She saw it immediately and it gave her the kind of chills you only got when the news was completely unexpected. Plastered across the front page (of the Times, for Pete's sake) in huge block letters: MINNESOTA MAN'S FATE: DEATH BY ANGELINA JOLIE.

"Holy shit," she whispered, shook out the paper, stood there in the mud and crisp cold and read the whole article, back-page and all. A picture of her covered half the page, of course, looking less than her best in black and white. They never printed the pictures Angie really liked. And the article was about a thirty-six-year-old man named Jonas Singh who had taken that new blood test and gotten his result, and that result was "ANGELINA JOLIE." The mugshot of him showed a brown-skinned, white-toothed, handsome man, and he was quoted as saying, "At first I was shocked, then I was confused, and then I accepted it and got kind of excited. Death by Angelina Jolie is definitely an interesting way to die, and I admire her. I'm looking forward to finding out what it really means." He was married with a baby, worked as a photojournalist for his local paper, and had served a year in Iraq.

She had to go inside and sit down. The baby was sleeping, thank God, and so were the other kids. Good kids, really, they made her days. The paper was burning a hole in her hand. She had to call Brad right now. (God, next thing they were going to get quotes from Jennifer Aniston, Jesus, and Billy Bob and Jenny and Jonny and everyone, and they were going to be calling her and Brad all the time.) She pressed her fingers to her temples, inhaled and exhaled. She needed a smoke badly.

She speed-dialed his number. "Brad?"

"You read it," he stated. He was perceptive like that, one of his more charming traits.

"They didn't call, did they? Before they published it."

"Didn't call me," he said. "He's a photojournalist, so it probably got to the paper first. You know how some states are starting to pass laws that for certain jobs you have to have it done and make it available to your employer?" The rationality behind this was that your death might involve your work and then your employer was technically responsible-- if Jonas Singh had been fated to die in a plane crash, say, his boss might prohibit his flying anywhere for work. Angelina herself refused to take the test, not wanting to know. Brad had been dared by George Clooney (HEART FAILURE) to take it, had taken it drunk a month ago, and had triumphantly gotten NATURAL CAUSES. "That could mean anything," Angelina had warned him, more than a little jealous, but he had shrugged that off with the shit-eating grin of a man who knew he was lucky.

"Christ," she said in a small voice, "how am I going to kill this guy? I don't understand. What does that even mean?"

"I have no idea, Angie." He sounded impatient. Well, fuck that; he was the one who had brought it up; who cared about his movie, she was his wife.

"Brad..."

"Look, hon, can I call you back?"

What a bastard. Just because he had nothing to worry about, NATURAL CAUSES, he couldn't care less that the woman he called "love of my life" was practically accused of murder? She wanted to slam the phone down, but it was cordless and she had to satisfy herself with pushing a button instead-- poor substitute.

By the next morning, when the nanny came back, Angelina was a wreck. The kids had been darling as usual, but they were little and high-maintenance. The baby, croupy, had wailed all night, and just to top it all off, the phone had rung all night long. When Angelina had turned her cell on, she had 42 new messages: all family, friends, and lawyers. She ended up unplugging the landline and vomiting at quarter to two in the morning. Of course this had to happen when Brad was upstate. When else? She had not slept a wink that night. She kept seeing the young Indian man's face, imagining him with his wife and baby. And then she kept seeing the headlines spin out like in a movie, all about her. God, if she had to get the spotlight in the real, non-tabloid news, couldn't it have been about all her work in third-world countries?

Brad called again. "Good news. They're gonna let me come down here for a couple days, 'til Monday."

"Thank you," she said, close to tears. "Oh God. Thank you, Brad."

"I'll see you in a couple hours, 'kay?" She heard him snap his phone shut and called up his wonderful face, those soulful eyes. She wondered if he had shaved since last week. She wanted to suck his cock on the kitchen tiles.

One of the kids wandered into the room, barefoot, sucking his thumb, the crux of angeli. Angelina picked him up and kissed his cheek, then let him down again to wander off, thinking about Jonas Singh picking up his baby and kissing its cheek. If this was a ploy to get her attention, like that guy who had shot a president to get Jodie Foster to notice him... well, it sure was fucking working. At least the nanny, red-cheeked and blessed with a thick Spanish accent, was restoring order beautifully quickly. Angelina had to hand it to Rosa, she knew what she was doing. Woman deserved every penny she got. The kids loved her.

She realized she was hungry; for some reason that had slipped her mind. She got up from the too-comfortable couch and got a carton of Ben & Jerry's out of the freezer (mint chip). Married women didn't have to watch their weight; on the other hand, she knew if she gained half a pound the world would start wondering out loud if it was a "baby bump." She'd seen that humiliation happen to better women. Sighing, she returned the ice cream to its rightful place.

Surely Jonas Singh was telling the truth. Things like this could be verified. They had to be verified if the Times had printed it. They could have held the guy down, tried his blood again. The machine always gave the same prediction. What if he'd used someone else's blood? (But did it really matter? After all, that meant someone was going to be killed by ANGELINA JOLIE, anyway.)

She found herself wanting to contact him-- "but wait," she said aloud, "that would just raise the chances of my killing him." But then after all, wasn't that unavoidable? The machine had never yet been wrong.

"Fuck it," she said, not wanting to think through this puzzle, this maze of red tape. She wished Brad was home right now so they could go lie in bed like people in a movie and talk it out, his hands behind his head, downy armpit hair tickly, and she would probably cry on him, like a movie, and in the end there would be a cut to the next scene, and Jonas Singh would probably be biking down a street in the early-morning-shooting sunlight.

How am I going to kill him? Jesus, how is it going to happen? She sank into the too-comfortable couch and closed her eyes. Is this some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, or would it have happened even if I'd never heard of him? She was reminded of Kirsten Dunst's apparent fate: OEDIPAL. That was all the machine had told her, and when Angelina had first heard that it had made her laugh. Apparently it had driven Kirsten crazy.

She wondered what her own fate was. Maybe now she would have to have the test done. Maybe it would say JONAS SINGH and that would shut everyone up. She doubted that, though; the machine seemed to be kind of a smartass to Angelina. "NATURAL CAUSES," yeah right. She hadn't wanted Brad to do it, hadn't wanted to be reminded of their mortality, even if the cause of death seemed innocuous enough. The whole idea of the machine was really kind of annoying, made her feel worried and queasy. She didn't like to think about death.

She thought about checking her e-mail and knew immediately that there would be over two hundred messages, and those only from her friends. Nevertheless, she turned on her Mac and logged in.

She checked her old e-mail address, the one she hadn't used in five years, first, because of a vague half-baked idea that her father would have written something. He hadn't, of course, and though she was over that she felt a distinct anger. She knew he had pored over the article, probably carefully with his reading glasses on, and she knew he wanted to say something to her about it but he wouldn't because of the stupid feud. Damn it. It just pissed her off was all. She wished Brad was back already. She wanted to call him, but probably he was on the plane. She hoped he was on the plane. She had suspected, lately, that he was screwing around on her, but she didn't want to think about it. Probably that was unfounded anyway, probably she was just being paranoid like always. Jesus, she couldn't think straight. She pushed herself up and got up, intending to take a long hot shower. She didn't want to see anyone or talk to anyone, but, at the same time, she kind of did.

Mostly she just wanted to talk to Brad. Or maybe her brother. Doubtless her brother had called, but she had unplugged the phone, and Angelina was not planning to return any calls.

She felt eyes boring at her through the thick curtains and knew it was the paparazzi, stationed out there waiting for any sign of movement. Jesus Christ, like she needed this in her life right now. She needed a bodyguard. She needed Brad, really, but she knew if she thought about him too much he would smell the desperation on her when he kissed her hello, and he would think she was a needy whiner. He had practically said as much about one of his exes once, and she had never forgotten it.

She walked up the stairs. The house was oddly quiet (but then it was very well insulated). She trusted Rosa with the kids; probably they were all in the playroom. Her nerves felt scraped and raw. She wondered if she had killed Jonas Singh already, somehow, without knowing it. Sometime last night, guilt had snuck onto her shoulders and was now wrapped around her snugly like a shawl. It was not going to go away soon. Maybe not ever. Oh, God.

Passing through their luxurious bedroom on the way to the shower (how much time had been spent in that bed? hours upon hours, but somehow not nearly enough), she paused and turned on the TV (high-def). She had been almost expecting it, but the shock slammed into her like a brick wall anyway when she saw her own face on the screen, an announcer glibly yammering behind it. "Minnesota photojournalist and war vet Jonas Singh got a shocker last week when he took the obligated death test and his paper said he was fated to die by ANGELINA JOLIE. After getting the same result four times, Singh, though utterly bewildered, seems to be dealing well with this news.

"The same cannot necessarily be said for Ms. Jolie, however. She has returned no calls and has not left the house since last night." The picture switched to a shot from outside Angelina's house, and with another jolt she realized it was live, it was being filmed right now. Her heart twitched. Jesus! She felt more trapped than she had felt in years, she wanted to flee, she wanted to die. Instead, she punched the TV off and stepped under the shower, shedding her clothes only after they were already sodden, turning the knob to the scalding side. She closed her eyes and felt the water pound her. She wanted to forget everything, to turn back the clock and live in blissful ignorance, to move to, maybe, Mongolia, where no one knew who she was. A nice place to raise kids, she'd thought when she saw the movie about the cute little children, and there was so much grass, a sea of prairie. She had taken her fame well, she thought, but this was too much. This wasn't happening to anybody else. It really wasn't fair, damn it. Why her? Why this, why now? Why hadn't the machine given Jonas Singh something vaguer? She wondered again what her own fate was, if she should take the test. Maybe it would clear this up somehow. She imagined talking to Brad about it, and she knew he would want her to: ever since he'd done it he had been trying to convince her to do it too. Well hell, maybe she would, maybe she would.

She stood there with her eyes closed, feeling her skin wrinkle, for a long time. She was roused from the trance only when she heard a door bang. There was only one person with a key to this house that banged doors. She slammed the water off, peeked out past the curtain, feeling the sudden cold on her skin.

"Brad?"

He didn't answer, but she heard the TV on. That was typical of Brad too. Whenever he walked into a room he had to flip on the TV, just in case. When he was gone the house was a thousand times quieter, in spite of all the kids. She wrapped herself in her wilted robe and ventured out into the bedroom, feet soaking into the plush wine-colored carpeting. "Brad?"

He looked up fast like he had been caught doing something he shouldn't have been doing. Then, just as quickly, his face softened. "Angie, baby." He went up to her, slim-waisted and looking delicious, and kissed her searchingly. "You're all wet, hon," he said when they broke apart.

She looked up at him, getting that dreamy movie-feeling she often got being with Brad, because she had first seen him on a screen, and she felt her eyes starting to water. "Brad, what am I going to do? What am I going to do about this?" She was so glad he was here; she felt the core of her melting with that gladness. "Did you see the paparazzi outside?"

He rolled his eyes and sighed. "Had to fight my way through em. It was terrible."

"Our house was on the TV, for Christ's sake. I saw it live. This is a fucking nightmare, Brad--" And now she really was crying, sobbing onto the hard muscles of his shoulder, like she was going to hack out a lung onto his plane-wrinkled button-up shirt, like she was going to spit up the way the baby did. He held her like a good husband, and he smelled wonderful, and that in itself made her feel a hundred times better.

"Shh. Hey, hey, Angie, listen, we're gonna work this out, okay? We can work this out. We can talk to this Indian guy--"

Angelina wailed something unintelligible.

"Hang on, Angie. Come on. Let's go make you something to drink."

Over blended margaritas, they discussed it.

Brad told her there was nothing they could do really, that there was no way of figuring out how she would be the cause of his death, how she would probably not be at fault, and how she should refuse to be interviewed. He thought Jonas Singh was telling the truth, and he thought maybe Angelina should meet him. He thought Jonas Singh was a pretty weird name, and he thought Angelina should take the blood test.

"Do you think it'll make a difference to the public?"

"Yes," he said with his honest face on, and that had her mostly convinced.

"Okay, fuck it, let's get it over with. Call up Dr. Faulkner."

"You want it done right now?"

She shrugged. She rubbed her eye and black came off on her finger: her mascara had run. "Whatever."

"This is really bugging you, isn't it?"

"Has anything like this ever happened to anyone before?" She was doing her best to keep control over herself, but it wasn't easy. Her hands were shaking.

"I... I don't--"

"Well, not to anyone as famous as I am, that's for sure," she snapped. "And I can tell you this, Brad, it blows. It fucking blows."

He poured her another drink.

"I'm afraid," she confessed, "that when I try and meet him he'll just die, I'll kill him somehow by accident. I don't want to ever meet him, really. But then, I guess I do."

Brad cleared his throat. "I'll call Dr. Faulkner."

Dr. Faulkner was a wiry man with a long bulbous nose and scrappy gray facial hair. He was the kind of man who looked like he knew what he was doing. He took Angelina's blood without comment, although his lips were pressed tightly together as though he was holding something back. Well, no surprise there.

The test was much quicker than she had thought it would be. Dr. Faulkner put the vial of blood into a slot in the machine, it made some clicky rattly machine noises, and within three minutes a slip of paper had slid out. Dr. Faulkner handed it to her face down, not looking, clearly a practiced hand.

Brad was there, his arm around her shoulder. "Do you want to look?" he asked her softly. She nodded, feeling like she couldn't breathe, flashing back to the pregnancy tests she'd taken several times, getting the same sort of tense important feeling.

She turned the paper, though her hands were shaking, and what she read was disappointingly anticlimactic. This was what her life was leading to?

"INFLUENZA, CAUSED BY RUPTURED SPLEEN"?

Dr. Faulkner was standing there trying his best not to look curious. Feeling pity, Angelina read it to him. "What do you think?"

"That's one of the more specific ones," he said after a moment, raising his tufty eyebrows. "And you know it could be years in between the rupture and the flu. Really, not such a bad prognosis."

She thought of Brad's again, NATURAL CAUSES, and that shit-eating smile he'd worn. Ruptured spleen, and flu. That didn't sound great, but it didn't sound so awful.

(Did it have anything to do with Jonas Singh? She had no idea. His name was already growing infamous in her mind.)

She looked at Brad and he kissed her neck. "I'm proud of you," he said, and her heart filled up. She loved that she had married the kind of man who knew she needed to hear that. She loved him wholly, right then, despite everything.

Right then, despite everything, it seemed that things would turn out okay.

After a few weeks, the news died down. Several actresses had babies and several couples broke up, and Patrick Dempsey, it turned out, was fated to die of AIDS, and everyone just forgot about Angelina and Jonas Singh.

Everyone but Angelina and Jonas Singh.

But she lived her life as best she could. She thought of him almost every day, but after a few months she could sometimes forget about him for a whole weekend. The kids were growing, and they were planning to adopt another one, and Brad finished his Monterey movie and was home for a while, and that was nice.

In August they decided to go to Disneyland, not so far from their home, after all. (Disney World was another story. Neither of them really wanted to fly to Florida with all the kids in tow, not yet.) They packed everybody into the van, Rosa too, and Angelina took the wheel, sunglasses on. It was a nice day for August, very hot.

She stopped at a red light almost halfway there. Brad punched at the radio, changing the station to some kind of reggaeton. One of the boys started crying, and Rosa hushed him. They had thought to bring Popsicles for the drive, and Brad had remembered a cooler, and so that had been lucky.

The light turned green and Angelina tapped the gas. At the same time, someone in front of her, facing the other direction, in the other lane, revved out, and lost his control somehow-- later Rosa said she had seen a duck in the road, but another witness reported the man had been on his cell phone-- and he weaved into the lane she was driving into. Before Angelina could even think, his little white Volvo had smashed straight into the front of the van. The glass smashed, the car made a sickly crunch, and the airbags puffed out. The children started screaming. Angelina felt a sharp terrible pain in her side, but not for long, because it wasn't long until she blacked out.

She came to knowing everything. When the doctor approached her, she said calmly, despite the whistling pain in the side of her chest, "The other man was Jonas Singh, wasn't he? Is he dead?"

"No," said the doctor, looking a little taken aback. "Not yet, at least. He's badly injured, in critical condition. It wasn't your fault, everyone corroborates that."

"My family, Rosa? How are they?"

"They're fine. Your husband's legs were broken, but he's in stable condition. Everyone who was sitting in the back doesn't have anything worse than cuts and bruises. You're a very lucky family."

"And me, how am I hurt?" But she knew the answer to that one already.

"You have whiplash and your arm's fractured, and your spleen's been ruptured. But you came out pretty well. You've been getting a lot of phone calls, Mrs. Jolie."

Angelina waved them off. "Thank you, doctor," she said. She felt, oddly, less upset than she'd thought she would; she felt like a crucial puzzle piece had just clicked into place. She wanted to go and talk to poor Jonas Singh before he died; hopefully he would hang on a few more days. Right now she was beginning to be really aware of her pain: a stinging in her neck, a sharp throbbing ache in her arm, and of course that odd leaky whistle in her side. That had to be the spleen, of course.

Now all she had to do was wait for the flu and live out her life.

malnutrition, Tom Hanks, myspace, violinist, battle axe, lactation, billboard!

2007-04-29T00:46:00.000-07:00

The violinist was beautiful.

Ivan noticed this passively, just another thing to add to his list of what was in the world. "Beautiful violinist playing Beethoven." He rubbed his hands together in the dark of the concert hall, fought the urge to crack his knuckles. The man next to him was roiling and fat, breathing heavily and ogling the performer through a pair of opera glasses. On his other side was the flight of stairs, dimly lit from below. He wondered if there were any cripples in the front row. Probably they always had to pay extra because they couldn't climb the stairs, another point of unfairness in the life of an already disadvantaged person.

"I could be watching this woman play on YouTube," he thought vaguely. "I could watch thirty seconds of her on the little video, and then switch to my other open window, which would be my myspace account, and look at Karen's page and the pictures of her licking bottles of tequila. Instead I am at a real concert, in a real concert hall, watching a beautiful violinist solo live." The man next to him shifted a little; Ivan's arm was on the armrest and he felt the man's fat squick against him. He wasn't sure if he would have preferred to stay at home.

She played a last, lingering note, then took the instrument off her shoulder and bowed a little. The audience applauded thunderously; Ivan clapped, too, his palms damp. He pressed the button on his watch that turned on the light. It was nine-oh-eight. "I am sitting in a concert hall next to a fat man," Ivan thought, "while in Sudan children are dying of malnutrition." He had never been to Africa, but Karen had, and she had taken hundreds of pictures on her digital camera. She had called it "a trip" and "totally recalibrating." If Ivan had been home, he would have gone to Karen's flickr page and looked at some of the pictures, skinny beautiful children with bright eyes and shaven heads. She had gone to Africa more as a tourist than as a helper. Ivan couldn't blame her. He didn't really want to work, either.

The violinist was playing again. Ivan watched her appreciatively, watched the emotion in her bowing limbs, the shiny way her black hair hung, the flawlessness of her smooth Asian face, the speckles of light against her modest black outfit. He tried to imagine sleeping with her and couldn't. She was too professional. He could see himself sitting with her at the cafeteria instead. She would drink white tea and stir it with her left hand while talking dynamically of how the music felt to her, how long she had been training, how she felt in front of a crowd. And then she would ask, "Well, and what about you?"

Ivan wouldn't really know what to say to a professional Asian violinist. He stroked his little goatee and thought, "This makes me look even more like a college student." He thought, "I am a textbook college student." He was studying biology, writing his thesis on mammalian lactation. He tried to imagine himself telling the violinist that he was writing a thesis on mammalian lactation and shied away from the thought. "I'm not very impressive," he thought. "Not in this day and age."

The music grew louder, more frenetic. It made Ivan picture Vikings and pirates. He tried to place himself into the scene and discovered that as a Viking he would have been one of the slaves who rowed the dragon boats. (Was that how Vikings worked? Ivan couldn't really remember.) He could see the violinist being one of the military commanders, directing all the ruddy men who ran around waving weapons and screaming. He could see her hoisting up a battle axe triumphantly with her bowing hand and shouting, "Hail Valhalla!" (Ivan doubted he was getting Vikings right. Patrick was studying history, Patrick would know.) The lead pirate would look like Tom Hanks with a beard, disarmingly average, but then he would kick ass with a sword. He would talk more like that heroic astronaut guy than Forrest Gump, and he would swig rum constantly. Ivan grinned a little, liking this picture.

The fat man next to him grunted a little. "Pig," Ivan thought and then wondered why he had thought that. He tried hard not to hate fat people just because they were fat. It wasn't easy, because they were unattractive and seemed lazy and stupid, but Ivan knew it was wrong to assume that. "Some of my best friends are fat people," he thought wryly, but it was true. Karen weighed 254. He always thought of her when he thought of fat people, because she had mixed up his prejudices. She was smart and interesting and they talked a lot. They had slept together once, drunk, and Ivan didn't remember much of it although he knew at the time he had wanted to remember everything, knowing he would never sleep with a fat girl again. "You were good," Karen told him that Tuesday when he had asked her about it, and he had felt gratified.

The violinist stopped again. More thunderous applause; Ivan clapped hard. "Hail Valhalla," he thought. Someone, a shadow, hurried down the stairs past Ivan, and he caught a whiff of some indeterminate kind of perfume or cologne. He couldn't really tell the difference, something he had never told anyone, always feeling vaguely ashamed of that inability. "That person has to pee," he thought, and it made his own bladder twinge in sympathy.

The violinist cleared her throat; the sound, miked, startled him. "Um, I'm just going to play one more. This, uh, this is a piece I wrote when I was on the train in Europe, to perform in Germany," she said. Her voice was deeper than Ivan had thought it would be; he wasn't sure his cafeteria projection washed after all. He could no longer imagine her, enthusiastic, saying things like "I was trying to get a teacher, and then, as if God had sent it, I saw an ad that was exactly what I was looking for, right there on the billboard!" Instead he saw her, faltering, taking intermittent sips of the tea, saying, "The people in Germany were, um, very nice, but they kept offering me beer and I just couldn't drink it. You know? Have you ever been?"

He rather liked this second violinist-self better. Ivan liked doubting people; they were less intimidating. He still couldn't imagine sleeping with her, though. He tried again and failed again.

The fat man coughed, once, kind of politely, quick before the song began, so as not to interrupt. Ivan felt a surge of quick, impermanent affection toward him. "This man and I are here together," he thought. He wondered why the fat man was here. Ivan was here because he had seen a picture of the violinist looking beautiful and a good pre-review in the paper. And the concert only cost seven dollars. He thought, "After she does this one, I'll go out and buy a soda."

The violinist began to play. Ivan closed his eyes, then opened them again. He liked looking at her, liked watching the light play over her shiny black hair and clothes. As the song progressed (quick, light, rather impressive), he tried to imagine scenes of a train going to Germany. He could, sort of, because she'd said it. He wondered if he would have thought of that if she hadn't brought it up. There was no way of knowing.

The song was over too quickly, and then there was more applause, even more thunderous; a few people whistled, and everyone stood up and clapped a standing ovation. Cooperatively, Ivan stood too, clapped too. He thought, "I think I'm going to buy a brownie too."

The bugs

2007-04-23T17:43:00.000-07:00

It's a sunny afternoon in late April and I decide to go for a walk. Nothing major, maybe clatter down the street and trudge back up again, maybe lie in the grass a little, maybe, if it's warm enough, take off all my clothes and pretend some Pan is peeping.

So I let myself out the door and down the asphalt road. Some cars drive by and it's awkward; my dog, ancient and deaf, hobbles past and doesn't hear my call, but the man in the truck does, I think. I shake the thought out and walk back up the road. I'm out of shape, and my hamstrings groan, and I start breathing heavily from the mouth.

When I make it back to my yard I collapse onto the grass, fragrant and flowering, panting, and close my eyes. When my heart rate's dropped a little I crack them open. Lately I've noticed how my vision focuses on things that move, and I let myself enjoy this: my eyes sharpen and show me a dynamic ladybug, large and spotted, climbing up a blade of grass maybe three inches from my head. I watch it a little, appreciative. If there's any bug I find pleasing it's that one.

Suddenly I feel something tickling my hand. I look down, focus on another ladybug, tiny and bright red, crawling on my knuckle. I smile a little and let it cross my hands, a trek across plains. It repulses me a little when the insect tries to sneak its crumpled wings out from under its hard red casings. They're cute when they walk, but wrong when they fly, unnatural in their awkwardness.

I let the beetle leave and rest my face on my folded arms, relaxing a little. My vision sharpens, re-sharpens, re-re-sharpens, as I move my hooded eyes. Something catches my eye more than the rest, and I frown a little. It's a ladybug like I've never seen before, bright red but with a strange asymmetrical triangle on its back instead of spots. "Fucked-up ladybug," I christen it and wonder if it's the product of a genetic mutation, a tweaked amino acid. Utilizing biology.

I watch fucked-up ladybug struggle up its blade and then I see another one. And another. And another. All of a sudden it seems impossible: there must be a dozen of these little colorful beetles crawling around me, hideous garbage-bag wings hidden under their uniquer shells, eyes painted-on and white on their black bodies, six legs scurrying aimlessly.

And then another bug catches my eye, not more than two inches away, right in front of my nose, and this time I gasp. I've never seen anything like it before, don't know what it's called: an orange-bodied, praying-mantis-like inch-long creature with blue wing cases and small, intelligent-looking black eyes. Its feelers wave cautiously as it scales the blade of grass. I watch it, transfixed, wondering if it's real. It reminds me of a dragon, looks like it's about to take off any moment, unfurling and exhaling mysterious flame.

And now my skin is crawling. I'm lying in the grass, sun warming my hair, and there are insects all around me. I've never seen so many in one place in my life. "I must be high," I think, though I know I'm not. "This must be a hallucination," I think. There's no way it could be real.

I am suspended there for too long, learning the ladybugs, learning the other bugs, and then my belt pokes at my hip and the spell is broken, I hoist myself up and run for my house, let myself back in the door, careful to breathe as if everything were normal, careful to keep it a secret.

Run my fingers through my hair, though, just to make sure it's not alive.

Blink away the immediacy of six-times-hundreds flailing legs.

you are vegan and it is disorienting

2007-04-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

you came over and we made zucchini.
you are vegan and it is disorienting.
you steamed the zucchini and it was green and soft.
i looked at you and your hair was very yellow and soft.
i looked at the clock and it was two-twenty-eight.
you were going to leave at five.
i felt uncomfortable because there were leftover meatballs in the fridge and also turkey and skinless boneless chicken breasts and milk and cheese and butter.
i did not feel ashamed of my meat and dairy products but i wanted to hide them from you.
you drank orange juice and talked about your ant farm.
i was bored and wanted to fuck on the kitchen counter.
we added paprika to the zucchini.
we added raw cauliflower sprigs.
i was glad i had bought vegetables.
you had brought a thing of yeast.
my kitchen was very bright and un-mysterious.
your skin gleamed and your eyes drooped.
i wondered if you would look different if you were not vegan.
you said that last night you had slept for fourteen hours.
you said you had found a pager and you wanted to page me.
i told you i would make you a mixtape.
we ate the vegetables and they had turned out okay and a little mushy.
we went to my computer and looked at my songs.
i made you a mixtape with a lot of classical spanish music on it.
i drew flowers on the mixtape with a thin-tipped sharpie.
i looked at your bony toes.

love triptych

2007-03-08T20:38:00.000-08:00

I.
thinking about you
makes me
hungry,
and sometimes i feel sick.
your eyes, clear as an actor's, start a fizzing inside of me
and iridescent bubbles glimmer in my
alimentary canal,
shyly glowing a little, if you know where to look,
and it gets so i can't talk to you
(as if i could, anyway, come up with
something to
say).
more often than not i blurt an excuse and
flee--
cramming my mouth with pears and apples,
poor substitutes for your kisses.

II.
dear,
biting through your tendon
was a time of my life:
feeling the twist against my teeth,
the vital living flesh,
tatsing the iron blood as it coursed down my lips, your neck,
like some furious-german river;
your skin so tender and thin, your blood so pure, distilled as
bottled water;
the little gasp when i punctured
will stay with me forever,
aurally erotic legend.
and so will the knowledge that now, inside me, there you are,
atoms mixing with my own, molecules unwinding
and (kindly) rewinding again;
"you are what you eat,"
and i love you.

III.
onscreen,
the cleft in angelina jolie's lip
reminds me of you;
at home,
the plates remind me of yours, the first time i saw you--
cafeteria lasagna, that thick white industrial china
(easy wash).
when i'm driving sometimes i stop in the middle of the street,
horns our symphony,
catching sight of a boy in a beret biking
or a graffiti'd up stop sign
or, god forbid, a rainbow.
babe, you've ruined
a dozen songs for me;
two tv shows, four movies, make me curl up and cry.
and the phone, christ, the phone!
it can't ring without my first thought being of you.
too bad you won't let me call anymore.

pickering

2007-02-22T18:54:00.000-08:00

Germany was home; I couldn't change that. Pickering thought it was abominable, which irked me. "I don't think less of you because you're from Rhode Island."

"Rhode Island didn't elect Hitler," he retorted.

These sorts of conversations usually degraded into exchanged "fuck you"s and "fuck your country"s, simmering baleful glares, and at least one of us stalking off. Once they had actually led to physical blows. This was because Pickering was a full-blown jerk. Among all of us, this was established; everyone by now had resignedly accepted his assholitude. Still, somehow, there was something about him which attracted me. I had always dated boys who had later turned out to be secret jerks, but never had I been interested in one while already knowing the extent of his stupidity. Thus, I reasoned, I was definitely not into Pickering. Not even a little bit. Hell no.

I went home and looked at atlases. Berlin, now divided. When I was seven I went there with my father for a weekend; I remember taking a day off of school for it.

'Rhode Island can bite me,' I thought, then pretended I hadn't.

In the shower that evening, the water bouncing and running off the oils of my skin, I mentally defended my country to him. I dug out all the national history we had made reports on in grade school from the crevasses of my mind, and presented it too proudly to my not-quite-friend, dodging all his arguments with the grace of a ballerina. (In my mind, that was. When I tried to debate Pickering for real, I was always the one who got red and flustered while he'd stare me down, he'd always keep his cool.)

He had a girlfriend, a peachy thing with an incongruous Bostonian accent, and when he kissed her in public I blushed for the both of them. They lived together and I knew they slept together, but fiercely denied it to myself. I was sure he was an expert in bed, but denied that too.

Pickering was thin, tall and European-looking, with pinched features and a brown-blond, scraggly goatee. He was barely in his thirties but already balding. I told him he looked Germanic, but, infuriatingly, he remained supremely unruffled. I couldn't push his buttons, probably because he knew that was the way to push mine. He made me want to punch things, to crack bones, but I spent hours imagining the freckles on his thighs, the taste of his sweat.

I knew he would stay faithful to the girlfriend; he was that sort. It made me angrier. I wanted to kidnap him, to force him onto a jet plane to my little country town in Germany, to fuck him on the grass until even he, so imperturbable, gasped for breath. I knew it would never happen.

I spent all weekend painting him in my mind. I wanted to break his heart.

the photographer

2006-12-23T13:26:00.000-08:00

She lids her eyes seductively and watches him twist the lens a hair. He's squinting and his woolly curls half-obscure his face. The camera hides the other half. Irene fills in the blanks in her mind's eye. Mexican with a broad face and small passive eyes, a scar on his cheek, Raoul's face tells more stories than her own ever could.

"Good," he says with his slight accent. She watches the muscles of his arms and tries not to let her expression change, though her mouth wants to edge up into a smile. "Go ahead," Raoul adds and his white teeth reveal themselves generously beneath the camera. Irene likes that he can see that in her, likes how observant he is despite everything.

The flash goes off and Irene, experienced, doesn't blink, just watches the sunspot on her retina. It goes off twice more, and then he lowers the camera and she's rewarded with his face, just as she'd imagined it. Except there's sunspots covering bits of it, thanks to his camera.

"You think you can use those?" she asks, and wishes she smoked. How chic, how impressive it would be, just now, to light a cigarette and inhale like a girl from 1955.

"At least one of them should work. You did ver' well today. The company will like these shots." Raoul pours them both glasses of water; she sips at hers, thinking what an inadequate substitute it is for that rush of nicotine she's so often imagined (worried about blemishing her sharp, straight, white teeth, she's never even touched tobacco). She looks at the water, swirling, distorting, but she can feel his beady, watchful eyes on her and tries to curve like the gorgeous woman she knows she is. This is the first time she's worked for Raoul, and she likes him. He makes her feel appreciated. Her friend Ky told her once, knowledgeably, that women always like photographers and cosmetologists, because they make them feel beautiful. But she's never liked a photographer as much as Raoul, and Irene has been a model for two and a half years now, gone through a lot of people.

"You make me look good," she says, untying her kimono top and hanging it over her chair, and her canines, abnormally pointed, glint.

"You appeal to the market," he replies. "Good-looking, excellent cheekbones, the shadows fall ver' well-- it is less work for me. And there will need to be ver' little photomanipulation. You will sell many pairs of pants by yourself." He smiles at her again and gulps down water, throwing it down his throat like vodka. Idly, she wonders what kind of drunk he is. She wonders, too, how he is in bed. Gasping and hardworking, maybe, like the other round-faced Mexican she once slept with, a cute, honest painter with an easy smile and crinkly eyes. Irene decides she finds Raoul attractive, thinks maybe she'll give him a try. What's his last name again? Probably Gonzalez. They're all named Gonzalez.

"How long have you been taking pictures?" she asks, more out of politeness than real interest.

"I got my first real camera when I was sixteen. I went around taking pictures of everything I could see. And I never stopped, not even now. When I worked, I saved my money for better cameras, not for cars or clothes. Always the camera." She enjoys his soft slurred tones. She thinks that she needs to meet more immigrants. They're not as smart as real Americans, but they're good, humble people. That or desperate, dirty thieves and killers, of course. It goes one way or the other. Irene's maternal grandparents were Russian, and her father's father was black. It makes her beautiful, and because she was born in America, there are no negative side effects: she's just as quick, as fluent, as anyone.

"That's really dedicated of you," with just the right amount of earnestness in her tone. Raoul doesn't catch it, of course; Irene intends it to be too subtle for him. But he gets the undercurrents, and his thick eyebrows draw together furrily. He gulps down water like a man who can't get used to having enough, and thinks.

Finally his small eyes meet hers. "And how long have you been modeling, Irene?"

"Oh, a couple of years." She waves it off like it's nothing, making sure he notices the perfect shapeliness of her arm, the fine bones of her wrist. Her fingers are long and graceful. Her dappled body, in this light, is flawless, and she knows it, uses it shamelessly to her advantage.

Raoul knows it too. He drains his cup, sets it down on the table, stands and shakes her hand. His grasp is warm and dry, her own a little clammy from moisturizers and lotions. "Thank you for working with me, Irene," he says and pats her hand. "I hope to see you again sometime." And he starts to walk away.

She watches his rounded buttocks in his scuffed, big-pocketed jeans move as he walks away from her. His back to her. Confused, she starts to ask him, don't you want to stay, but she stops in time. All that comes out is, "Don't you--"

He turns and looks at her again. That broad, calculating, scarred face. Those little eyes, seeing everything. "Did you say something?"

She shakes her head, feeling her vixen hair whip coolly around her long graceful neck. "Goodbye."

He shuts the door quietly behind him, and she stays seated in her jeans and silk bra, hand still curved around her cup of water, speechless, not knowing what to think. For the first time in a long time, Irene feels stood up.

And by a Mexican, no less.

Marten's Birthday

2006-12-23T00:24:00.000-08:00

We were celebrating Marten's birthday when the phone rang. It was right after we'd all sung to him, and he was opening presents, ripping with the enthusiasm of a newly thirteen-year-old boy. I'd always thought he was an unlikely kid, my cousin; the name Marten calls up visions of a towheaded Swede, but he is dark-haired and half-Filipino. Go figure.

Anyway, we'd all been exclaiming over a video game when the phone started to ring. "Go get it," Aunt Emily said to my dad, her brother. Dad went to get it-- he's that kind of guy, does what people tell him.

We watched Marten unwrap my present, a book. Eragon, some new hit fantasy novel all the middle-schoolers liked; the movie had just come out. "Thanks, Franny!" He came over to give me a hug. I hugged him back. He's a nice kid, my cousin. Unlikely, but nice.

"Happy birthday," I said.

Dad came out of the office holding the cordless phone away from him. I didn't notice at the time, but he looked kind of shocked. "Emily, you better take this one," he said, and something in his eyes made Aunt Emily take it.

"Hello?"

Marten moved on, tearing the paper off of a present some friend of his had given him-- he'd had a social party at the bowling alley the day before and saved the presents to open with us. I watched him. Until Aunt Emily said, "I'm sorry, what?" and something in her tone was so awful that all of us-- Dad, Mom, Rocky, Christopher, Uncle Ira, Aunt Libby, even Harry-- turned to look.

"Are you sure it's him?" she asked. Behind her tone was a quickly rising wave of horror and panic and loss. My heartbeat started throbbing in my throat. I was kind of terrified. I snuck a look at Rocky, grabbed his hand. He squeezed back.

"Okay," Aunt Emily said. "Okay. Okay. Thank you, um, thank you for calling. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye." She clicked off and looked out over us, her eyes darker than they'd ever been, and unfathomable. Shit, shit, shit, what's going on? I thought desperately, and fidgeted, and played with my big brother's sailing-tanned fingers.

"Well?" said Aunt Libby finally, tensely.

Aunt Emily gave Marten a darting glance. He was looking up at her, utterly lost, the gift from his friend forgotten. The room had a waiting feeling; all of us were holding our breath. We knew the news was bad, but we didn't know what it was. Was it some stalker of Aunt Emily's, having seen her in that brief modeling stint six years ago, violating a deserved restraining order? Had Great-Uncle Rocco (Rocky's namesake) been hospitalized again? Had Grandpa Jack died, or been diagnosed with cancer? Somehow this seemed even worse than those, worse than we could imagine.

Aunt Emily took a deep breath. It hitched in her throat and so did mine. I was nervous as anything. I thought irrationally of my crush, Dylan. That made me scareder.

"Tim's been killed," she said calmly. "Timmy's died."

Oh my God, I thought. Tim was her older son, my eldest cousin at twenty-four. He'd enlisted in the Army three years ago. Been sent to Afghanistan eight months ago. We'd all sort of assumed he'd come back, knowing it was impossible to live scared that he would be killed every day. Without talking about it, we accepted it, and set Timmy aside in our minds as someone we'd see when he got leave again, hopefully before a Democrat was elected.

And now he was dead?

Marten ran to his mother and buried his face in her chest. Pandemonium erupted quietly, in the middle of his pile of presents. The magic in them was gone, reduced now to unimpressive, inanimate things. We all drifted toward Aunt Emily, comfort vaguely in our minds, penetrating the fog of shock and disbelief. "It must be a mistake," I heard my mom mutter. "Some bureaucrat thing. It can't be, not our Timmy."

I tried to picture him in my head. It was hard; I hadn't seen him in about eight months. My mental image was grainy but clear enough: a dashing young guy, thick arched dark eyebrows, a closely-shaved head, strong chin, good smile. A little heavyset, a little shorter than average, a little singler than most of his friends, but hell, Timmy was a great guy. Really lovable, funny, smart. We'd been getting e-mails from him when he had the chance to send them, and it was always a treat to read his thoughts.

No more e-mails from Tim now.

I looked at Marten. His thin shoulders were shaking in his new red snowcoat. Aunt Emily was caressing him, her hands touching his hair absently. She still looked out over us all, like she was an actress who'd been told not to look the audience in the eyes. No one knew what to do. Bad timing, I thought. Poor Marten. And his father, of course, had left ten years before. I wondered if Uncle Nick would even find out about his son's death-- Timmy's death, oh God, death. I imagined my cousin in a big army tank, patchily armored because the army was so underbudgeted despite the cost of the war, and some insurgent throwing a bomb out into the street, the explosion, Timmy in the driver's seat, his head blown off, the blood and brains painting the tank. I was still clutching Rocky's hand like a security blanket. I shut my eyes, and it was only when I felt the wetness on my lashes that I realized I'd been crying.

Harry started wailing, a thin baby cry. He wasn't even two yet. Aunt Libby picked him up gratefully, Uncle Ira cooing over him as well, trying to distract themselves. I heard Mom ask Aunt Emily in a low voice, "Do you want us to stay?" I peeked out to see Aunt Emily nodding vigorously. Poor woman. And Marten, his teen-birthday ruined, Jesus. I couldn't quite grasp it still. I kept picturing Timmy's brains plastering the window of the tank. He'd told me he was driving one two months before.

"Afghanistan," muttered Rocky. "You'd think it would be safer than Iraq."

Not for Timmy, I thought, and I remembered how when he'd graduated high school he'd told everyone to stop calling him Timmy, only Tim, and of course none of us ever remembered because we were family. I remembered when he'd phoned us and asked for a ride because he'd gotten too drunk to drive; the time when he'd come over and talked me through a bout of bad depression because a boy had made fun of me; the way we had used to talk on the phone, how he called me Francine, always, tenderly, in a cousin way. Oh, Timmy. I felt Rocky's hand on my head, felt my tears getting the dark wiry hair on his arm wet. I couldn't help it anymore; I started sobbing, for real, the way Marten was. The birthday party had turned to a party of mourning.

We stayed for hours, until it got too late and there weren't enough beds in the house. Aunt Emily apologized profusely, and thanked us for staying. Uncle Ira had taken care of all the calls to the other relatives. We didn't let ourselves think about Timmy's friends.

When we got in the van to go home-- Rocky, Christopher, my parents and me-- Dad drove shakily, erratically. Mom was tense next to him, barking reprimands for leaving his high beams on, for forgetting his blink signals. Finally Dad snapped, "For Christ's sake, Wendy, my nephew was just killed!" After that we were all very quiet. All three of us were in the back, Christopher in the middle, my little brother, and he had taken our hands and we sat in a chain and tried not to think of Timmy's life spraying all over his shattered windshield.

"Some birthday for Marten," Dad said as we pulled in to our driveway.

We all went to bed, and I couldn't sleep that night. I stayed up, wanting to call Dylan and tell him, have him comfort me, but I never called Dylan and we weren't really friends. Wanting to call Kylie, but she went to bed early. Wanting to call someone, anyone, but it was actually almost twelve and it was a school night. I couldn't face school and I knew it. More than anyone I wanted to call Timmy, who'd never minded the late-night calls. Timmy could tell me the truth, that he was alive and fine, what a fantastic birthday gift for Marten, a living brother after all!

But in Afghanistan, he was unreachable. And in Heaven (if there was such a thing), well, maybe he could hear me, but I couldn't hear him back.

I crept out of bed, padded my way to the computer, a desperately hopeless idea in my mind. Christopher was sitting there, the glow of the screen lighting up his face. He turned to me guiltily. "You should be sleeping," I said hypocritically, unable to think of anything else to say.

"Sorry, Franny. I..."

I looked at his screen. He was writing an email. "Who're you writing?"

"Timmy," he mumbled, not looking at me.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He was Marten's age, had turned thirteen in July. I wanted to tell him I had had the same idea, but I couldn't get the words out of my mouth. They sat there, heavy, below my tongue. I couldn't even spit out a simple "good night."

I went back to bed, curled up in fetal position under my covers, and shut my eyes. And for the first time in years I really prayed. Not the hopeful, shallow prayers I always offered up in church (God, get Dylan to like me; Jesus, make the pimple on my chin go away), but real prayer, the spiritual kind. My eyes were squeezed shut and I called up my pictures of God and His Son, like a good Episcopalian.

And in my imagination, Jesus Christ looked like Timmy.

"

2006-12-01T20:07:00.000-08:00

Shit. What have I done? My hands are strange(rs) to me.