Troika Moonshine 300

switchblade, birth control, Nietzsche

2012-02-06T18:59:00.001-06:00

Tom had been reading too much lately, mostly philosophy, soup labels and an unhealthy number of health articles on the internet.

His tastes were leaning toward Nietzsche and cream of broccoli these days. Often, he would dip his finger into the pot of soup bubbling on the stove, curious to see how long it would take for his skin to begin to crinkle and peel away from his bones, but he never could leave the finger in long enough. He had sustained only minor injuries.

Over the summer, as his body grew more and more conditioned to Erica’s absence, he had begun to regard his own feet as spider-like, capable of moving in any direction at any given moment.

In April, when she had confessed to him she was pregnant, Tom slapped her across the face and stormed off to the bathroom. Moments later, he returned, flipping her birth control packet open like a switchblade. He tossed it at her.

“What the fuck is this then? How hard is it to remember to take a single pill in the morning? Are you stupid, or have you been planning this?”

She was calm as reflexive, brackish trails wound down her face, “Nothing’s sure-fire, Tom. You know that.”

“I’m not gonna be fooled, and I’m not gonna be trapped,” he said, pausing to pick up the flimsy pop-out card of hormones and count the tiny, colored discs:

“Don’t call your mother, Erica.”

***

In July, while drinking bourbon and eating oranges, Tom ran across a medical article that detailed how oral antibiotics lessened the effectiveness of birth control.

He remembered Erica’s strange springtime bronchitis and felt his arachnid feet growing itchy, restless.

I didn’t even go inside with her.

He picked up the phone and called her mother.
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throwing star, referee, aloe vera

2012-02-04T10:59:00.004-06:00

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Richard met Bethany while working at the bank. He was a teller and she stumbled in at 10 in the morning, drunk. Her high heels were so high small children were running under them. Richard thought he saw a mountain climber scaling one.

“I need to make a withdrawal,” she said, draped over the counter.

“I’ll need your account number.”

“Account what? I don’t have an account.”

“You can’t make a withdrawal without an account.”

“Deposit then.” She started handing him fistsful of cash.

“I still need an account number.”

“You know what...who made you the referee here?” She laughed, hiccuping. Then she passed out on the floor.

At five, he found her asleep in a hedgerow outside. He touched her on the shoulder and she bolted upright. “I need to go,” she said. She’d made it halfway across the parking lot when she fell again, sending the mountain climber to his death.

He drove her home. She lived in one tiny room in a rooming house. On the wall, was a painting of a nude male backside, muscular ass flexing.

“My husband,” she said. “Separated. He used to make me stand against a target so he could practice his throwing stars. Want to see my scars?”

“I think I’ve already seen them,” he said, because it sounded clever and poignant. She really was beautiful, now that her eyes could focus.

They sat on the bed. When he checked his watch his sleeve lifted to reveal a scar of his own. Must have happened in that spiky hedgerow. She got a bottle of aloe vera and rubbed it on the wound.

“Vera means truth, you know,” she said. “This is our truth serum.”

“Is that right?” Her fingers were so warm.

“I could never lie to you,” she said.
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grass, ga-lang, hex

2012-02-02T23:46:00.003-06:00

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A man with an underdeveloped palette being the only thing wrong with him, you'd think you'd won the lottery...despite the hex that Louisiana psychic said had stuck to me in the womb, through both my parents--from whoever they pissed off in the sixties.

But what if that man ate strange combinations of food? Like peanut butter, ham and Captain Crunch sandwiches, or in the summertime--frozen hotdogs, like they were skinsicles, or worse: flesh pickles, crammed into Twinkies.

The worst thing about it? Always the burps. Like he was raised to make them loud and smelly and no one told him not to.

There's also that habit for odd-mixing slight racial slurs with food too, like when mentions his ex: Yukimore from Japan, everytime we go out for California rolls, he says: Oh mercy, she did have the prettiest tempura colored skin!

Saying a black girl has chocolate or even mocha colored skin is one thing, because it's true! but fried batter? He might as say her skin is a grease pit known to cause heart disease. But my man isn't a poet.

Now that I think about it though, he did say something poetic one day last week, while eating a bowl of frosted flakes in orange juice, his favorite breakfast, before he set out to mow my yard. He said:

ga-lang, ga-lang goes my mower,
I cut your grass, and then I tap that ass!

I tell you what he can say my skin looks like chutney goulash as long as he keeps saying sweet things to me like that.
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frost, tarragon, bookends

2012-02-01T20:47:00.004-06:00

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Winter confines us to our cabin. I don’t know why we have come here, secreted ourselves from convenience and society, but you seem to like it, this nesting. You are wrapped in blankets of your own knitting, ugly loose-raveled things that leave multicolored fuzz all over the floor like a trail of breadcrumbs. Except they lead into the gingerbread house, not away.

Frost on the windowpanes, frost on the bird feeder, frost on my dreams. At night is when I love you most, your furnace heat, your fleshy parts along my bones. During the day, you sit on the couch with bovine complacency, content to read. I adjust the bookends where you have removed books. You drink tarragon tea, which I have heard is good for pregnancy. But you are not pregnant, not that you have told me. This house is the womb.

A wolf howls, keeping me awake. I rise from bed, the moonlight a funeral wreath through the window. I load the shotgun with shells; we bought it when we arrived in this mountain town, but I have never used it. On the porch in my underwear and boots, I raise the gun. The wolf is not fifty yards away, its fur a majestic silver-white, its yellow eyes looking at me patiently. I wag the gun barrel in a get lost gesture. Scram. It howls once, throat extended as if to be punctured, slit.

I do not pull the trigger. The wolf trots off. Almost out of view, it looks back, daring me to follow into the hoary dead grass. I imagine taking off my boots, joining the pack, the feeling of newness like being born. But I know I will go back inside, to our bed where you are soundly sleeping, ready to begin another day.
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Interview -- Raul Clement

2012-01-28T18:36:00.000-06:00

by Lindsey Butler

LB: How old were you when you created the ﬁrst piece of writing you were really proud of? What was it about, and do you still have it somewhere?

RC: I don’t think a writer is ever satisfied, in the absolute sense, with what he or she writes. At least I’m not. Completing a piece is difficult enough. At a certain point – draft five or eleven or whatever – fatigue kicks in and you stop asking whether your work is perfect, but merely whether it’s good enough to trick someone into publishing it.

I do, however, look back on some of my early work with (undoubtedly false and nostalgic) longing. There was a freedom and zaniness to it that I’d love to achieve now – only this time around with more control and perspective. I didn’t know anything about writing, not consciously at least, though I had read a lot. But my head was empty of the “rules” (better to call them guidelines) that can so undermine your best impulses as a writer. These rules are useful – avoid excessive adverbs, show don’t tell, appeal to the senses – in that they can immediately make bad writing competent. But they should be learned, internalized, and forgotten. Ask a tennis player about the mechanics of his serve and he’ll immediately spike it into the net. This probably doesn’t apply to Roger Federer, but I’m not Federer.

To answer your question more directly, at sixteen or so, I wrote large chunks of a novel about a six-foot-tall salamander who falls in love with a woman and decides to pose as human. It was very Vonnegut, with a bit of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles thrown in. That novel was never finished – what sixteen-year-old has the discipline to complete a novel? – but I remember being excited about the product, written in half a dozen cheap spiral notebooks.

LB: Please describe your workspace for us. Is it neat, is it messy? Are you snacking, are you fondling sweaters?

RC: I’m not sure I have a workspace. I’ve lived in houses or apartments that were conducive to writing and some that were not. The best place I ever lived was a duplex where the bedrooms were on three separate floors. It was quiet and I was distanced from the siren-call of roommates; when writing is going badly, any distraction is welcome. It’s also possible it was simply an especially fertile time in my life, creatively, and the workspace had nothing to do with it. I say that because I have produced a lot of work in public spaces – coffee shops and bars, mostly. Something about the white noise and white motion, if I can coin a term, prove useful; it’s a game to distract the nagging, hypercritical part of my brain. There’s also something to knowing your time is limited. Coffee shops close; your house does not.

I fondle sweaters as well, but that has nothing to do with my writing, and everything to do with a particular sweater-wearing Parisian girl of mod sensibilities who shan’t be named.

LB: You’ve submitted both prose and poetry to Troika Moonshine 300. Which do you prefer writing, and why?

RC: The honest answer? Both. It’s sort of like that joke about the man with two peg legs, each longer than the other.

I consider myself a fiction writer first and foremost, but I generally enjoy writing poetry more, probably because my identity is not so wrapped up in it. It also helps that I am woefully ignorant about poetic technique, form and fashion. You can count on one hand the number of poets I’ve seriously read. Most of my poetic influence comes from fiction and some of the better lyricists. From fiction, I borrow narrative techniques, and from lyrics, rhetorical strategies – e.g.: John Darnielle’s playful grandiosity or Steven Malkmus’s façade of nonchalance.

There’s also the matter of length. Though we writers don’t like to admit it, size does matter. A poem, in unedited form at least, can be tossed off in a single (often very short) sitting, before the conscious brain has time to muck up the effort. This leads to a gratifying sense of completion. Whether or not the product is any good is a different matter.

LB: Here are some common themes I’ve picked up from the 26 pieces you’ve submitted so far: the pervasive nature of longing; the plight of the outsider, or the injustice of people on the fringe; the many manifestations of loss; and the effects of isolation on the individual [which I guess hearkens back to the ﬁxation on the outsider]. Are these themes conscious choices or preoccupations?

RC: I think they are conscious insofar as I know myself and my own interests and tendencies. George Saunders says something to the effect of style being “knowing your own strengths and weaknesses.” You want to accentuate the former and mask the latter. I write well (relatively speaking) about outsiders because I’ve always felt myself to be one. If I may meta-fy this interview for a minute, refer to question eight below for a more detailed explanation.

LB: You have a fascinating, highly developed sense of romantic absurdity [as terriﬁcally evidenced by the couple inhabiting a sand castle in “Drano, Youtube, Wordworth”]. Where does this come from? Who are your inﬂuences?

RC: Jesus. There are so many, and in every imaginable style. That particular piece, as well as many of my other surreal and wistfully romantic pieces, is probably most influenced by Richard Brautigan. My father used to read him to me as a kid, leaving out the sexy parts and sticking to the funny and wildly imaginative. To this day, whenever I see a used copy of Sombrero Fallout – my favorite novel of his – I have to buy it. I give Brautigan books away as gifts: it’s sort of how I test potential romantic partners. What that says about my relationship with my father, I’m not sure – hopefully nothing too Freudian – but a lot of my sense of humor and imagination was shaped by those books he read to me on the weekends of his visitation rights. Douglas Adams and Joseph Heller were two other staples. Catch-22 is still my favorite comic novel, if that’s not too diminishing a term for it.

As far as more recent influences go, Paul Auster’s Leviathan made me want to be a writer. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest remains the high-water mark in my reading life. Julio Cortázar is, and might always be, my favorite short story writer. The woefully neglected Italian existentialist, Alberto Moravia. Dostoevsky, particularly Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. Steinbeck. Richard Wright. Sartre, especially The Age of Reason. Roberto Bolaño.

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of short stories, a form I used to consider inferior to the novel (or at least less emotionally satisfying). Two current favorites are Sam Lipstye and Steve Almond. Almond is, in my opinion, the best short story writer working in America.

LB: What are you listening to right now, and what - if anything - do you listen to while writing?

RC: Besides the conversations of coffee shop patrons, I listen almost exclusively to the band Cloud Cult as I write. Their music is spiritual in the best sense of the word: it celebrates the joy and mystery of life. Many people would probably find it overly cute or sappy, but for me it’s cathartic, inspirational. I think we as sophisticated art-consumers have had so much commercial crap forced down our throats that we now associate anything positive with someone trying to sell us something. Only by being dark can an artist be authentic. But that’s just one part of life.

Or it could just be that the celebratory mode gives me the lift I need to write. I am certainly no optimist, and my writing probably reflects that.

LB: Which well-respected author do you secretly despise? [We all have at least one.]

RC: This is such a fun question, and the snark in me (if I may “nounify” that adjective and then verbify a couple of nouns) could probably spend pages rattling off names. But I’ll stick to one: Vladimir Nabokov. I find his characters to be wooden, his plots to be mechanical or nonexistent, and the smug sunning in his own brilliance to be evident in every word of his bloated, purple writing. I think this last element is most important: if the personality that comes across on the page is any indication, I would have loathed him as a man.

If I am completely honest, there’s probably an element of self-hatred to it. My natural impulse is to a plotless lyricism and I’ve worked hard at winnowing those excesses while improving the other elements of my writing. We all, except possibly Nabokov, want to be something we are not, and the extent to which we want to be determines how much we rebel against the mirror.

LB: With the exception of "joy, blackbird, nude" [which is beautiful, by the way], all of your poems and stories that touch on stated or implied romantic relationships seem to focus on dysfunction, disappointment or unrequitedness. Can you comment on this?

RC: I see why you make the distinction, but even that piece has a darkness and a “lack” at its center. We all know how much an author’s explanation of his own work is worth, but to my mind the birds who eat the speaker's garden can be interpreted two ways. In the vaguest sense, they are the part of the self that can never be fulfilled by any human relationship. But I’ve put clues in there toward a more specific interpretation: “comma claws,” “wet ink,” “wet page.” The birds can be read as the speaker’s writing (or perhaps the garden is the writing and the birds its dark costs). Being truly committed to art keeps you from ever investing yourself fully in a relationship.

More specifically, in even my best romantic relationships, I’ve felt myself to be playing at domesticity. At humanity even. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has a bit about how he is not a human, but a monster. How simply because we both like chocolate cake doesn’t mean we have anything in common, or are even, in an existential sense, the same species. I feel that way often.

I also think that dysfunction is simply a more productive and interesting state. We write about trouble, not about things that work.

LB: What are you currently working on, and where can we read it?

RC: The number of things I am working on is borderline absurd. A couple of months back, in a fit of drunken rage, I smashed my computer. Ironically, my productivity has increased as a result – I no longer spend hours hitting refresh on Facebook. But it has changed and loosened my writing method: I’ve gone back to those spiral notebooks of my teenage years. On any given day, I work on what interests me the most. A scholar flipping through my notebook posthumously – yeah, right – would probably not be able to make much sense of it.

The project I am most excited about right now, however, is a novella about basketball. I don’t like talking too specifically about a piece as I am working on it – I find it dulls and rigidifies the process – but suffice it to say that those who follow sports media, or have turned on a television is the last six months, will recognize a couple of highly-publicized child sex abuse scandals. But these are really just an outlet to explore the nature of corruption, friendship, and loyalty – what would you do to protect a friend or someone you love? what crime, if any, is unforgivable? – and, of course, the beauty of what I consider to be the most balletic sport. Much literary writing has been devoted to baseball, but not much to basketball, and I want to prove that it is content-rich and can tell us a lot about the possibilities of human achievement. To that end, I’ve made a sportswriter my main character. He has grand ambitions – to raise sports writing to the level of high art – and I hope the piece will feel like one of those classic European novels of ideas, only with distinctly American subject matter. Like Hermann Hesse meets Michael Lewis (author of perhaps the finest piece of sports journalism I’ve ever read, “The No-Stats All Star.”)

I have a publisher in mind, though they don’t know it yet. It’s a trick to keep me writing on the damn thing.

LB: Lastly, enquiring minds want to know: Betty or Veronica?

RC: Veronica, though simply because of hair color. In my own false and probably offensive dichotomy -- not at all based on Archie -- blondes are nursing students, own two or more Pomeranians, and wear leg warmers to the gym. Brunettes play bass guitar and volunteer at the crafts fair. I know which I prefer.

Read Raul's stories here.
Read Lindsey's stories here.

mustard, parasite, GPS

2012-01-28T10:47:00.002-06:00

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Last week I started my new job as a sheep carrier. It’s not bad for a job, as far as jobs go. I lean down, scoop up a sheep in my arms, the woolly bastards probably covered in dancing parasites, lug it to the fence, step over the low barbed wire — one leg, careful of the crotch, then the other leg — carry the sheep across the highway, and deposit the dumb bleating creature into the better paddock. I’m a big bloke, as far as blokes go, so it’s not that hard. A fellow named Solly once told me that if he had forearms like mine, he’d go around knocking over trees with them, and then women when he’d run out of trees. He was a character, Solly. I get two fifteen minute breaks to have a cup of tea and a smoke, and half an hour for lunch. Lunch is two ham and mustard sandwiches and three apples. My bosses provide the lunch, which I suppose is a pretty decent perk, as far as perks go. I never see who brings the lunch. It just appears. I carry a sheep across the highway, and when I turn around, there it is, on top of a fence-post, in white wax paper, like a gift from angels. My bosses told me that I have this job as long as I want it. The sheep will never run out, they said. There’s always more sheep on the way. The company I work for doesn’t have a real name, just letters, GPS. As far as I’m concerned it’s not bad for a company name, as far as names go. That’s about everything, really. My name’s Hamish.

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coffee, marigold, photo album

2012-01-24T23:05:00.001-06:00

Margaret, 25:

Four pictures are more than enough.

Don't show me any more.

I know what I look like, and I know what I do not look like. You are thrusting your photo album at me, and I see a foreigner in the matte squares - a pretty, smiling guide for a tour I've never taken.

You move your hands like a wrestler interviewing for a job at a bank, pointing out your favorite scar in one of the photos. I don't understand, and I don't have a scar across the back of my knuckle.

Stop grabbing my hand, señor luchador. It hurts a little.

Tom, 46:

I see you, Marigold, drinking coffee and reading,

flippant to the meaty seatbelt slices,

smirking affront to the overpass plunge.

You are younger and unkinder than you used to be.

You will remember me when you are 35 again,

pinch-locked between vodka tonics

and a glittery heel caught under the brake.

I will wait for you, love.

mustang, fleece, falcon

2012-01-24T22:55:00.014-06:00

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The cat's tolerance had been a big relief when the baby came home in his blue fleece blanket. Surly as he was, unless he needed food, or the window cracked, to go in and out as he pleased, to hunt. There had only been one incident in eight-months, when the cat got shaken up like a coke on a hot day, by a hand-dragged catnip squeak toy.

The baby didn't make much of a fuss when his hand got scratched trying to grab it. A clean strike, a grunt, next thing you know he was pretending to play with one of the smiling farm animals scattered among his playthings, smearing blood everywhere.

Daddy watched baby in the mornings so mom could get an hour or two of solid sleep. Bagels, cereal; breakfast was do-able, as long as there was no spice rack or stove involved. Though once in a while, the smell of burning bread woke mom from dreams of forest fires, white mustangs charging through giant burning toaster ovens, carried by falcons soaring high and away from woods, on fire, eyaaah!

One early morning, stepping over floating gray wisps on hardwood, mom saw baby sitting on his blanket with a toy and went for coffee. Daddy was in the kitchen scraping burned rye into the trash, when he looked up to say hello, and with a grimaced NO, NO, NO he shot across the living room before his wife could ask: what's wrong.

As the cat stretched out on a blue fleece blanket, licking his paws, the baby coo'd with great pleasure, his little healing hand, soothed by a soft bundle of lifeless feathers, the cozy morning catch of the day.
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sailboat, portent, inertia

2012-01-12T00:40:00.006-06:00

Ladyshoes lingered at the edge of the sidewalk, looking down the gully to the stream where Choo-Choo lay, motionless, staring up at the tops of the trees.

Choo-Choo took a breath, sighed, and called up, "I had you going, didn't I? Minute and a half! Personal best!"Ladyshoes grinned in relief but didn't feel like showing his teeth.

"Choo-Choo! What's your defect, man? Breath-holding in the Olympics now?"

"Breathing's too noisy. Get down here." Then, in a voice filled with exaggerated portent, "Watch your step, there's some real stickers in that burr patch about halfway down."

Ladyshoes obliged but didn't listen, just let inertia trundle him straight through the burr patch, permanently tangling the laces on his shoes, and sticking his jeans in wrinkled patches. "I told you,

Ladyshoes. Some real stickers in there. You'll never get the burrs out of those shoelaces."

Ladyshoes stopped walking, nodded slightly, and considered his next response. He still didn't feel like showing his teeth.

"What about you, Choo-Choo? You're lying on your back in a stream, with your clothes on, just to hold your breath. Do you want a sailboat for that? Can I get you a sailboat?"

"No, it's peaceful. Cold, and my wallet's ruined, but when you swallow the air before counting seconds, you swallow everything around you. The cold water, too. The woods, the stream, the air, the sidewalk you walked down from. Lie here next to me and try."

Ladyshoes decided to take Choo-Choo at his word.

"You're an idiot," he said, before laying down and taking a deep breath that felt so crisp, complete, and delicate that Ladyshoes, for the first time all day, couldn't help but smile. With teeth.

patchy, pentagram, kindred

2011-12-26T16:11:00.005-06:00

“Have you guys considered the importance of lines? Just the placement of a few lines, how much they change everything? A star connotes Christmas or Christianity in general, a pentagram calls to mind Wiccans drawing in chalk to protect themselves, and a pentacle evokes Aleister Crowley for a lot of folks. However, all are mere strokes apart from one another. Lines are radical. They tell your mind how to interpret its world.”

My Principles of Design professor used her hands to paint shapes in the air before us, seemingly unaware of the clean expanse of the dry erase board directly behind her.

I had gleaned all I needed to engage in esoteric, masturbatory conversations over cocktails later, so my attention was becoming patchy by this point, hazy with thoughts of boys and bands and ways to talk to boys in bands. The weekend loomed ahead, and Design was over in 20 minutes.

As I mentally practiced the best way to toss my hair, I felt a sharp shove and turned to find Linda smirking at me, a pencil clasped between her pincher-like fingers.

“What the hell, crab people?” I hissed at her.

She gestured toward her crotch and tossed the pencil at me, “I need dick, and so do you. What are we doing this weekend?”

I caught the pencil and laid it in my flattened palm, “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

“Well, be thinking about it.”
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My attention returned to the lecture:

“The association of ideas draws us together, helps us find our kindred spirits amongst the overwhelming sea of people we encounter day in and day out. You can thank lines for part of this, for their seemingly invisible talent for ordering our world.

They control you in ways you don’t understand.”
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goldfish, mango, dermatologist

2011-12-07T17:32:00.107-06:00

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Personal trainer Andrew finds processed-foods addict, Jayne, sugar crashing and depressed in front of a Wendy’s and acts as a friend figure to help her redeem herself, but when Jayne wins the 16 million dollar jackpot, and Andrew suggests she open a celebrity gym, Jayne contacts old friend, Emily, who's caught in a rut with her impotent musician boyfriend, Donovan, and is about to face her former flame, Christopher, at the high school reunion. Longing for a family, Emily dreams of Donovan leaving for New York City to pursue his music career. But things take a strange turn when, drunk at the reunion, Christopher confesses to being tried for child abuse. Meanwhile, Mr T. and his ExxonMobil buds hit Vegas with the Boy Scouts of America and Bonito saves college freshman, Ally Anderson, from drowning during an epileptic fit while bobbing for apples at the Harvard Halloween Party, but when Ally awakes she is not the person she used to be. Against her mother's wishes, Ally changes her major from History to Politics. But will Bonito buy his wife the Wii Fit? In any case, his daughter's goldfish, Mango, happily swims in his bowl. But when his angry master, twelve year old Carly, flushes him, Mango goes on a wet and wild odyssey to find a new home, encountering numerous shitty challenges along the way, until he meets "Nice Girl Nikki from Iowa" who recently moved to California and, through a stroke of dumb luck, landed a pornographic film deal. But Californian show biz is a fickle dude, and Nikki's luck soon turns spunk-sour when she is reunited with her paternal father on set.
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Satan, ghetto, trowel

2011-07-30T09:55:00.002-05:00

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I wake up on the floor, mouth as dry as Satan's psoriasis. I'm not exaggerating. That certain ghetto feel of matted berber carpet--a miasma of catfood and cake frosting, topped with the rank dose of freshly smoked, chainsmoked cigarettes...tell me I'm home. I'm naked, great--and there are drawings all over me.

Upon closer inspection, I see what the drawings are: talking carrots. In ink. Plural. Meaning not just one. There are a lot of them. And by talking I mean carrots with eyes, and mouths and, you guessed it--speech bubbles. I look down between my breasts and see one particular carrot's wearing a hat; his bubble reads: I AM THE LUKIEST CARROT IN THE WORLD. Further along is a carrot with fat carrot hands buried in my crotch hair; his bubble says: I LOVE NATURAL WOMENZ. There are five or so more carrots--that I can see!

What the hell is THIS?! I say.
To which I hear the reply of: Good morning, sunshine!
Oh god, I'm in hell, I say.
Well, what else was I supposed to do? You passed out.
So you defiled me!
I embellished you.
This carrot in a garden of human heads--that's creative, I say. I like
-----his--shovel?
That's not a shovel--it's a trowel. Trowels are much smaller than
-----shovels, and easier to maneuver in the dirt at close-range.
I see you know a lot about garden supplies, I say.

When my guest finally leaves, I'm up, admiring half a dozen berber-pocked carrots and their filthy comments about my ass in the mirror, before I jump in the shower. That's the last time I bring home someone from Chipotle, I say, rubbing a carrot off my thigh. Then my cat crawls out from under the bed, looking for food.
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try, little, tenderness

2011-06-30T15:12:00.004-05:00

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I fucking hate Home Depot. Always have. I hate the high ceilings, the waterless unused toilets, the disgusting orange aprons cinched around the employees torsos and hitching up their t-shirts just enough to expose the back fat spilling over their khakis' waistbands. I hate the smell of cedar, the bright aisle of pointlessly whirling ceiling fans, the bewildering names printed on the paint samples. I hate the words Home Depot in that order, the sound of them together unspeakable. But I needed duct tape, a roll that came with its own dispenser with a serrated edge to separate the strips. After navigating the labyrinth of caulk guns, dowel rods, drawer pulls, shower curtain rings, staple guns, I found what I needed in a display by the checkout line, hanging by a hook above the gallon tubs of cheese balls. I self-checked out, prompted by the uncanny robot lady voice to place the roll of duct tape on the metal scale, which determined it weighed as much as a roll of duct tape should and let me pay for it. I took the duct tape home without a plastic bag, to reduce waste. I went up to the bedroom, placed the duct tape on the nightstand, lay on the bedspread, and closed my eyes as the tape ripped from the roll and glided across my mouth with indescribable tenderness. It was worth a try, I figured, even if it hurt a little getting it off.
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auditory, vanishing, banshee

2011-06-07T22:32:00.004-05:00

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They got married because they both hated the Graduate; they divorced because of his vanishing. Nights and weekends alternated for the children. Happiness alternated between the time-release effect of capsules prescribed by therapy. From once weekly to perpetual. No one cried at the funeral. Maggie cried by the death of her only friend, Brad. A Boston terrier, who loved a good tug of brisket, belly rubs, bubbles; he wasn't a pickey pup. His banshee wails relinquishing nearby fire engines of their SOS awakenings. Auditory landfills. Psych-out joyrides through the traffic stained streets. She kept her ring. He lost his along with his sex drive. Somewhere between a couch cushion in Des Moines and glove box in Albuquerque. The VHS tapes were divided equally. Upon meeting Hoffman one day at a wine shop under the Hollywood sign, they both agreed he seemed like a nice guy. Their son became a lawyer. Their daughter an actress, famous for the line: Don't call me no chicken in a Blockbuster aptly titled the Graduation.
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sting, wrath, heat

2011-06-07T21:16:00.000-05:00

Please eat my favorite foods.
Or I will be offended. Not
only eat but overeat. Be
warmer than warm. Be
red with heat. My wrath
is concave. A lifetime
of quiet space. And when
I say I love you, you sting
me in silence. And you look
at my toast like I am crazy.
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minuet, paisley, saturnine

2011-05-19T09:30:00.004-05:00

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Hello, I'm saturnine. You may recognize me from the Analogies portion of one of the many standardized tests you've taken/been subjected to over the course of your short (?) life. My name of course is derived from the god--the Titan--Saturn, aka Cronus, who was in charge until Jupiter (Zeus) usurped his/my throne. If you identify with the usurper, you are jovial. If you identify with his sons, you are either martial or mercurial. If you identify with the deposed, you, like me, are saturnine.

You are also saturnine if you contain lead or suffer from lead poisoning.

You'll be happy to learn that, as lead has been eradicated from modern plumbing, the Analogies portion has been/will be phased out of modern standardized tests, as have/will most vocabulary-out-of-context question types. E.g.: Choose the word most nearly opposite in meaning of MINUET:

waltz

bolero

cancan

allemande

fandango

The correct choice, cancan, is a fast-paced, raucous dance in 2/4 time performed by a chorus line with dramatic kicking steps, while a minuet is a moderate, social dance in 3/4 time performed by couples with small, mincing steps. The test-makers have decided that such fine distinctions and relationships among words are either too far beyond the average test-taker's ken or not a relevant measure of aptitude, or both.

Thus will I, jovial, etc., be pushed further toward extinction, as likely will the names for our equivalent humors within the body: sanguine (jovial), choleric (martial), melancholic (mercurial), phlegmatic (saturnine).

It's in my nature to feel bitterness about this change, even depression. But there is dignity in becoming an arcanum, like the strange grace of paisley, whose twisted teardrop pattern has roots in Zoroastrian symbology but is more commonly referred to as "the Welsh pear."

clairvoyant, incubator, drugstore

2011-05-02T00:42:00.016-05:00

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Wyndham had always been different. Born early in dead silence, right through his circumcision. Past the incubator's glass I could hear his thoughts. Hold me, mommy, he seemed to say. What is this place and why is there so much light?

On his third birthday while tucking laundry away in a bedroom drawer, I heard a loud crash in the den. When I found Wyndham, shards of glass gathered at the base of his crouched frame, the largest was in his hand hacking away at our goldfish, Hector. How my son managed to not cut himself is beyond me.

When Wyndam was five, on our way to a drugstore to pick up some fresh toothbrushes after a bout of the flu, my son looked at me and said, Ice cream now, or death. I wasn't in the mood to argue, so after he promised to brush extra good before bed, we both got a scoop of mint chocolate chip and headed to the drugstore after.

When we got there the place was surrounded by police. A man had brought a gun trying to hijack pain pills. Five were dead including a pharmacist, two pharmacy technicians, a nun checking her blood pressure, and a teen browsing condoms through a locked case.

Later at home, while we brushed our teeth for six minutes a piece with germ-free toothbrushes, Wyndham asked me if we could get another goldfish. I don't think so, I said. No mommy, Hector was sick, he said, He told me so. This time I want a happy goldfish.

The next day at the pet store, I waited while my son went from tank to tank talking to all the fish. That's how we ended up with Jack and his wife Amelia. Three years so far--and they're still kicking.

sunglasses, collage, sparkler

2011-04-20T12:49:00.007-05:00

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"Will you look at this woman in the hot pink track suit? Is that not the most garish display of tastelessness you have ever seen?" He says while tapping out a cigarette on the steering wheel.

"Who makes those things, much less buys them? I mean, if they were never made in the first place..." I trail off

"Sweat-shops my friend, women in third world countries making 12 cents a day, sewing these awful fucking garments, working themselves to the bone 12-14 hours a goddammed fucking day, wasting away, losing their youth, fuck, way more than that...literally their souls...and people buy this shit without any thought to the price these people pay to make this truthfully ugly as ass-shit"

"Yeah, it makes me sick to think about" I say, slightly incensed, but not sure what I can do.

"I mean, really I can't talk, I smoke these fucking coffin nails, and those are the most evil mutherfuckers; and I'm shackled by debt to those fucking credit cards. I bought fifty buck sunglasses yesterday...what's left? What's pure in this world, Donny-boy, tell me?" He turns to me, mouth aslack in a mock intimidation.

"Glaciers. Water from glaciers is pure" I answer.

"SHEEEITT! And those are melting into the salty oceans; the retribution flood is coming. It's going to be a collage of disasters that bring us to our knees. The whole is, in fact, greater than the sum of its mutherfucking parts due to the connections among said parts. It will be like the alcoholic fucking up every aspect of his life before he gets some help. The problem is the pain ain't great enough for us to change."

I look out the window at two young girls waving sparklers in the blue-grey dusk.
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clatter, nostril, dice

2011-04-18T20:28:00.089-05:00

.
She'd been working out for weeks. Spin classes, pilates, hot yoga, treadmills. Her usual breakfast of toasted everything bagels and lattes had been replaced by three boiled egg whites, diced with a pinch of salt, and black coffee. She'd get her bracelet back on Tuesday, strategically placed in an armoire as a final plan in case he was to call one of her bluffs and end it all over another petty dispute over nothing.

Since then, almost a year ago before, she'd lost 30 lbs, bought the perfect dress and now he'd finally see the clatter he'd brought upon their lives. Spinning at once those plates too many. Concerned with public image. His artistic conquests. Groping her breasts in the dark, then only hours later--humiliating her in front of guests at that new thai place around the corner, by asking her loudly to skip dessert.

When she first got a nostril ring, he approved, saying it gave her an edge. Punk rock he said. A year later it made her look like wannabe trash. Along with the lines of her ample bosom overflowing above her low-cut blouse. Ever-beloved it was, before. He went from offering her ice cream on rainy days to never wanting to leave the house, to never touching her body anymore from early bedtime to morning.

And now he would be at the coffee shop around the corner from their former lover's bungalow. She would walk in, thinner, sleeker, and he wouldn't rise. She would see the ring on his left hand. The bracelet on the table next to a pile of crumbs on a napkin. And sitting beside him a bloated wife with her same dark hair flowing, adorned with a diamond ring similar to the one she'd worn for five years of her life.
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vacancies, hot-legs, moo

2011-04-18T11:04:00.005-05:00

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“1987, All I want to do is get high” – Spacemen 3 “Come Down Easy”

I started to realize I was old when I came out of my drunken stupor a few years ago. Hello, mid-to-late-30’s what the hell have you been doing? Where is the hair that used to be on top of your head? What are these lines so deeply grooved in your forehead? Where is the sparkle that used to be in your eye? Shear off enough chunks of your soul and the lights will slowly blink out. Hack into it with a rusty blade, cleave and saw – no clean cuts, no aseptic…just you and your deluge of regrets and madness.

Those mornings when the sunlight through the window is more like a searchlight, illuminating particles of dust suspended in the stagnant air, no warmth just more stale bar smells, dead skin cells…you throw open the windows for some spring freshness, try to wash the soul-sickness off, the anxious gnawing in the stomach, a deep loss of innocence, like a clear-cut forest, a vacant lot overgrown with ragweeds and broken glass.

Those pangs of anxiety, what are they really? What do you fear? The missed carnal opportunities? The knowledge that you would actually use a phrase as maudlin as the wilted flower of youth? (I actually did) Isn’t this the pasture where so many have gone to die? No longer a throaty Ginsbergish Howl, no MC W-Hitman Yawp, not even a Salingering fingerpoint of phony, more like an Updikian Moo.

I have dallied in neon and hot-legs, thunderstorms and the wind through tall grass.
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foaming, weenis, dictaphone

2011-04-13T13:59:00.010-05:00

.
I put the gentlest kiss on her lips behind the old Volta Laboratory Museum. It was early spring…the air was adorned with cherry or apple blossoms. The shadows of the tree branches were thrown across the wall she leaned against with her hands politely behind her. Her face was turned up, her eyes closed, her lips puckered in the least romantic way, in an almost academic, clinical way. I thought “My God, my chance has come at last.”

Dictaphone recording: (static, crackles, pops, electronic warbles)

“When I placed my lips to hers the clouds were foaming over…messy and indulgent, bulbous, slow and celluloidicle. Which was understandable given the contrast to that ache-of-longing-blue oblivion of a sky, the clouds rolled lazily along, chewing on a stalk of grass, pondering the world from above, staring too long, carried along on the glassy buzzsaw of cicada’s mating calls and the trillion orgasms of nature peristematic blooms. A day so syrup-paced you can hear the Xylem and Phloem move up and down the trees, you could feel the shimmering vibe of photofuckingsynthesis. Who needs to go the movies when you have this slo-mo explosion going on all around us if we could just slow the fuck down long enough to enjoy it, appreciate the majesty, the epic abundance of life.”

“Does everything you say have to sound like you’re playing with your weenis while you’re saying it?” a spectral voice asks.
.

honor, Quaalude, obey

2011-04-07T14:47:00.007-05:00

.
"I'm alive she cried, but I don't know what it means" - "Opus 40", Mercury Rev

I have a weak mind...and probably a sickened soul. Raised up on Honeycombs and Starblazers. Learned Label envy, those little fucking ketchup-stain Ralph Lauren insignias delineating the haves and the have nots...soon I started reading Blues musician biographies instead of the assigned reading in high school. Prom night - Rush or Muddy Waters or "Disintegration" with the windows rolled down and the luke warm May night on her neck (the Cure, dude, the poor girl is begging for the Cure) The stoned internal uneasy knots in my stomach, perhaps my soul spoiling, rotting to the core, a [youth decay] going to the dentist high as hell listening to "Crimson and Clover" (Tommy James and the Shondells shivering tremelo...) Maybe I wanted to have some 'street cred', to pay my dues with more than the 12 stitches I received from falling from the wooden plank and chain playground at my Catholic elementary school that buffered a golf course. I never had to struggle in my life, never had to go hungry...just deal with my schizophrenic brother, my alcoholic father and the perpetual psychological battering from the cable television box and an increasing paranoiaffected inferiority complex. Like how a band like the Kinks couldn't make it today because they're just not good looking enough. I developed some blue-eyed soul envy and I didn't know how to honor that other than exploiting the privilege of 20 dollar bags of weed, zoned out quaaludic bliss, Pink Floydian reveries, Bob Marley activism...I really had no clue when it came to relationships, and I was afforded the dubious luxury of indulging resentments and self-help fondlings ignoring any noble purpose; obeying the clock while life rapidly slipped away.
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skiff, shroud, troublemaker

2011-03-31T18:31:00.003-05:00

.
“Okay, I’m leaving.”

I want to ask “Why?“ through the shroud of my half-sleep but then I remember that it stormed last night.

“Be careful,” I say just as the door clicks closed.

When it rains around here all of the earthworms come wriggling up out of the dirt trying not to drown. I don’t blame the worms, but Harold says they have to be put back in the earth. He says the worms are the semen of the soil, and if you don’t keep them in the ground then the earth will be barren. Harold, he says the worms dig to the center of the earth, to the mother’s glory god hole, and impregnate her. And I want to ask “Why?” and “Pregnant with our radishes and tomatoes, Harold?” But then he would call me a troublemaker and look at me with his gaping fish eyes.

In the mornings after a hard rain Harold goes out with a shovel and puts the worms back. He says he can find the tunnels that they crawled out of, that he pours them back down. I imagine each going down on a tiny skiff writhing and pale like something not to be seen with one’s house-eyes.

Now the garden, yard, street, it’s all so much rain. The rain seems to get into the house’s pipes, and in the middle of the day you find the shower covered in fresh drops from its seeping head and think, “Who is here? Harold has gone to plant worms. He’s gone and it’s as if someone who is neither Harold nor me is hiding with her wet skin behind every door in the house waiting for me to ask “Why?” Waiting to open her mouth and let the worms come spilling out.
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Nicolas Cage, oni, temporary

2011-03-31T06:15:00.000-05:00

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Before we went to bed we waited for the sun. It came up fast, small and bright and round. “Like a baby,” he said, and I started to cry. This fragile new sun in our arms. Then we feel asleep watching a unspecified DVD and during the night he must have rolled onto the remote’s pause button: Nicolas Cage’s worried-hawk face is frozen on the screen, shifting between two frames as if he is shaking his head at us, gently.

***

I wake again and this time I take a look at where I have come to. We are in his tiny bedroom, the sun sneaking through the shades in stripes. There are three guitars at the foot of the bed, two mirrors on the wall, and a Basquiat print is sticky-taped to the ceiling. I can smell patchouli, and toast.

***

We are walking to the shops for an afternoon breakfast. It’s turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth. Everything solid—shrubs, trashcans, parked cars—seems to stir in my peripheries, as if they are all waiting for me to turn my back so they can pounce, like they are all camouflaged or shapeshifting Oni in a black-and-white Japanese horror film. I hope it’s only temporary; I don’t have it in me to retaliate with any conviction today.

***

I am at home, pleasantly lonely. It is an impossible task just to make a cup of tea, but this is okay. My hand holds a pen and has been scribbling on a pad for the past little while, but I haven’t the nerve to look down and see what is on the page. The sun sets, big and shiny, like an angel resting her head for sleep.

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jaunt, sweater, bridge

2011-03-30T07:43:00.001-05:00

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Jeremy looked at the umber sculpt of the calves of the women in front of him, and he looked at the geological push of her breasts against the inside of her sweater, and he felt the increased pulse in his penis. All the standard metaphors were invoked inside his head. He knew he looked innocent, too. Just a bespectled gent taking his daily constitutional. Or maybe not so regal, maybe more like a nerdy/cool guy strolling hither and thither across the spatter of grass. Even just a man walking in a park. Whatever, he didn’t feel like he could possibly be seen as threatening, which was good, because he was harbouring very threatening thoughts. He was harming people from a distance, inside his head: punching men and raping women, kicking dogs in their ribs. What looked like a relaxing jaunt was actually a planned going out into the world and venting of sadistic but natural urges. Natural in that he didn’t ask to be filled with violent ire and sexual iniquitousness, but there they were still, every day, like corn flakes. He was close to building a bridge today, close to action. He felt through the outside of his jeans the joint in his pocket. Perhaps he’ll just snick it out now and light it up, see what’ll happen after that. Maybe all he’ll do is steal a bike and ride for a while. Or go and lie down in a pile of leaves, and then kill a cat on his way home. Or break a window, somewhere, anywhere. It didn’t matter what he did, as long as he kept doing it. And that is easy enough, isn’t it?
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paw print, evergreen, changeling

2011-03-27T17:04:00.001-05:00

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You asked me if I hated my boss. No, that would be an exaggeration. To say you hate someone is giving them too much credit for affecting your life. I'm more apt to say: I don't care for that person. Meaning: if that person were to catch on fire and run face first into the path of a semi hauling oranges to Kalamazoo, I would only wince at the melodrama, but not at the fact that certain people have earlier expiration dates than others. I'd also wince at the collision; as part of a natural reflex. I once winced at a three-toed paw print on the hood of my Ford, which couldn't've belonged to a neighborhood cat. If anything it was the mark of a changeling glowing and ravenous under a full moon. Believe me: the woods surrounding my house are the perfect place for such a thing. MISSING signs posted everywhere. I have to tell you: on cold, quiet nights, I've heard mysterious grumblings of beasts outside. Worse than mating cats, or growling coons or anything similarly natural. Once I heard a pitiful creature being torn apart by an alpha. Taking its punishment, its murmurs of pain were muffled, like it was sorry. And then it stopped. The automatic porch lights came on. They flicked off, and it was over. The next day at work when my boss asked me why I was late again, I told her the sloths were waging war, taking over the grove in hoards of ghosts keeping me awake. It wasn't the first time I'd been fired for saying the truth. And so I slipped my her name and address into the knot of a bloody evergreen, right beside a clump of nettled fur. Slow or not, I just hope those beasts can read.
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straddle, lengthen, prod

2011-03-27T15:18:00.000-05:00

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A producer of the successful romantic series Angles & Arrows called me aside at my party. He pointed to my cat, and asked me to hand it to him. The cat was nervous, but I did it anyway, trying to get on a good side for the sake of my husband's budding career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

It wasn't my fault that the cat scratched a hole in a brand-new Armani button-up to escape into the bushes. The producer wasn't mad. All he said was: Wish I had time for one of my own.

Then he asked me if I'd walk him to his car to help him find a CD.

The pinata was Dora the Explorer. Straddling sticks like a witch's brooms, we prodded relentlessly at her paper mache dress between hits. At one point, tired of hitting air, I suggested lengthening the stick with tape and another stick. But right after my facetious remark, my husband gave her a solid blow to the torso, causing candy guts to fly out, all over the loot craving, slightly buzzed crowd.

Later in bed, he wanted to talk. Bouts of anxiety had been making it hard for him to sleep.

A woman came up to me after the pinata, he said, and told me NOT TO HAVE KIDS. At first I thought she said that because she wanted me for herself, then I thought she was trying to say something about you. Like warn me. Then I realized it was a just joke about me beating a pinata kid's face in with a stick. I feel stupid.

And I, accidentally let our cat scratch that producer who brought the supermodel model tonight, I said, but I fixed it...

send him your script tomorrow. He said he'd be happy to look at it.
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hurt, drain, spaniel

2011-03-27T13:06:00.002-05:00

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The dogs. It is only after Mary has been in Berlin for almost a month that Matthias explains about the dogs.
“It’s the government,” he said.
He lives in her apartment building, a ruffish boy whom she’d started sleeping with the second day she’d been in the city.
“They subsidise dogs,” he said.
The two of them are sitting in the communal courtyard. It is late morning or early afternoon and they are drinking long brown bottles of beer and smoking limp reedy rollies. Mary had slinked out early with a book and a cup of instant, intending to read for 15, maximum 20 minutes, and then get right back up again and have a shower and go to the library and spend the whole day writing. She would dismantle her laptop’s wifi function using the program called Freedom and she would write, all day, nonstop. She would pinch herself on her inner thighs if she caught herself getting interested in the particulars of her cuticles or the angle of the light outside. But then Matthias must’ve spotted her from his window; he obviously hadn’t been to bed; he came out his hair over his eyes bottles clinking in his hands and he asked her about her home and her family, and now he was telling her about the dogs.
“The government pays you if you keep a dog. 30 euros for a big dog, less for smaller. That’s why all the homeless people have these big fuck-off dogs. No poodles, no spaniels, you know?”
She asked him if everyone was okay with canines eating up welfare dollars. Wasn’t it an unnecessary drain?

(cont. in comments)
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skiff, shroud, troublemaker

2011-03-25T05:11:00.000-05:00

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Alright. So. Line-in-the-sand time, it is. This: some of you here are writing these great transconcious pieces that justabout burst with all this Pynchonian imagery and Syd Barrettesque madcappery and Ginsbergian cuckoldry, you’re putting up these posts that are full of pointy allusions and multicoloured flashes and word ordering that simply can’t be deciphered by the rational parts of the spongy mushroom that is my brain. And me? I’m hiding behind this thin wavery shroud of orthodox narrative peekabooing, I’m being all cowardly with my straight-up telling and my blankish characters and my conventional settings, and to tell everyone here the truth, I’m feeling a bit left out. Y’all are depth charging the shit outta the literary water, and I’m peppering the surface with a poppoppop gun, and I need to ‘step up’ and ‘lay it down’ (oh my). I’m not purposefully trying to play troublemaker by pointing this out, and I’m not trying to ‘shake things up’ or ‘pat you down’ (ooh la la), it’s just that I needed to make this public so that everyone knows that I know, and then we can all move past aforesaid knowing and I can get on with writing a real stream-of-conciousnessny type post, right here and now, a post that doesn’t skim or sniff or skiff over the tops of things, but stops and stands still, that demands to be re-read and re-re-read. Who knows, maybe I’ll include an oblique reference to an octopus and also hint at the letting go of a bunch of red balloons, and I’ll allude to an incestuous rape scene whilst never-quite-mentioning the love that can exist between a person and their mirror image, and the whole world will exist in a water drop.

So here goes, wish me luck:

whistle

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shambolic, postcard, moonlight

2011-03-24T08:16:00.005-05:00

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Harmony Korine, you sure have got a lot to answer for, buddy. What the fuck is Gummo, huh? Huh? That shit is warped, friend. Like I’m seeing this nice girl, I’m trying nice girls now, I’m seeing this nice girl for only the third time and this meet-up’s at the apartment, this get together is the y’know dinner and wine and film-with-blanket type of scenario, and I manage to duck out of work right on time even though work is as shambolic as a shook-up milkshake, and I pick up the last bits for dinner and I go to rent some DVDs, I get five rentals for $12 and choose one Blockbuster (Black Swan), one New Release (It’s Kind of a Funny Story), one Classic Comedy (Ferris Bueller), one Horror (Sex and the City 2) and one ArtHouse/Independent, all your stuff Harmony is under ArtHouse/Independent, and your Gummo has all the wreaths on it from different tiny film festivals so that it looks like a bloody postcard that has been ink-stamped sixteen ways to Sunday, and anyway it wasn’t like I exactly asked the clerk for the full run-down synopsis of each film, so I grabbed the DVDs and after the osso bucco and the tiramisu her and me sit down in front of the Sony and I ask her to choose a film because because because, and lo and behold she picks yours and we settle back but before long I’m feeling as uncomfortable as a bishop at Sexpo, and then you just keep on with the dead cats and all the rest don’t you, and she moonlights out of there before I can even think to push eject, and now I’m sitting here, alone and quiet, and the blanket’s on the floor.

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spore, s'more, slaw

2011-03-24T01:02:00.004-05:00

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Bill never had a gift for math. His brain wasn't wired that way. A half-wit. A Superman. He heard the cars that shook and rattled in slaw of a shack set far apart from town. His spores spread wide, he'd seen his fair share of dilapidated castles, nestled between anthracite canyons. White sinew swathed orange pods were his favorite pulped snack. Canned of course. Radishes and beets he grew, and pickled with lavender.

When Bill had his first nervous breakdown, he called me in tears. The cows have all died he said. What cows? Or basilisk? Or creatures to die for miles? Domestic. Or so it happened when when I came, a small tremor had shook his table-size town. Replicas of courthouse to pasture askew. It was more than Bill could handle. But he could not handle wisp. Barely a hair set his sink aflame in symphonies of screaming semaphore. The brush of Spring petals set his ankles afire.

Those cows, those streets, defined gravity from a whirlwind grave, it seemed. And beneath my waning dissemblance, or an urgency to get through this day, I pinced the first cow, lying idly by a bike shop bench, and blew into its maw to resuscitate its spotted ivory mold, so Bill could hear it milk once more, and mask the rickety of railroads steam. The engines glazed, black and cold by morning. Time for eggs and tea.
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shovel, spirit, robotic

2011-03-23T06:04:00.000-05:00

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Gerard told me about his dream. He told how he saw himself on a beach, not an endless beach like the one I pictured when he said beach, but a little cove beach, one of those hidden horseshoe-shaped swoops of sand, and he was digging, not with his hands, which is what I saw, but with a shovel, he was digging with a shovel and taking hefty shoeboxes of wet sand out with each scoop of the shovel, and he was tossing the slabs of wet sand over his shoulder and behind in the time-honoured style, but he wasn’t to know what he was digging for, wasn’t sure if he was digging something up or if he was digging a hole to put something in, I guessed he was digging something up but I didn’t say anything, and just when he was about to stop digging, he heard a voice behind him and he turned around and saw a person made of sand, a sand spirit, and all this time he hadn’t been digging a hole like he’d thought, but he’d been building a person, all behind his back, and each shovelful of sand was a portion of this person, this spirit, and the spirit said stop, and said thank you, and then walked off without one grit of sand falling. Gerard’s voice always turned robotic when he was describing his dreams, like his voice was a recording, although sometimes I could tell he was changing his dream as he told it, making it more interesting or whatnot. At these moments I saw Gerard as an oil painting, a portrait, but instead of sitting prim he is painted as though he is touching the inside of the canvas, and he is smearing the paint. That is what I saw.
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disparity, heralding, snap

2011-03-22T21:47:00.002-05:00

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Some burning thing was out here among the pines. Freeman did not need the snap of the forest’s January floor to tell him how to follow the thing, the occasional half-emberred cluster of pine needles was heralding its escape. The twinkling leaves were like the trees’ attempts to lure you deeper in, take all your money for just cheap drinks while you shitgrin at all the pretty waitresses , Freeman thought, like in Tunica; and now, he was chasing something that wouldn’t stop burning.

He smells smoke but could only think the waitresses keep a cigarette sent though there’s no smoking allowed in the casinos, their faces are over-tanned in the blackjack light, but their legs are pale, and they say we are the sex you came in here for, there is nothing but pious sunlight past these walls.

Somewhere among the casino women is his forest voice telling him that he is at home among the pines behind his house, that he is whiskey-brained and chasing fireflies.

He ignores what disparity there is between the women and the pines near until dawn when his sobering eyes tell him that he is doing something foolish, that there is no fire out here to chase just as there was no fire in Tunica, just false whores carrying their false lights.

He stumbles home and tries to ignore the feeling that there is something out in the world still burning.
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shovel, spirit, robotic

2011-03-22T10:26:00.013-05:00

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Reality TV Show: Extreme gene pool makeover. 192 united nations go under the knife in search of genetic perfection. Thought turns robotic. The human spirit is ultra shiny. Bodies are shovelled into giant space bags. Ratings skyrocket. All is well in the universe.
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Arizona, beard, haunted house

2011-03-17T10:00:00.011-05:00

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It's not so much that I have been restored to sanity, its that I know how to keep my mouth shut. Some days the world is like a quadraphonic chalkboard scrape...what I mean is, why go see noise bands when standing on the corner of Fulton and Division with your eyes closed approximates what they do with their shiny, nobbly electronics?

Can they make their toys cry? Howl like a silver wolf when they try to sear the synapses off yer brain? A scab in the Arizona sol, inside a microwave, or cellphone radiation through a mega-phone.

Ok, wait, I'm getting upset again, like some deep-seated tissue-issue from childhood. Envying the bigger kids with shinier BMX Bikes. You calm this sea, or at least remove the fear of being crushed by the waves, the endless streams, the news feeds that crash in and over wave after wave and really all I want to do is play with the long intro of your curls, the soft cascading melodies, like stems of marigolds all yawning arms up to the sky and the way it splays out against the pillow and the sun in our eyes and we giggle at the futility of our little insurrection.

I looked good in a beard, goddammit. You shoulda seen me, 23-24...collegiate talking all activist and shit...wasting all of my outrage on used records, videogames, local beer, orgasms with the perpetually emotionally unavailable, donating to Amnesty International and feeling really, really good, more local beer and cheap whiskey.

Some mornings I wake and feel like the weeble wobble haunted house...just cobwebs and an old woman rocking in a chair on hardwood floors, staring out a black window...I can't see her face.
I reach for your hand and it's not there. .
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P.O. box, renal, shutdown

2011-03-17T05:31:00.004-05:00

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The tube of lube is there. Alarm clock, book, lamp, nail file, aspirin, lube. Next to her bed, as if it needed to be within reach as much as all the other items occupying real estate on her bedside table.

I am just a prude. That's all. A prude about lube. And about anything to do with sex. And drugs. It's true.

So what if she has lube, out and ready to go? Maybe she uses it to help slide her rings off her fingers. Or to massage moisture into her leather boots. Or maybe she suffers from renal failure and needs the lube to help self-insert a catheter so she doesn't poison herself with her own piss. A body shutdown from kidney disease turns yellow.

My uncle died from kidney failure. He'd been a heroin addict in the 70s and 80s, and then the price of heroin skyrocketed and he became an alcoholic. He was also a drug dealer up til the day he died. He pushed drugs onto mostly university students, using two dozen P.O. boxes. The cops told me this and more at his funeral. Because he was dying they just it let play out, didn't arrest him. He wasn't the worst by a long shot, so they just watched from afar. One of them hinted that they'd made sure he never scaled the transplant receivers list, just to be sure.

The lube is the brand KY Jelly. I am going to kill this woman tonight.
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sun, kiss, pandemonium

2011-03-17T05:22:00.003-05:00

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The ad on craigslist said models wanted and after the click it said something about female models needed for artistic photography folio and that models must be comfortable with nudity. Nudity was spelled nudeity; it was almost certainly a scam. Some perve with an SLR and white sheets nailed to a wall in his house, who'd become bored with even the fringest and sloppiest porn online, was taking small pervey steps to the next level of perveness. But I needed the money and I carried a knife, so I emailed the probable-perve and in his reply less than a minute later I could just about hear the pandemonium in his pants.

His 'studio' was a dozen blocks away, so I walked. The sun was veiled behind gauzy clouds, like a lightbulb under a crepe paper lampshade. It must've been the weekend; there were families scattered everywhere. I lived in a neighborhood that wasn't nice enough to raise your kids in, but interesting enough to visit for a glimpse of what the big newspaper called grunge chic. I saw a little girl walking a pram with a doll in it. Beside her her parents were pushing an empty pram. The little girl stopped, walked around to the front of her pram-in-miniature, picked up the doll and kissed it on the face. Her parents looked at each other and smiled. I lit another cigarette and crossed the road.
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picket, artifice, hydrangea

2011-03-16T22:38:00.000-05:00

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"Books are dead" seems to be the new "god is dead." In either or this depends on who you ask. Accessibility, artifice, that latest Blockbuster chick flick based on a book by so&so Sparks, and magic sticks.

E-books is where it is, she said, my husband's blog gets mad hits.
(Her husband brings her office hydrangeas, too, so off-beat, vanguards on edgy display, fair ride ticket foreplay in frou-frou, and I love you til the next batch, honeycakes.)

In Delillo's prose, White Noise aside, he claims to warp time, unenvisionable, sublime. Picket the idea of order. Ambiance and atmosphere have never seemed aloner. Bacon without fat. Fruit without a tree. Impulse, impulse, is all we need.

And who is it for? Not for me, my neighbor, priest or mother. But for the few who see efficiency as bland, but bland they will teach another. And another. Into a void of climax and narrative is deceased.

"Books are dead" you sound like my cat, but my cat would more likely say it about a rat in a bed of hydrangeas. My neighbor says my cat is smart, but he will never read Oblivion.
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chimney, blouse, mason jar

2011-03-15T07:22:00.002-05:00

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My first time at the Laughter Club was because of a particular bad comedown. The whys and wherefores are foggy. I do remember that my low spirits and self-uncertainty had stretched through the usual Monday and all through Tuesday, and when I woke up Wednesday at 7:23am and looked around and could still feel the heavy fingers dragging me asunder like a drowner, I pulled the doona over my head and gave up on the day. I felt like a bird trapped in a chimney. A moth in a mason jar. A blouse at the very bottom of a long-overdue washing heap. For a few hours I faked sleep but never went all the way, and then I killed the early afternoon hours slow-masturbating but gave up before even coming once, and then so because my phone was within reach—I wasn’t getting out of this bed until I no longer hated everything—I flicked through my apps looking for a game or film or something to do. In thirteen minutes I’d just about wrung all of the enjoyment I would get from the phone, but so then I opened the images album hoping that the approximately 200 photos I’d taken in the past few months might steal from me a few more minutes. The first image I saw was the last I’d taken. I didn’t recognise it. It was of a flyer sticky-taped to a powerpole in a street somewhere. I must’ve taken it sometime during the weekend’s bender. The flyer’s heading was chunky and handwritten: Local Laughter Club. Underneath it were some details about where to meet (the beach), what time (5:30pm) and the day (Wednesday). It was run by someone named Damian. I googled what is a laughter club, and read for a while, and then I swayed out of bed and put my shoes on.
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pluck, legend, spectrum

2011-03-15T07:19:00.001-05:00

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Ricky Maynard’s a legend at Treskowallee Prison. He’ll sell you a mirror for six packs of darts or a flask of any type of booze. A real glass hand-mirror. They are pink and someone smuggles him a handful of them from the outside every couple of weeks. They are little girls’ mirrors, maybe even they come with a doll. He’ll sell you a mirror but if you use the glass or even the plastic casing as any sort of weapon he will cut your balls off and put them up your own arse. He did that twice a few years back to two guys with either no brains or blind pluck or both, and a mirror hasn’t been broken since, not even by accident. The prison won’t give us real mirrors, is the reason why Ricky makes a living with his little hand-mirrors. There were no mirrors here before Ricky. All that we had was steel sheets nailed to the bathroom walls, sheets that are all banged up by fists and feet and heads. You never got to see yourself in that steel, you was always distorted beyond recognition. At the start the little pink girly hand-mirrors looked funny in the more-tattoos-than-teeth guys here, but soon to not have a mirror was something suspicious. New guys if they were lucky were advised of three survival musts when they were delivered here: give back or shred up or eat in little swallows your pillow but don’t don’t don’t whatever you do keep it; never find yourself alone with Guard Jim Trotsky, and get yourself to Ricky for a mirror, pronto. Most of the guards don’t mind about the mirrors, weirdly. Sometimes once in a while light from one of their torches will bounce off a mirror and then reflect off another mirror, and the spectrum of colour will make everyone freeze still.
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laconic, sided, gates

2011-03-14T21:12:00.010-05:00

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dear charity,

this is part of it, my hands soaked in a pool of pipe'd hot sink water. the sharp meaty pain in my temples. I never get headaches unless there's noise about machineries.

shut up leaf blowers. semis. seismographs. the crack growing down my spine and out this big pain in my ass called life. these gates flowing, the red beast from my ever ever ever suffering, sorrowful, merciless, fat curdling farce, this one sided maelstrom of allergic, putrid pestilence and prunes and pussy and pink skins and puckered tits, my limp dick, daily flossing, rising costs of gas, heartburn oh my delicious onions. shut up. laconic answers from god our bearded Oprah my messiah.

my knees are weak.

I didn't want to make a mess. a mop, a bucket, the dramatic exaggerated circumstance of ghosts and birth and me. these roses, they have my wrists. and my sister, she will have my bicycle.

all best,
glenn
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separation anxiety, raw metals

2011-03-10T08:48:00.006-06:00

Oi your tits are ‘bout to flap out Krystal, oi love can you hear me, nobody wants to see those jubblies at least not for a coupla more hours yet huh. Save that shit for laters when we’re all slaughtered so we can get in the raw and have a skinny dip down at the beach. Oh shit everyone I just got a text from Michael saying he and the boys at the bucks are at their third bar already, we haven’t even left our first one yet so come on everyone, drink up drink up we gotta get a move on, oh shit Amber you already brought another round of breezers? Look he’s already opened them, it’s alright we can just stick them in our bags and drink them in the hummer on the way to the next pub. Sherri if you don’t pick up that cocksucking cowboy and put it down your throat I will get the girls to hold you down and I will pour it in, I swear girl you’ll get separation anxiety by the time you decide to knock it down. No Tiff you don’t have time to fix your make-up who cares anyway this is a night all about us ladies and there are no men allowed we already went over this at pre-drinks so stop making eyes at that bloke over there and put your shoes back on and shit Krystal I can see all of one nipple and half of your other, pull up your singlet already. Man fuck me this outfit is digging into me like a cunt, it’s like all made of metals or something, Tanya can you look at my back and tell me what is digging into me. Alright everyone let’s get a move on.
..

indicative, poison, pedal-steel

2011-03-09T00:07:00.095-06:00

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The Murray River had finally dried up. All that remained were a few oily ditches by the dredging machines, and the hungry river rats, who dutifully ate the last of the rotting carp.

The farmers packed their cars and drove to the Heinz baby food factory in search of work in Echuca; their wives filling out dole application forms to the sound of 4WDs moving Chinese tourists down The Barmah Choke in search of extinct wildlife.

I really don’t know what I did that year, other than visit Mignon, and occasionally walk to Gary Dungy’s house to listen to him play the pedal-steel and stare at his collection of stuffed ibis.

We were living in a ghost town. Mignon’s breast cancer had outgrown her body and was now spiriting itself about her house. The cancer had a serene energy about it, although, it was a nuisance; latching itself onto visitors and doctors alike; transforming everything around Mignon into cellophane wrapped flowers. It was a poison indicative of death, very self-possessed. The only thing the cancer didn't turn into flowers was a framed photograph of Mignon and I, swimming in the river.
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cursive, worship, merchandise

2011-03-05T06:31:00.018-06:00

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Loyalty, Love, Solidarity, Bravery, Harmony, Humility (Good Words), and a dog unintentionally named Nicolas Cage. Hi, I’m Lauren. Here's some things I want to say. 1. The other night I dreamt that I was writing Kill Bill. It was hard going because Lucy Liu kept appearing in ghost form to posses my hands and change the script in her favour. 2. I saw Steve Buscemi walking down aisle seven of a Melbourne, suburban supermarket. He looked up at me. Picture it now. The way Steve Buscemi might look at you. That's when I realised it wasn't Steve Buscemi at all; it was every character Steve Buscemi had ever played in the body of a guy that looked like Steve Buscemi. Even better. 3. When I was eight I turned my gaze away from Beverly Hills 90210 and asked my Dad if we could buy a convertible. He said, No. 4. Thanks for reading 'cursive, worship, merchandise' (I'm cheating). 5. Sometimes I wonder if all the best stuff happened when I was nineteen, and, since then, I've just been chasing some old, fleeting feeling I had back there. 6. I was in Mountain Gate, in the bank, and there was this big, fat woman with bleach blonde hair and drawn on eyebrows. She announced to everyone in the bank that she'd just caught her husband having sex with other women. 'Literally having sex with other women!' she exclaimed. 'If I seem a little strange it's not because I'm a bad person. It's because I'm very angry.' I thought, me too, and I'm glad. 7. Up a tree, eating Reese’s, on an incline, dogs yelling in yards, supermarket cart swimming in the quarry, backstroke, I’m stretching, thinking: Olympic swimmers train all day, well, I'm going to do the same.
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orbit, tranquility, wack

2011-03-02T18:26:00.000-06:00

This track is wack: was the last and only thing I heard the guy say before a car clipped him going full speed. We had the right of way. But I had dropped my bag. The other guy just went. In Australia, from what I hear, crosswalks are known to beep for the blind jaywalkers. Here on Glendale the only sound I heard was a screech and a bump, then an orbit of legs spinning a body in a hurricane of wires as a headset smashed against the pavement.

A miniature Asian girl scooted nimbly past us without stopping. From afar her petite body made me want to touch her thighs, but as she came closer and dodged away, her face formed the boneless waves of a fanatical crowd. A Shar Pei's head transplanted on the body of a thirteen year-old.

Sometimes it's not good enough to look both ways, I heard someone above me say. I looked up, towards the sun and streetlights at a Starbucks, at cars. It was the lady who lived at the bus stop bench, feet wrapped in newspaper and rubber bands, shoulders draped by a few buttoned sweaters.

I'd passed her a million times on the way to the library, holding my breath, avoiding eye contact. I thought she'd smell like urine or disease up close, but right at that second she smelled more like cinnamon and cream. I wanted to pull her beautiful tit out and drink her while she smoothed my hair. Looks like he's in a place of tranquility, she said as she crouched beside us. Then she gently cupped his head in her hand and said hey, hey, wake up.

hangnail, flood, sorry

2011-02-28T20:05:00.041-06:00

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‘Smoked trout risotto,’ he says, ‘coriander, lemon rind, pepper.’

‘The crisper’s half the size it should be! But it has one of those built in ice crushers. I like that.'

'Sorry, not coriander. Just pepper.'

'You press your glass against a leaver on the front of the refrigerator and then crushed ice comes out from somewhere inside the freezer.'

He nods. Chews at his hangnail. Goes back to talking about fish.

‘Caught a big one at the trout farm in the country. Great day for fishing that day. Sun wasn’t too strong. People were flooding in and out.’

She smiles, ‘Do you know what I like to do? I like to put a little crushed ice in my bloody mary.’

'Yes. Ice keeps things cool. I always take an ice bucket with me when I go fishing.'

'It's refreshing, isn't it. Drinking a bloody mary on a Sunday morning.'

'It's pleasant. Very pleasant out there in the country.'
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camera, sign, chandelier

2011-02-23T10:35:00.003-06:00

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These are the mementos we cannot capture in song or on paper. We cannot hold their essence within a melody or ink, bronze or clay; no camera can shutter this place between us. This chance to know delirium and dust.

If I am so grateful to have "found" you, then why do I feel so "lost in your eyes"? Its the endless deeps, oblivions, oblivious, and time may tell that I have known your ink stained hands and mason jars with willows, the loveliest of leaves, the boldest of lines, the softest of curves; the way you threw my red flannel shirt over the lamp, a mini-chandelier for us to swing from, while the snow fell as frozen stars in the warm glows of the streetlights, but then everything has a warmth and a glow melting the icy fear that grips the heart; the inevitable urge to foresee the future is dangerous especially when the moon becomes a sliver yet returns full bodied, red as Luna's blue-blood cycle.

This maybe one that I tear off the page, fold up and put in your worry jar. I need not fear, for in the dream you cut his hands off, not to cause pain but to help him heal. Aren't we all on an endless expedition, looking for signs – between the stars and in the rising stems from the rich soil, the roots that hold them in place as they push down, through the ground, searching for nourishment.
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wholegrain, perspire, vigilant

2011-02-18T20:48:00.003-06:00

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It was cramped, trying to pull things out, put things in, allswhile the occupied slot was what she tried to focus on, while her polyester businessman was vigilant for whatever his hands could reach underneath her blousetop. The lunch she'd had that day was beginning to wane the strength of her legs; next time whole grains could give her endurance a boost, versus the fries and shake, which made made her crash too soon. Though she was not facing him, she could smell the man's perspiration; a rich mix of cheese danish and Diet Mountain Dew. She didn't prefer the drinkers smelling of leather, and booze and Tic-Tacs; they had a hard time being hard and reminded her too much of her uncles -- it didn't matter which one. A rough spot hit as they slid, detached, and reattached above the toilet. An announcement was made in German, an apology for the turbulence, please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts -- which set off the climax, a white flash, a wave of euphoria tingling fingertips, white noise, bells in spring, and whoosh -- the evidence went flying past the clouds above an ocean separating land from land these shuttles made for any sort of beast willing to let his libido roam on a dare. The best part was at home, naked in her husband's arms, telling him she wanted a baby, warm and wet, smelling sweet with aspartame honey, suitcase still packed; him saying no baby no, as though it made a difference; either way.
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camera, sign, chandelier

2011-02-17T13:18:00.002-06:00

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Isabelle had never before been inside a house that had a chandelier in it – let alone eleven chandeliers at her last count, one in every downstairs room at least – and had actually only recently (but luckily, considering right-here right-now) found out what a chandelier is; like those shut-off tribes in the interior of Africa who had no word for snow, or conversely the Inuit clans who were oblivious to most things – coconuts, sand, giraffes – Isabelle had never needed a term for the ornate sparkling chandeliers that hovered above her now, as if she was standing on the ocean floor and great giant jellyfish floated above her, each one isolated and lifeless. If she’d had her camera around her neck, like she nearly always did, it would’ve been almost impossible to not snap umpteen shots of these angelic umbrella-shaped sculptures of gold and glass, to squat down in furthest corners and balance upon banisters in search of the best shot, the shots that sought to be as unique as daguerreotypes were originally intended to be. But she’d seen the sign at the entrance – STRICTLY NO PHOTOGRAPHS – with a cartoon rendering of an old-fashioned camera half-obscured by that universal ‘forbidden’ sign, the thick red circle with rigid slash through its middle. All she could do was pay as much attention as possible, and hope her memory could be at least a tiny bit as enduring as her magical Nikon. Isabelle brushed her hands down the thighs of her skirt, looked back up to the deep-sea-ish chandelier that didn’t-blob above her head, and continued to wait.
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driving, knee-high, bounty

2011-02-17T13:17:00.001-06:00

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If Jean-Claude was going to be successful in seducing Charlotte, this crab bisque on the stove he was ever-so-gently swirling, this desert-sand-red crab bisque that simmered every-so-slightly as if a seabreeze was shifting across its surface, this lustrous, creamy, delicately-balanced crab bisque that tasted like the shores of Montpellier – like home – would be the olfactory keystone, the gastronomic lynchpin, the satiating key to Charlotte’s (obviously metaphorical) chastity belt. This was the most solemn and somber he’d been about any sexual bounty, and Jean-Claude had chased down, stuck his claws into, and feasted upon (again, all metaphorical; just read all this as completely emblematic) many targets, prey that was female, male, and other. He had sexual intercourse like other people travelled: sometimes for work, sometimes for fun, but always considering it truly necessary. He had first seen Charlotte when he was driving his elderly uncle’s 1964 Jaguar back to Montpellier; Uncle Francis had been visiting Paris for the weekend (not to see Jean-Claude, of course, not since that Christmas a few years back) and Uncle had up and had a stroke whilst walking through the Latin Quarter, and died. So Jean-Claude had listened to his mother plead and beg him to help, just this once, and so Jean-Claude drove the Jaguar and spotted Charlotte walking along the quiet countryside road in her knee-high socks, and he stopped and he talked, and now he found himself hovering over today’s third attempt at crab bisque. Still, he reckoned, if this bisque wasn’t perfect, he always had that leftover Rozerem, the only sleeping pill he’d tried that was undetectable by taste when crushed between two soup spoons and stirred into a glass of his favourite sauvignon.
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Kmart, slick, curve

2011-02-10T21:48:00.011-06:00

Every eight seconds a unified clap! exploded from the back room, followed by foot thumping and Tina Turner's singing. It was Ruth’s 40th birthday. The party was pumpin'. Women in high waisted jeans line danced their buns around the room while Damien, drunk as can be, flailed his arms out the back window yelling, "Nutbush! Oh, Nutbush."

It was 1994 and Boronia was a great place to be. There was a Kmart, a Sizzler, and a myriad of public schools. If that didn't wet your appetite, there was a single screen cinema and a $2 Shop as well. Things were easy in Boronia. You could wear velcro shoes if you wanted to, because no one ever looked twice, or wondered much about anything. At least, that's what the historians concluded.

The stripper was supposed to arrive at midnight and parade about the backyard in bottomless chaps. When word got out everyone could hardly contain their excitement. What kind of person took their clothes off for money? Would the stripper look people in the eye or act like no one was around? Making believe he was at home entertaining himself in the bathroom, as people do. Ladies imagined the slick curve of his muscular bottom and began checking their watches. Somewhere between second beer run and speeches people began chanting, "We want the stripper."

Sadly, the stripper never turned up. One of Ruth’s friends however, who often cracked inappropriate jokes about Damien’s sex appeal, boldly dacked him during Ruth's thank you speech. Wussing out wasn’t an option in Boronia. Damien knew he had to provide a stripper. And so, he graciously allowed everyone to bully him into riding the kitchen broomstick pantless around the party, while Ruth gaily slapped his arse and spilled beer on his favourite velcro shoes.

bum, bible, pederast

2011-02-10T17:40:00.002-06:00

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“Your headmaster, Mr Urwin – who was also my headmaster a few years back, when I sat then like you sit now, shiny-haired and farty, my bum on those same uncomfortable linoleum chairs in this same fusty hall – invited me here to your morning assembly to talk about how I became a ‘success’, which I think refers to the amount of money I have and how often my name is mentioned in the good pages of the newspaper, but you are that delicious adolescent age with your grassy knees and the perspiration beading on the not-yet mustaches of your upper lips, and thus you do not really care about how the affable boy I was, a boy a few ticks higher than the standard deviation in just about all areas of life, came to make more money than Joe Bloggs, and although the smell of wealth around these school grounds is just as pungent as when I flitted about making a proper nuisance of myself and generally ignoring the malarkey that came from the mouths of elders like your Smurf-like headmaster sitting there, his pudgy legs swinging because his high-backed mahogany chair belongs in the palace of Emperor Mao, or maybe behind the citadel walls of Nero’s Rome, if I was to stand here before the sea of your sweet blank-slate faces and extol the absolute pleasure that money brings, the bliss that comes when you can buy anything you want – remember this – even the most illegal of illegals, then that would buck the Christian principles decreed in the Good Book, the principles by which the esteemed school professes to govern by, such as that to be a pederast is a sin, although the bible is actually rife with homosexuality and pedophilia – I’m not kidding, take a look, and ask Reverend Michaels, I assume he’s still drifting about – and I am not about to be different, because to be different around here is death.”
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squeamish, triptych, lamb

2011-02-07T18:36:00.009-06:00

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Eveline sat at his desk, frantically finishing a political theory paper he had due in the morning. He looked at the time. 10:38.

It was time to prepare lunch.

In the kitchen he chopped an onion, retrieved a jar of pickles, mayo from his fridge. Fishing around the cupboard, he scanned a triptych of spices. Bypassing canned soups, corn, beans, and tunafish, he finally found what he needed.

Hmm, liver, lamb...cod.

Returning to his base concoction, Eveline cracked open two aluminum cans of Mighty Meow; he let the sumptuous gravy drizzle in; squeamish, he let out a gutteral euuuggh! then stirred everything together.

He spread the mixture between two slices of white bread, cut the sandwich in half, picked up one half and smelled it. Not bad. He grabbed a handful of tortilla chips from a bag, and a soda. He walked back to his desk and waited.

At 11:20, Lawrence Freightrain entered Eveline's front door.

Wassup man! Just stopped by to see what you were up to! Aww, damn, I'm hungry, you got anything to eat around here? I know you do, ya rich prick! Haha.

Lawrence, ambled over to the fridge.

Sheeit man, where's the beef, bro? I gotta get back to class!

He trundled over to Eveline's desk.

Doin a paper, huh? Oh yeah, what's this, tuna, I love tuna, can I have it?

He grabbed half the sandwich and crammed it in his mouth, following it with a handful of chips; he cracked the soda and guzzled.

Suddenly he stopped, half-chew, with a puzzled looked his face, looked at Eveline...and let out the wettest, foulest burp imaginable.

Dude, next time, a little less onion!

Then, like a flash, Lawrence grabbed the other half of the sandwich and was gone, leaving Eveline alone again with his paper.
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fuzzy, incense, stack

2011-02-03T11:57:00.001-06:00

He was pissing with the door open again, she couldn't believe it. He left the toilet seat up, too, didn't flush, didn't wash his hands; she could imagine, above the acidic yellow bowl foam, the spray of urine on the toilet seat, spritzed all over her stack of dog-eared books, and on the floor at the base of the toilet. He walked back into her bedroom.

Good morning beautiful!

You know I have two roommates, right?

Oh I wasn't thinking. Head's fuzzy.

It's one thing not to flush, it's another to leave the door open like that. It's Sunday. They're both here.

I'm sorry. Wanna get some breakfast?

No, I have to go, and you have to go. But you have to go now, so I can get ready.

Will I see you again?

Probably not.

And that was that. She hadn't invited him to come to Brooklyn in the first place. He was just there, trying to get her drunk on all night gin and tonics, so he could fuck her and convince her that they'd been in love this whole time they'd been apart. What a moron. He looked better when he wasn't smiling. Too much gum, not enough teeth. His lips stretched wide and too thin, looking worse than the pout that sat on his mouth when he frowned. And his sperm reminded her of aspirin, when you had to chew it. Defective is all she could figure.

The smell of fresh incense wafted from the next room, then a burst of skunkish pot, shuffling, and a few dry coughs.

Go, now, before they see you. Be careful driving back to Texas. Please, don't call me. And thanks for last night, it was fun.
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write, now!, please

2011-01-31T03:19:00.001-06:00

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Her head sunk write deep back into the pillow, she thinks,
we live in a time of whirlpools, a time when a new person can be slung straight from the womb (itself an internal washing machine with its liquidy vortex of amniotic fluid looping around the walnut-shaped fist of an unborn) into an awaiting eddy of family pleased, him/her already straitjacketed in swaddlecloths, and amid the lights and colours and orange faces that evoke a Kubrickesque carousel, him/her being pass-the-parceled around the circle from nonna to grandpa to auntie to cousin to nurse to little big brother Helmut and sooner or later back to mother, that is if same mother isn’t lying back flushed from exertion and also from knowing that she, by bumping her procreâtus into the first of life’s undercurrents has at the same time herself dropped a little bit out of the flow, is feeling the (now!) bumpbumpsnag of the first anchor stick deep below and a second later slow her up-to-now-unwavering momentum, is feeling the anchorline tug at her middle ever-so-slightly;
and she remembers just a few weeks ago finding Helmut crouched and squatting over by the windowsill in his bedroom – for a moment she thought he was doing a poo – his child’s fishing rod lying in parts on the carpet, so that she wasn’t even sure if it was still a fishing rod, and when she quietly said his name he seemed not to hear, and after staying still for a moment with her head tilted, admiring his little silhouette in the white light of the window, she walked over to him and was about to say his name again when she saw his hands, his fat little fingers squirming around like worms, trying to tie fishing line around the swollen belly of a housefly;
and she cried.
.

fall, Music! Music! Music!, cherries

2011-01-31T03:16:00.002-06:00

.
“Everyone thinks juggling is about numbers,” says gran, who once told me that she (gran) has VHS tapes of her (gran) juggling a dozen firey knives. “But it’s not.”
I am listening to gran, who is in the loungeroom on her MacBook Air speaking to my dad her son-in-law on skype. My mum died a few months ago of a disease called suicide, and my dad said that I’d better go and stay with gran for a bit in her big ol’ breezy queenslander in Queensland, just for a few days or so while he sorts things out and tidies things up and deals with being the fall guy for all this mess. He bought me a MacBook Pro and bought gran a MacBook Air and we all sat in the loungeroom when he flew with me to take me here, and we skyped three-way to each other even though we could see each other In Real Life.
I can hear gran throwing the pits from the cherries she is eating into the old metal billy can that she uses for her cigarette butts and hazelnut shells. The billy can hangs from a parrot perch that used to have a parrot named Percy on it. He died a long time before mum. The cherry pits go ping, ping, ping.
I am watching TV on my MacBook Pro because dad also bought me a USB-TV-plug because he knows gran’s TV is older than the dinosaurs. I am watching three TV shows at once in three different browser tabs. One show is cartoons, Family Guy is on now, I don’t like Family Guy, one show is a documentary on frogs, I am watching that, and one show is a music channel called ‘Music! Music! Music!’.
“It was annoying, people always asking: ‘How many balls can you juggle?’”
Ping.
.

lethargy, kelp, marble

2011-01-31T02:59:00.000-06:00

.
Because she’d told him that anywhere in Friedrichshain, Kreutzberg or Neukölln would place him a short bike ride from most of the city’s finest, and because she was the first person who’d ever used the word ‘fantod’ in conversation with him – and she hadn’t even done so with irony, or double-irony, or lethargy, or anything! – and because he was akin to Donnie Darko in that he liked to see the jellyfish tubes of where people had gone before and where they were going next, he found himself standing in the orangest and tiniest bathroom he’d ever been in – tinier even than a hole-in-the-wall café’s legally-required hole-in-the-floor – in an 26m2 studio apartment in Berlin with a flamboyantly homosexual real estate agent who was 60+ years old and over 6 ft 5 and who weighed less than a dragonfly’s wing, an estate agent in violet pinstripe suit and mauve tie who was less-absent-mindedly-more-probably-deliberately playing with the pump action hand sanitiser bottle on the little shelf above the teacup-sized faux-marble basin so that every once in a while a slingshot of pink sanitising liquid shot out and added to the waxy slither of pink goop already on the floor, a not-insubstantial kelpy daub of goop that suggested that the estate agent had been in this same apartment several times today and had stood in the same position half-in half-out of the butter dish-sized bathtub, suggestively fondling the hand sanitiser and talking about the ‘proximity to public parks’ (pronouncing the Ps with pursed lips, lips as wet as a playful porpoise) and the ‘thickness of the redbrick walls’, shifting his weight so that the foot of his that was in the bathtub sounded a little like a hightop sneaker screeching on a basketball court, the screeching echoed like they were in a cave the size of everything.
.

chocolate, paint, volcano

2011-01-10T22:40:00.058-06:00

While Eating Chocolate Ripple Cake &
Painting My Son's Volcano Diorama...

‘Hey,’ he says, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

I prepare myself for the worst: he’s on crack, has contracted AIDS from a biker, and is leaving tonight. I am a vain, negligent mother who let her son walk home alone from school!

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘The video store delivers.’

While Ordering Shrimp with Broccoli & Special Fried Rice...

I catch a glimpse of him picking his nose while he waits for me in the car. He does it the same way his father did. Thumb rims 'round the nostril. Outside in. He nonchalantly wipes the booger on the shoulder of his sweater, then notices me looking at him.

His eyes say that it never happened, but beneath this casual disposition is a look of shame, followed by a quiet apology. Why does he care what I think? I never told him not to pick his nose.

Maybe we are genetically bound to be our parents, and I, unknowingly, hold my mother's disapproving gaze.

When the restaurateur hands me our takeout I make the courageous decision to pick my nose in front of him. I also promise myself never to set foot in this particular restaurant again.

jazz, liberty, arrogance

2010-12-31T22:27:00.000-06:00

I woke up this morning with an incredible hangover. It's one of the worst possible feelings, the anvils clanking into a stinging, the toxic poison sensation permeating my tongue, my skin, that all too familiar residue-bloated abdomen, tight with concentrated bio hazard. For the cherry add a strong sense of liberty, arrogance, the urgency of having to be somewhere so soon, that coffee's out of the question.

Then a flashback in trying to cover a zit, after lipstick and Visine, 7-11 for a pack of smokes, an upturned handbag, a bottle of beige concealer smashes, but I still ask for matches, apologizing profusely to the clerk. A house party in Bel-Air, the view was breathtaking, even at night, with tiki torches, on a deck with stilts. Miraculously over-abundant booze, acid jazz, shop-talking wannabes, movie stars, producers.

Where's Fran? He's in Russia, fucking-off, or whatever. I'm in a short film, let me get you my screenplay. An out-of-place cowboy from Riverside says: I want to punch everyone in this place. See that guy there in the cardigan? I really want to punch him. Punch them all: I say, in your mind, one-by-one. Until they're all decimated forever.
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simulation, fool, observatory

2010-12-31T22:06:00.000-06:00

Any fool could've seen what I was getting into. The simulation of co-dependent bliss in coupling. Point: does belonging to someone add to a sense of purpose? I'd tried every which way until now. Safety and comfort at night locked in, and mornings grounded with nourishment. It's the important meals we have to worry about, the training it takes to eat them alone. Observatory facts state: that ample freedom is a resource for loneliness: the canyon is too vast with all that space, and echoes, and sand. Do you think sand feels free? On the contrary: sand is best, from the beach, kept in a shoe the entire car ride home; the attention it receives from heel to toe is not much different from love.
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sweetly, optimal, shirtless

2010-12-31T19:13:00.018-06:00

.
Justine emerged the shower. She closed the space cracked in the window, so the condensation couldn't accumulate, so the neighbors couldn't see her at the sink, checking her face, combing her hair.

She picked up her comb, and flicked the teeth for crust and debris. Tufts of fuzz waved hello; she picked them out, picked a robe off a hook and slinked into the living room to check on Munro.

There he sat, half stuffed on the bed, shirtless, limp, sweetly spread for optimal cuddling. You're falling apart, said Justine. Your fuzz is all over the sink, all over the floor.

Come here, she said with a needle and thread in her hands. Your eyes are weepy, barely hanging by a string, your chest is matted, your legs are gaunt. A sack of skin you are. A useless knapsack for our house cat.

Do you want to cuddle? said the body on the bed. I love you, the only thing I want in this world is to love you. I'm sorry I used your comb. I was trying to look nice. You don't hold me in your sleep anymore.
When I reach for you, you pull away.
You've grown tired of me. What I am is not pristine, I know. But your hair smells so nice after you wash it. Your body smooth with cream. Lie down next to me, let me touch you once more, and I will let you be.

Justine approached the bed, removed her robe and wrapped her arms around Munro. Her arms squeezed, wrapping her legs around his body, the faint wisps of tears taking rise to the silence of the room.
.

liminal. whale, sham

2010-11-30T22:30:00.001-06:00

.
I saw a hale and hearty old man, with a handful of sandwiches, ham, neither in the park nor on the street, liminally butt-parked, beckoning every dog that walked by. I approached with my Rexes, spritzing post, sunbleached bench, weeds, piss drawn puddles and everything in between and after. We walked past the man, cursing the sun, saying hey puppy, puppy, slapping a ham sandwich on his palm, taking loud panting breaths with his tongue out.

What’re their names?

Rex.

Both of them?

Both I said.

Well why the hell would you do something like that?

All the men in my family are named Hugh.

Got any brothers?

Three.

All Hugh?

Yes.

What about sisters?

We have one younger sister named Rachel. Friends. It’s my mom’s favorite show. She met Courtney Cox once, at McDonalds.

No way.

Tell me, sir. Why do you act the way you do when dogs walk by? Do you have your own dog? Why do you carry that bag of treats, and sit here all the time?

Have you ever heard of fragrant beef? asked the man.

What do you mean?

I once knew a well traveled man, who’d been all around Asia, and he said whenever you see fragrant beef on a Chinese menu, don’t order it; it's dogs.

What does this have to do with what you’re doing? I said. Are you trying to open a restaurant?

No! said the man, I had my own dog once, Bruce, a black poodle, he was a champion. One day I lost a bet to a Chinaman, playing checkers in the park, I run outta money and he let me bet Bruce.

Are you serious? I said.

Maybe, said the man. Maybe I am. Right Rex? Sit. Sit, boys. Now play dead.

mocha, holy, wino

2010-11-30T21:10:00.006-06:00

Her mind was pacing, lying paralyzed in bed with the covers thrown over her face. She did not feel like being seen. Coasting through life avoiding things. Her cramps went straight to her face and guts. Coffee made her stomach palpitate. She was getting rounder. Edgier. A geometry dumptruck. Tender melons, squished and juicy. Daily fiber imperative, burnt smells of asbestos, no longer burning. It was becoming difficult to breath. Life was dark. She removed the covers from her face.

“Hey, I’m going out to get another one of those Holy-Wino grape eggnogs at the Electric Bean. Want anything? A pickle-mocha frappe? A sweet-bean-burrito protein smoothie?”

When he was gone, she rose out of bed and made some tea. No longer in anyone’s company. Soon those days would be gone. In streaks of stippled color. But at least there was a point to all that having and leaving now. Delicious, broken, all of them. A rusted pile of parts, radio, clock, metronome, dinners, dishes, top, bottom, mirrors, showers, foreign films, folk, rock, vinyl, flannel, all for the score of sacrifice. Dishes washed, counters wiped, she chopped garlic, tomatoes. She searched the freezer for bread.

supermarket, gleaning, overdose

2010-10-28T00:25:00.006-05:00

The tiny ticking of legs passing to her throat, she closed her mouth, and tongued to sip a dry and copper acid. She swallowed hard. A creature crawling passed her eye. It was dark. She reached her face and swept. Licked her lips. It was cold and there was a terrible smell, a gleaning of rotted meat; an overdose of supermarket neon came through a crack. 3 a.m. by the brisk still of delivery. A box beneath her, wet. She crawled out. Crouched behind a foot of spread feet, she spoiled her shoes and socks, again. A rotted melon, a sweet canned peach. A broken bottle in her pocket, she tore and swallowed a plastic bag. Shoved some in her ears. She crawled back in. Up, in, one foot at a time. She reached for sleep. Swallowed hard and waited. A slick warm ran her cold fingers numb. Skinny and blue was all they said. Eyes wrung, lips parched. Bless her heart. The cleaning guy prayed for days. The manager wept for weeks. Someone knew her mom. Her mom said she was Catholic. The spiders, they said, were the worst part of it all. Pouring out her lips, as if to say...
.

couch, assemblage, legacy

2010-10-23T03:20:00.003-05:00

.
We bought three acres with the insurance money and tried to plant ourselves in the dry soil. It grew fleabane and dandelion rampant among the rows of dead cotton stalks. Only the occasional wild strawberry gave any relief to the endless brown, wounds among the dead gold of the field.

You told me about your dream, how the carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes were fetuses curlicued beneath the soil waiting for some fatherly hand to coax them out. The you that rose before work in the morning and the you of your vegetable dreams watched as my careless hands guided the fruits of our labors through spring, summer, fall, winter. It was as real as Columbus Day, this endless cycle of seasons; and yet, the growth was evasive. Who knew what empty legacy kept our carrots submerged? What stale battle has left the tomatoes bitterly blighted? "Oh, you sent us to war with trumpets, with trombones, with piccolos even you called us, do not now bear our bodies home on the assemblage of your sober regret."

It is a sad truth of the soil that nothing will grow where too much is planted, how you reaped not what we had sown but what you had dreamt in the long nights of our early matrimony. Trying to couch your worries, I set up gates and laid down poison. I counted each crow with the bead of my rifle.

In time, my vigilance produced results. I gave you roasted rabbit and crow pie. I laid you down in the evening as late as the spring does the moon. And when I talked to you it was as cicadas. And when I kissed you, I kissed you as locusts.
.

turkey, furnace, machinery

2010-10-18T08:19:00.018-05:00

...some things that encouraged human relocation were:

Eviction, interracial dispute, boredom, the neighbour’s ugly washing line, bushfire, sudden death, infestation, a jail sentence, termites, accidents surrounding poorly built balconies, freeways and related noise pollution, tornado, witness protection, rabid boogie monsters, disease, bankruptcy, adultery, drummers, bullies, war and related bombings, drought (see Australia), the sudden appearance of ghost children, flooding, a bad smell, Chinese whispers, rehab, grizzly bears, allergies, failed corner store business, mental breakdown, grand prix, irritating housemate, plague, wheelchair access, divine intervention, bad reception, Melbourne Cup Carnival, sewage leaks, earthquake, Hitler, redevelopment, pedophiles, 400 kV high-tension transmission lines, tsunami, old age, alien abduction, sticky carpet, werewolf attacks, hospitalization, failed romance, general irritability, plane crash, supermarket explosion, dirty water, mind control, teenage noise pollution, creepy furnace and the related fear of machinery (see mechanophobia), nuclear disaster, spiders, financial crisis, inadequate selection of entertainment at local video store, requiring more space, marriage, career opportunity, government funding, loan approval, Roy Orbisonesque sugar daddy gift (see ‘You Got It’), house sitting, travel writing, extended holiday, sleepwalking, change of mind, spontaneous travel adventure, the sea, research, the birth of children, books, an increase in pets, Tour de France, lottery win, space exploration, trust fund, a ride in the Wonkavator, student housing arrangement, business opportunity, trucking, inheritance, the personal choice to disregard others and squat, hotel discount coupon, scuba diving, caravanning, outrageous salary increase, better cafes, starting a turkey farm, barcode competition win, couch surfing, school camp, treasure hunt, living everywhere (see Billionaire), investment opportunity, boat cruise, turning into a mermaid, renovations, boot camp, escape, taking care of business (see Bachman Turner Overdrive), wilderness retreat, building a tree house, requiring less, innovative money saving ideas like living inside a storage unit, the desire to nomadically wander, dreams, volunteering, falling in love, reprogramming, and time travel.
.

calamity, almond, moonboots

2010-10-17T19:00:00.004-05:00

.
Once in an 86 Monte Carlo, I saw him 50 feet ahead, and when I got beside him...WHAM! the hood dented, the grill smashed, and I rode that burst of adrenaline for hours with the wide-eyed look on that deer's face--seared into my head. He kicked for leverage, until he finally flopped off into the woods. Damn calamity.

I had to hear this story every time Benny got drunk. We were at Birds in Hollywood for their Happy Hour bourbon and cokes. Jessica Alba was in the back corner teasing the paparazzi by sporadically covering her face with a menu.

Oh god, are moonboots replacing Uggs?

Who cares, said Benny, she is so beautiful, look at her face! Her almond shaped eyes! Her breasts, if-she-only-knew-the-skills-I-possessed.

You should write that one down. Eminem would be jealous.

Well, I was on the topic of great racks! Did I tell you that deer was a five-point? Such a prize, a sight to behold, just like Jessica. Speaking of which, I found the perfect Gucci glasses, but they're four-hundred freakin dollars. I hate life. It's too bad the credit card companies looove me.

Hey, is Alba walking over here? I think she's coming over here Benny. Um, what do we do?

Think unfazed, think over-it.

Excuse me, I was wondering if you guys could help me out with something?

Sure, I said, what's the problem?

Well, I noticed you guys were looking at my boots, and since, you know, gay guys know everything about fashion, I was hoping you'd tell me if you think they're hip or gross. They were free, so...

Um, they're fine, said Benny. Fabulous...especially with those leggings.

Oh, whew! Thanks. You totally helped me out. Thank you so much. Go Prop 8!

We're, uh...you're welcome.
.

starter, polemic, reserve

2010-10-17T17:00:00.013-05:00

.
It happened again last night.

After it hasn't happened for a while, or is my memory more than anything ever happening at all? If it happens all the time, I just can't remember. Or am I rambling from the shock?

--of reality as a rare find these days.

We walked, a town of us, some of us by car, through a gutted clearing in nature on a mission, a pace below frantic, trying to enjoy ourselves; the rain was the starter. And then it was now.

I look down at my feet consumed by muddy water, I turn, a tidal wave bulls full speed towards me, I'm afraid it's a reserve for me. I climb for higher ground, and somehow I escape dry.

I resume walking on a bank beside a rushing river, walking in the same direction as others who are also dry and presumably familiar. I see cars zooming past me in the median.

I turn, I ask a companion: How is it possible that these cars can function this way without sinking?

They are polemic against nature, he says. Like science.

I stare at running river traffic, at people walking, beside cities that no longer seem to exist. We walk, and at least the rain has stopped.

I've seen these floods, coming or already come. A matte-wet-beige, water rambling, devouring, to make clean; it's the sound of a bath being drawn, on & on & on.

Skyscrapers, they float on rafts by a beach, and the homebodies inside are reading wet magazines.

Cities above the sea, drop ladders to submarines emerged for supplies. Powerboat archipelagos, pilots for every vessel.

And we sleep sound, and sweat with dreams of turbulence, all not forgotten by the buzz of morning.
.

jazz, liberty, arrogance

2010-10-16T23:20:00.005-05:00

.
The customs officer uses a megaphone, despite the fact that the front of the waiting line at the border crossing station is only a few metres away. It also makes no difference to him that they are indoors, in a single large room and that he has a loud enough voice so that he wouldn’t need any artificial amplification if they were much further away and outside. But he shouts into that elephant-gray megaphone watching people jump like fat in a frypan and he continues to stand behind his counter day after day, his fleshy-lipped smirk looking like anything but liberty.

The officer’s name is Ned Vizzolo, today is Friday, and although he can’t know it yet, there are two young black men waiting at the front of the line, their backpacks full of methamphetamine pills. They have just over 7,000 pills between them in vacuum-packed plastic bags.

Ned calls them up, not even bothering to aim the megaphone in their direction. They walk over with all the arrogance of youth in their stride, like the stucco floor was laid out a minute before they arrived and would be torn up and carted away the instant they were gone.

“Gentlemen,” says Ned.

The shorter of the two young black men speaks. “Tell me, my uniformed friend. Do you dig jazz?”

Ned squints and picks up a pen. “I’m sorry?”

“Jazz music. Duke Ellington. Chick Corea. Bill Evans. Kind of Blue.” The young black men are not smiling.

Ned takes in the scene. He’s just realized, a little lethargically, that today is his day. And he isn’t ready. Not at all.
.

germs, heroes, babies

2010-10-15T11:06:00.002-05:00

.
“Eye candy is your heroes, babies,” Eiji sung. “Eye candy is the way to pain.”

“Fuck’s sake, Eiji,” I said. “Lay off it. One, you’re singing a fucking gay song, and two, you’re getting all the lyrics wrong.”

I sucked up the last of my disgusting Bubble Cup drink and slammed the empty container down to emphasise my displeasure. In my few days so far in Tokyo I’d heard enough horrible singing – and not just in damn karaoke bars, but in public, everywhere, that it was the last straw to hear my friend join in with the wailing chorus. The Japs loved to wail along with the worst English pop music, almost as much as they liked to chew on whale, the Minke-eating fuckers.

“Sorry Jim,” said Eiji. “But Enrique is one cool motherfucker. He’s sexing that Anna Kournikova, the slammiest tennis player evah.”

“Don’t say ‘sexing’, you bastard. It’s not a thing you say.” I was ready to book the next flight out of this country, to flip the bird at the pretty amazing job opportunity Eiji had teed up for me through our Tumblr friendship. Yeah, I know, internet friends, real cool. But this was the first time I’d met one of them, and I hadn’t anticipated how different we are from our online selves. It was as strange and rare as two germs meeting in the bloodstream.

“Alright Jim, I’ll shut up now. Anyway, it’s time for us to go and meet your new boss. Mr Gotu is going to be super pleased, super pleased with you and me both!”

Eiji pulled me up by the arm, pushed me towards the door and picked up both our bags. I stepped into the street and looked up, which had been my reaction the whole time I’d been here. The Japs are short little cunts, but fuck do they build high.

I looked back to street level and Eiji climbing into a black four-wheel-drive.

“Come on, Jim,” he called. “Get in.”
.

bomb, banana, ancestor

2010-10-12T21:03:00.005-05:00

.
The garbage truck crashed and roared like a troll under a bridge. She could hear it through the window of her third-story apartment, the sounds of its trashcan-munching anger rolling like waves over the rooftops. Did you know that waves, ocean or sea waves, come in sets of seven? Her younger brother had told her that a few nights ago when she was babysitting. He also told her that the waves get progressively bigger, so that the seventh is the king, the boss, bettering all ancestors who’d come before. That night she’d made them both banana sundaes (not splits; there was no careful splitting of the fruit, but instead specked oval discs, lopped off haphazardly) and they sat and watched some TV show about gay guys dressing up someone’s house. Her brother wanted to watch it and she didn’t care one way or another. She’d let him do just about anything when she looked after him; she knew she would need him as an ally when they were both adults, and wanted his memories to chock full with junk food and feeling free.

The garbage truck slid into sight between two buildings, turning into an alleyway so that it was heading straight in her direction. It reminded her of a shark, coasting through the late-afternoon streets, seeking prey. The glass windscreen was completely reflective so that it was easy to believe there was no human involvement in the collection of garbage. The jointed metal arm reached out, a giant flexing limb, and snapped up the trashcans, throwing them down like cups of beer. She watched as the truck continued on, and she thought of her brother some more. The sun burned a deep umber and the world kept changing in tiny clusterbomb increments, as normal as anything.
.

pocket, hornpipe, caper

2010-09-06T04:23:00.011-05:00

She’s jogging and, between pants, telling me that she’s not interested in romantic relationships right now. I wonder if that means she’s still up for casual sex, because I would definitely like to hornpipe her.

‘We could go out for ice cream,’ I suggest, ‘as friends.’

She winces a little, takes a sip from her water bottle. She’s as pretty as a caper, and I’m certain I could give her an orgasm, if she’d just give me a shot. I could make her happy. I’m a funny guy with a good job, what more could she want? I suggest the ice cream thing again. ‘Just ice cream,’ I say, ‘no pressure.’

She coughs a little and looks around her. The nape of her neck is wet with sweat and it’s dripping down her back. She’s a good runner, really good. I’ve seen her here a lot and I like that about her. One time we got talking. She was searching her pockets and asked me for the time.

'6.30,' I told her.

‘That late?’ she said.

‘I know, right? Where does the day go?’

I forget what she said after that, but I found myself asking her questions. She’s a travel agent, would like to run a marathon, she wears Asics, and, said that they were ‘alright’. She’s a cool girl, really nonchalant and easy-going.

‘I’m just running,’ she says, ‘just trying to do my thing.’

‘Sure,’ I say light heartedly, because I don’t want her to think I’m uptight.

Our treadmills keep churning and our limbs move in unison, then hers stops and she jumps off.

‘See ya,’ she says with a smile.

‘See ya!’ I reply.

defiance, contraband, mascara

2010-09-05T07:03:00.001-05:00

Melanie had studied makeup artistry but wasn’t interested in working at a makeup counter where she’d be expected to pile on mascara and smile at everyone in the mall. Melanie wanted to do something meaningful, so, as an act of defiance, she took a job in a funeral parlour.

‘One day a body came in - an unidentified male. He was wearing this awful green jacket, but his hair was this great mousy brown mess pile on his head.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Yeah. I was looking at this guy thinking he must be a bum or something, because he was pretty unkempt. Rough looking, you know, plus the jacket. Maybe he just dealt in contraband. Kept a low profile. I got to thinking about who he might have been as a child and, after a while, I came to realise that I’d seen him before.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘I couldn’t work it out. I thought, maybe I had given him spare change downtown or something.’

‘Right.’

‘I moved his head to the side and that’s when I realised I really did know him, well, kind of knew him.’

‘How?’ I asked .

‘It was Jeff Magnum.’

‘But Jeff Magnum isn’t dead, Mel.’

‘I know, right, but this guy really looked like him.’

‘Okay.’

‘Anyway, I figured if it was Jeff Magnum he wouldn’t mind if I kissed him, because he loved Anne Frank, and she was long dead after he got infatuated with her.’

I didn’t know what to say. Prior to this conversation we had been fucking. Now everything was turning yellow.

‘It was a once in a lifetime opportunity,’ she said.

Later, I asked Melanie if she knew how common necrophilia is.

‘More common than you think,' she said. 'But, you know, probably less common than you'd imagine.'

glossy, crunchy, soliloquy

2010-09-04T10:55:00.028-05:00

We heard something dazzling was on its way. Something big and bright, that had the ability to magnify itself and take us - a UFO, maybe, or a time machine. Some hoped it would be romantic like, love or something. I’m not sure why they hoped for that. Everyone who had ever been in love was now stuck inside their homes listening to sad songs. Still, some folk held onto the idea and the rest of us tried not to judge them for it.

For a long time a lot of us all but forgot about the thing that was supposed to appear. We settled with watching television because it glowed, told us stories, and you could buy pretty big, glossy ones in department stores. It was good. Sometimes we’d all get together and watch funny programs, but then, there were people who’d switch it on to get away, others who couldn’t talk about anything else; reciting lines from their favourite programs at parties. Some said they couldn’t sleep without it on…

Anyway, one day we got a call. Something was moving in the desert. Apparently it was bigger than the Opera House and making a lot of noise. I prepared a packed lunch, it included a Crunchy bar and a litre of apple juice. I threw on my safari shirt, which always made me feel more authentic, and strung some binoculars over my neck to complete the ensemble.

What we got was unexpected. It was talking to itself and doing so rather loudly. Its dialogue was messy, sort of like it hadn’t thought things through. Maybe it had arrived early and was embarrassed. I contacted my boss: Soliloquy machine. Probably not a time machine. Possibly intelligent.

crepe, hand job, anti-gravity

2010-09-04T04:54:00.050-05:00

There’s a time and place for enjoyable things like smoking cigarettes, eating crepes and fucking. Unfortunately, in the modern world, we only have time to attempt these things while driving.

Mark looks to his wife, Louise, who's frantically flipping through the street directory, and then into the rearview mirror.

‘We’re so late!’ gasps Louise.

Turning onto the freeway he can't help himself, Mark begins mouthing off about the incompetent TV watching son-of-a-bitch 4WD mother (fucker) who’s tailing gaiting them.

‘Why do people have televisions in their cars?’ Mark asks his wife.

‘I dunno,' mumbles Louise. ‘Page 45…’

‘Fuckheads - that’s why.’

Louise shifts in her seat. ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘...C12. Mark! We’re so late.’

‘We’re always late, babygirl,’ says Mark before caressing Louise's knee.

The traffic slows then stops. The couple sit staring blankly at the street directory. Louise sighs.

‘I don’t know. I can’t stand these things. Christenings.’ She drops the street directory onto the backseat. Mark looks to his wife with a half-smile.

‘Fuck it,’ he says, grabbing her.

The couple kiss, and then kiss some more, and then Mark undoes Louise’s seatbelt and Louise looks at him like, no you didn’t, and then things get slippery; Mark moves his hand up Louise’s skirt and it's like anti-gravity; Louise's arse rises, she moans something incoherent before madly pashing Mark's neck, and Mark replies with something equally silly like, fuck yeah, and then the lady in the 4WD behind them honks her horn.

Everyone, everywhere, every day, is miserable, and everyone, everywhere, every day, feels starved of something, thinks Mark as he begins driving again. Still, I want a hand job.

maraca, curling iron, painless

2010-09-02T12:12:00.006-05:00

I showed up to the wedding late as usual – late everywhere I go – and put my awkwardly wrapped gift on the table in the foyer. A curling iron, the cheapest item on the list. The wrapping paper clung lumpily to it; it looked like some sort of festive sandwich.

“Thank God,” Jennifer said, coming out into the foyer in her wedding gown. Her face was flushed with happy anticipation.

“Traffic,” I lied. “You look amazing.”

“And you look like an overgrown child,” she said. She tugged my bowtie into place – the tuxedo rental had nearly ruined me financially – and refastened one of my cuff links. I had a moment of panic back in the hotel room where I realized I had no idea how to put the damn things on. I actually had to Google it.

A few months earlier, she had called me out of the blue. “I want you to be a groomsman.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea considering.”

“Come on. I promise it will be painless.”

She had no idea what she was talking about, of course. I had introduced Dale and Jenn, neutering myself in the process. Correction: the neutering had been completed a long time back. I could no longer want what others wanted.

Now, I was in a row with the other groomsmen outside the rooftop patio where the wedding was to take place. The music started and I paired off with a bridesmaid, marching down the aisle with a dignity I did not feel. My heart rattled like a maraca and I had a vision of the events to come: the dancing, the glasses raised in toast, everyone inside the moment but me.

This was how it would be-- not just for that night, but for the rest of my human life.

stub, sway, heat lightning

2010-08-08T15:26:00.005-05:00

Man will not believe what man is capable to do until man has it done to him. Take me for instance, what killed his own for a mere thirty dollars of gold. This was in the 40s when panning became the devil’s deal, sifting through the russet-colored earth for tooth-sized glittering. Me, my Martha was sick and I knew it was strike it rich or no Cincinnati doctor. So when Mitchell said he’d pay for the horses I promised her to write.

The camp was all stubs of cactuses and scruffy sage. The river bed was not but a piss-trickle and it swayed in the drunk heat. We took our pans and sifted in our bare feet, our backs getting red as sin in the sun. Two days went. Two weeks. We hungered and thirsted and were at each other’s throats.

One morning, rainless hot lightning flashed along the river basin. Mitchell must a woke prior to me, because he was already stooped and clutching something like to hide it. I said show it here, brother, remember everything that’s yours is mine. And vice-a verse. When he would not, I grabbed him by his skinny donkey neck and shoved him into the dirt. At first, I did not understand the blood. I wiped my face and came away clean. Mitchell didn’t seem to be breathing rightly so I poked him with my boot and said come to now. The blood came from his mouth and his hand slacked. When I saw the dirty lump there, I almost laughed.

I know you won’t believe me, old man as I am, talking to you from this solitary cell at the advent of the new, glittering century. But you wanted to know my crime and there you have it.

hydro, vagina, lump

2010-08-05T21:51:00.005-05:00

.
When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t remember your name. You might think this would bring me relief. Not so: I wanted you back. I was addicted to my self-pity. It was better than the alternative – these too-bright, endless days.

Or maybe it was just this lump of wax in my ear. If I am forgetful and sleep on my left side, I wake up unable to hear. Clogged and unbalanced. This morning, I decided to do something about it and walked through the summer swamp to the Rite-Aid. The hydrogen peroxide solution had not worked. Time for an ear candle.

In the artificially frigid store, a little girl ran up and down the aisle with her dress lifted and her underwear down – her little, hairless, harmless, perfectly compact vagina showing. A neat line drawing, having nothing to do with sex. Her mother chased after her, mortified. And what I thought was: let her show the world.

Do you remember when we were six-years-old and we pretended you were a sleeping princess? You’d dress in a tiara and a white dress and get under the covers. I’d get in with you and crawl between your legs and kiss your scentless vagina to wake you up. Still, when I think of sex, there is some of that mixed in – revulsion and fascination at what you had there. How much unlike mine it was.

How did this lead to talk of marriage and long screaming matches, my waving a kitchen knife at you to get you to listen to a single goddamn word? The drug store didn’t have any of those ear candles, so I went back into the heat with my hands empty and my ear still so much dead meat.

At least I now remembered your name.
.

velvet, buzzsaw, claptrap

2010-07-29T22:37:00.005-05:00

There they were, ugly, shriveled and glorious: Botticelli’s fingers. In a case of red velvet, they looked like dried-up sausages. I had to have them.

This was my third estate auction of the morning and all I’d seen was the usual claptrap – paintings of Indians, broken muskets, chairs too wooden and narrow to sit in but too new to be worth anything. I’d had my man drive me to this final auction with my expectations low, a headache like a buzz-saw.

But the minute I saw the mummified fingers that had painted the Birth of Venus, the headache vanished. I was not just attracted to their gruesome value but to their closeness to beauty. They had not created beauty – Botticelli’s mind had done that – but they were the medium by which it expressed.

There was just one problem: Franco. As the bidding began, I could see he coveted the fingers too, and as usual for the wrong reasons. We engaged in one of our epic bidding wars, but this one I would not lose.

“10,000 pounds,” I cried.

“Fifteen!”

“Twenty!”

I had nearly reached my limit. “Twenty-five and I’ll throw in the car.”

Franco sat down, stunned. Beside me, my man Henry blanched: I know that all masters imagine that their servants were born to do their particular service, but he truly loved that 1937 Rolls Royce Phantom III.

“Mr. Evans,” he protested.

I couldn’t bear to see him whimper. “And Henry, too.”

An hour later, after signing the deed and bidding farewell to a distraught Henry, I walked down a country road overgrown with nettles. When it began to downpour, I simply clutched the case to my chest, imagining myself on the coast of Italy, in a studio full of warm, natural light.

hand, shovel, cigarette

2010-07-27T14:55:00.016-05:00

.
elegy for a crush on mikayo

sometimes the letters played
in the heart waters like younger
girls swimming between the legs
of taller girls standing upright in a lake,
masking their laughing mouths all by hand.

there was
no emptiness to feel
without abstract numbness moving
coldly through my shivering fingertips
as the lines of her separated the waters from
the waters, told them where to go in elegant bone.

there were never
enough towels around
to keep her flowing hair dry.

never believe crying
into a pillow makes
lying alone in a bed
symbolic.

many red flowers are drowned
in rain, in cat urine, in lengthy cigarette ash.

yet fresh hands waiting to be old will still be out
in the morning planting them again.

holes dug out of love are always easy
to dig deep as the warm bodies that fill them.

friend, hand over the hand shovel,
and no one gets hurt.

the gardening someone left undone here
will use this whole day up.

we will go swimming tomorrow. i promise.
.

polynomial, baggie, shrapnel

2010-07-22T16:10:00.006-05:00

Until her father was arrested for the murder of his wife, Sara Montgomery and I used to sit in Fischer Park and smoke pot in the back of her van. The van, a diseased-looking, mottled orange, was a testament to Sara’s strangeness – that she did not belong in this neighborhood, in that big gray castle on the hill, with her adoptive father and his pretty little wife.

I was supposed to be helping Sara with her math homework. But we did not talk about polynomials. Instead, she told me how her father lied about everything.

“He writes these horseshit war stories and people eat them up,” she’d say. “He claims to have shrapnel in his leg. But I’ve never seen it.”

On New Year’s Eve, Sara snuck me up one of a dozen hidden staircases in her house. In an attic the size of a football field, she cried on my shoulder about Timothy Abbey, who had dumped her for someone more “normal.” I told her she would find someone else, hoping furtively that that person would be me.

For some time, in the distant caverns of the house, a dog had been barking. As the sound grew closer, it became a human voice.

“Get the fuck out!” her father screamed. “Now!”

We ran out of the house and drove to the safe haven of the park. A glow rose from the dip around the tennis courts. A white pick-up truck was parked there, flames leaping from its shattered windows. Glass lay pixilated on the frozen lawn. How had it arrived there? And why was it on fire? I imagined mafia types disposing of a body, or drunk drivers swerving off the road with lit cigarettes.

When I asked Sara about it, she just shrugged and produced a baggie full of pre-rolled joints. “Sometimes things catch fire."

cog, workbench, razor strop

2010-07-21T03:30:00.002-05:00

.
The hammering coming from the kitchen woke Nessie. She didn’t remember falling asleep and was alarmed to find the full midday sun coming through the window. A lifting sensation ran from her head to her stomach as if something air-light but hard was loose and rattling around inside her. Panic. And then the hammering brought her back to the present, and Henry, and their impending move into the old folk‘s home.

When she entered the kitchen she found Henry on his knees in front of the cabinets hammering the doors shut. He was fully dressed with one of his checkered dress shirts tucked neatly into his navy slacks looking as if it were forty years ago and he was once again building their home. He didn’t stop or even turn to acknowledge her.

He had started reasonably enough with packing his razor strop and fishing dimes from behind the couch saying, “They’re already getting the house for almost nothing” and shoving the coins into his pocket with a satisfied grunt. Then he had given their daughter his workbench, their daughter who didn’t even have any tools but who was more hesitant to force he and Nessie into The Home than their son. Henry had begun referring to their son as simply a cog of his downfall along with the young couple who had bought the house and the newscasters on TV whose bright torsos seemed mounted to their desks.

Then Henry had painted all of the walls white saying, “They’re not living in my memories.”

Then he had scratched deep ruts into the carpet with his fingers saying, “They can’t love what I’ve broken.”

“Come to bed,” Nessie said turning back to the bedroom.

Henry stopped his hammering and rose. He turned out the lights, he took down the shadows.
.

shark, Brussels, wintergreen

2010-07-14T04:07:00.028-05:00

Hello, my name is Viggo Brussels.

I was born in the small town of Venus Bay. There were no beautiful women in Venus Bay. There was only my grandmother and the grocery lady, Barbara, who had a picture of her daughter on the grocery wall. Barbara's daughter was named Sandra, she lived in Melbourne with her cat. She was not beautiful.

One night my grandfather woke me by pulling the sheets from my bed. He wanted to go spear fishing. I told him, no, because I cannot swim. My grandfather insisted that I go because there were mermaids in the bay. I told him, no, because I do not believe in mermaids. My grandfather grabbed my ankles and, like a hungry shark, pulled me from my bed. My body fell to the floor. It was very painful. I told him to fuck himself. This was unlike my character but I was seventeen and lonely. My grandfather slapped me. This was very much like his character since Viet Nam.

I brought a bottle of wintergreen mouthwash with me but forgot my shoes. My grandfather did not like this. I told him that mermaids would not admire my shoes anyway. The car heater was broken. It was very cold. My grandfather yelled over the radio and steam came from his mouth. I was gargling when he told me that he planned to kill the mermaids.

When we arrived at the beach I spat the mouthwash out. The sea smelled of rotting seaweed. It was very fishy. My grandfather pointed to the stars and said they were one million shining arseholes. I did not understand. He took the spear and made his way down to the water. I saw a woman wading in the sea. She was very beautiful.

upside-down, Botox, polish

2010-07-14T01:06:00.004-05:00

.
According to a self-help manual called Beauty for Ingrates to Insides: it takes more muscles to frown than it does to terrorize small children with a glare. This is in Chapter 1 of a book I received from my mom after I told her she should get Botox for her Crow’s feet. We were having a spa day after lunch at La Poubelle in Hollywood, but in my defense I said, “This sort of thing is so normal these days…all these actresses in Blockbusters. Actors too! This is not a Joan Rivers issue anymore, mom. It’s like that upside-down water you’re into--it’s the now!” “You mean reverse-osmosis water, dear?” "Oh yeah…whatever. I’m still happy with my Brita...though, I could reeeally use a new filter?” "I’ll take you to Target after you finish your salad,” is the last thing she said to me before we got the check.

At Target we got Brita filters, five bottles of neon one-coat polish, an 18-roll pack of double-ply toilet paper, and a box of double-cheese family-size Goldfish. As my mom followed me to the car in the parking lot of Target, she casually begin to speak, “You know, honey, I’ve always admired your confidence, but don’t most young ladies who wear shorts like that exercise so they have less cellulite?” “Actually, I said, cellulite is genetic…wait, what?” When I turned around, she had her phone out, and click, took my picture. When she showed it to me, she said, “This is how you made me feel today, this face you made. Do you see?” At first I thought about calling her a bitch, but then I just cried a little. “There, there, baby. You know mommy loves you.”

I saw the picture on her twitter the next day.
.

overflow, chorus, Wednesday

2010-07-12T22:39:00.007-05:00

Since I’d set foot in Antananarivo, all anyone had talked to me about was The Lemur King. My cabbie, as we’d weaved through the streets overflowing with women with baskets, barefoot children, vendors hawking small hairy fruit, had asked me if I was on my way to see him.

“Who?”

“The Lemur King,” he said. “He is American scientist like you.”

In the hotel bar later that night, the air-conditioning fogging up the windows through which beggars stared sadly in, the bartender tugged his mustache, waxed to the sheen of a fossa’s fur. “I hear you are looking for the Lemur King,” he said in French. “For thirty dollars American, I will take you to him.”

That night I had the same dream I’d been having since I’d arrived. I was back in grade school and it must have been a Wednesday afternoon because we were in chorus. I was singing poorly, distracted by Suzie Richardson. Brian Crusoe kicked me.

“Quit looking at my girl.”

I could have told him I wasn’t, but to what purpose? Chorus ended and we went back to homeroom. I must have dallied because when I arrived, Brian was raising above his head the ant farm I’d brought for show and tell, shaking it dangerously.

“Don’t,” I said and ran forward as he smashed it on the ground.

Thirty years later, I had not forgotten the way the ants scattered over the smudged linoleum, vanishing into cracks or getting trampled by my classmates. And so the next morning, as my guide parted the monstrous, meaty leaves of two ferns, and I saw the Leumur King perched on his bamboo throne, surrounded by Ring-tailed, Red-ruffed, Goodman’s mouse, Aye-Aye, I could only say one thing:

Not you again.

stub, sway, heat lightning

2010-06-30T19:13:00.009-05:00

heads sway back wound up snugly in prescription drug titters
that fall sloppily off the greening bridge above minnow creek
to echo messily on the rocks like abandoned calabash flasks

day works her thick, squishy hips
out of her blue skirt like the night
the moon is a full pelvis sprawling
white legs on the sky’s velvet cushion

we stare so much with marvel our
tired eyes look away at each other
a washtub bumps the shore, still
none of our sore bones are in love;
you try with flesh as heat lightning
fucks the view up anyways your breasts
are slow dropping bird eggs lost from
the riffle wreath in the black fold of
your Rorschach splotch dress i analyzed
with my fingers as your mouth scheduled
a make out session with my awkward cock

it was hard making the first move for the kiss;
i firmly believed you leaned in first; i was all
blushing with my balls idly flopping there making
stupid compliments you could already see pulsing up
the veins on my legs like old lightbulbs leading the
eye to a cheap ticket show in the dark where a skull
caravans up a corniche to a hilltop where a gunslinger
floats in jar of formaldehyde except his red scarf is
faded, his hat is long gone, and his peacemaker is a
carnation white as the cum splashing the back of your
neck while you stub your throat over me again and again

laboring to beautifully work your
small torments into mine how the
glass bits in a whip bite silence
from the air or a borrowed thing
seems true in a dosshouse; still

...you kneel
and i stand
expecting no
more to come from this first date moment
because our tender bones are not in love.

balls, shoes, dog food

2010-06-27T02:38:00.067-05:00

Grandma is dying. I watch her television. Tomatoes fly. The music jangles. I get hungry and poke Grandpa. I say, dinner? He says, TV's full of rubbish these days. I ask if television was better when it was in black and white. Grandpa shifts in his chair. He says, put the kettle on.

Later, my Auntie comes over. She says hello to Grandpa. Grandpa says, can't hear you. TV's too loud. I turn the television down. Grandpa says, turn that back up. My Auntie invites me into Grandma's room. I say, I'm thirsty.

Over dinner my Uncle asks if I heard about my Auntie's breakdown. She's across the table from me. She looks tired but normal. I say, I heard. I take some salad and listen to my Uncle blame my Auntie's job. Work's hard. Too much pressure. Grandpa stabs his potato. The remote's in his free hand. I say, work sucks. Pass the butter? Grandpa says, butter shouldn't be kept in the refrigerator. Not tomato sauce either. My Uncle says he keeps tomato sauce in the fridge because it has a use by date. Grandpa stares through my Uncle. He says, chicken's dry. My Uncle says, also, you shouldn't put canned food in the fridge. It spoils. Grandpa chews and chews. I say, I leave canned dog food in the fridge. My Uncle says, your dog will die of cancer. Grandpa says, balls! Put the kettle on.

My Auntie likes Jenny Craig ice creams. I take mine out back and drop it behind some bushes. I hear a tapping sound. Grandpa's at the window. I come inside. My Uncle tells me not to worry. Everyone dies. He has ugly shoes. I say, not celebrities. My Auntie has tears in her eyes. The kettle whistles. Grandpa turns the television off.

blood, goose, caravan

2010-06-26T03:22:00.023-05:00

The PVC strips softly clap as Annie enters the store. Wedged behind the counter is an obese man who briefly looks up before returning to morosely thumb price tags onto dildos. Annie’s got the wig in her bag, to prove it looks alright. It was wrong to think they’d turn her down as a blood redhead, but she thought they might.

They is the obese man. His name is Theo. Theo lives in a caravan in the garden of his mother’s lot. He has always had trouble expressing himself. For Theo, life is the loneliest experience he can imagine. Nothing is right. Nothing is wrong.

Annie bites her nails and takes in her surroundings. The place is lit in fluorescent ceiling lamps and smells of stale cigarettes, followed by chemical disinfectant. The walls are lined with films, their titles mostly double entendres. Although Annie understands the films, their content and purpose, she neglects to realise that what she is about to embark on is linked to them. This is because a lot of the film covers have women with their mouths agape, their tongues out and semen glossed over their faces, and Annie, with her brown flats and small chest, can't think of a time when she might have looked like this. So monstrous. It's disengaging, yet she makes her way to the counter.

Theo looks up from his work. His goose eyes tell her to leave, run. But he asks if there's anything in particular she's looking for, and with her heart racing in her chest Annie says, Yes. She puts her hand into her bag and feels the wig. I'm looking for work.

rope, bone, shoulder

2010-06-20T19:16:00.015-05:00

I’d gone down to my dad’s place – one hundred acres in the swamps of South Carolina – looking for peace and quiet, but thanks to the damn bird I wasn’t getting any. It was Sunday and I was spread out in a big, comfy bed. My body was bone-sore, my hands chafed from tugging rope all weekend long. We had to haul this outbuilding out before it sank completely into the alligator-infested muck.

I just wanted to sleep.

I couldn’t see the bird, only hear it. A great shutter-clicking, sawing noise. Like some demonic children’s toy. I opened the window and banged on the roof—the newly-laid copper which was already tarnished to a fuzzy green by humidity and sun. Trees hanging limp just beyond it in the soggy courtyard.

The bird went silent. As soon as I got back in bed, of course, it started up again.

Screech, screech.

The next morning, bleary and angry, I was watching the first drops sizzle-smack on the bottom of the coffee pot – one of my favorite sounds in the world – when my eight-year-old brother ran into the kitchen. Said he had something I had to see. I followed him into the dining room, which we hadn’t used since we started renovation.

In the unused fireplace was an overturned nest. I flipped it and uncovered three baby birds, still alive. Opening and shutting their miserable beaks. From the fireplace’s ash, I picked up the brick that must have fallen down the chimney and taken the nest with it. That’s when I saw the dead one, its wing ripped from its shoulder, bone sticking out. The screeching that had bothered me so much must have been the mother, calling for her young.

“Fetch me a shoe box,” I said to my brother.

.

balls, shoes, dog food

2010-06-01T18:29:00.010-05:00

My shoes smell bad — sour, fungal. But I can’t afford to buy new ones. I live in a rented basement room right now; the woman who owns house had children, but they are all in college now. Her husband, a college professor, is on sabbatical from her until he can quit drinking.

In the room’s closet is a bag of dog food. Some nights, when it has been so long since I’ve eaten that I began to get swimmy, I open the bag of dog food and look inside. I even went so far as to bring down a spoon from the kitchen I share with the woman, Joyce. But I just can’t do it. There are lows you’d almost rather die than sink to.

Instead, I sneak bits of cheese from the refrigerator. A few crackers. One night Joyce catches me. “If you’re that hungry, just ask.”

She makes me a sandwich while I stare down at my bare feet. I need to cut my toenails — yellow claws — but what’s the point? “I put your shoes outside,” she says. “They stink.”

“I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she says.

I know it means nothing. She is still pretty, lean and tanned — but much older than me. What could she want with a broke loser like me? Sometimes the reality of my situation hits me like a horse kick in the balls: I am almost thirty years old; I have no family or friends; I steal my landlord’s cheese. My feet smell so bad that I’d be embarrassed to even get into bed with a woman.

I eat the sandwich. It has tomato, which I don’t like, but I say nothing. It’s a lot better than dog food.

sparkly, zygote, shadowboxer

2010-05-30T18:02:00.004-05:00

The wall, the ruins of some old farmhouse, was in the center of a field of tall, flowering weeds. Clear nights like this Anson and I came out here to drink and talk up the future. We were going to be famous — world-shakers, artists. (Embarrassing to remember now, but that’s how we thought.)

Tonight, however, we were talking about the past. Or the present as a consequence of a past in which I’d made the same mistake over and over, thinking it wouldn’t catch up to me.

“You’re being sentimental,” Anson said. He walked along the top of the wall — a gifted athlete despite his big belly. He threw a couple of punches in the air. “It’s a protein smear.”

“Not sentimental. Romantic. Sentimental with a purpose.” This was an old joke of ours. We weren’t drunk: we were drunk with a purpose. “I know the science. Zygotes. Blah, blah. I’m talking about what could be.”

“But do you want that? With her?”

“I want to want it. It would be nice if I were the type of person who wanted it.”

Anson hopped neatly off the wall. He could hold his liquor; I couldn’t. But I climbed up there, began tightrope-walking on those old chipped stones. This one was a little too — too — and then I fell. Anson stood over me, laughing now that he saw I was all right. And the grass of the field bent and folded around me, arms without weight. Above Anson’s head — stars. And behind them, as my eyes adjusted — more stars. Some impossibly small and sunk in the sparkly brightness around them.

I focused on one, the smallest, dimmest, most distant one I could find. I thought that if I could just keep track of it, everything would be okay.

stamp, clutz, reimbursement

2010-05-28T02:22:00.003-05:00

.
The lampshade always brought to mind American movies set in China where a peasant with perfect bone structure, a clutz at the oar but an expansive smile beneath his scrubby mustache, sailed down rivers that disappeared into some always-approaching dusk towards women that puffed enamel cigarette holders on bamboo piers caking everything in lipstick ground from weeping Egyptian beetles. Its Old World light made me look tanned, made me look healthy.

How strange to see it, along with the old bed pressed into a lover's crescent (broken into a dumpy scoop), and the bookcase filled with its British Modernism, and the bags of stringed Portuguese pearls missing your great grandmother's neck, loaded onto the American highway. I signed the mover's bill, but, oh, to have a stamp of my name, the first of their many billboards hocking meaningless crap. I give them the smile and nod of the Man's Secret Club, but they don't respond. Uncertainties abound.

How strange for the American night to swallow up nations. How hungry must be that road to the West to, after feeding it your select morsels of Europe and Asia, find it, in the end, baseball-capped and wired, waiting for its reimbursement.
.

envelope, trenchpants, fracture

2010-05-20T23:09:00.004-05:00

.
I saw the bottle while I was buying grapes: Invisible Ink. On a rack with the tabloid magazine and Mr. Goodbars (or is it Misters Goodbar?). I eat a lot of grapes in the summer, especially when I’m hungover. Something in them my body craves—Vitamin C? Do grapes have vitamins? I also drink a lot in the summer, the weather making me itchy and tempestuous. Fractured.

It was about the size of a Wite-Out bottle, only brightly-colored. I threw it in with my grapes and half-gallon jug of Cabernet—table wine, really, but I didn’t plan on tasting it. Maybe I should just get it from the source, I thought, looking at my grapes. But I bought all three items and walked the mile and a half home. My shoes, when I took them off, stank—a hole in one that had worn through all my socks. I was holding off, hoping Mom would take pity on me for my birthday.

At the table, I listened to Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto, dragging the brush from the bottle’s cap across the paper like a tortured Russian conductor. TRENCHPANTS, I wrote in large, self-involved letters. I didn’t know what it meant but it had been running through my head all day. Little sugar ants crawled up my fingers after feasting on the grape stems. What was I trying to tell you with this letter? That the future is not a blank page, as it first appears, but is actually the legible font of the past, revealed only if you know the method? Or was I drunk?

I licked the envelope and pinned it outside for the mailman. In our last conversation, you told me you lost your cat, the same one I used to pet. I hope you found it.
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spattered, whitebait, simulation

2010-05-20T23:08:00.003-05:00

Jack loved fritters, but when shown uncooked whitebait, which resembled slimy, translucent worms, he reacted with revulsion at the questionable, yet delicious, ingredient, apart from its essential lemon, butter and egg components.

When Jack was twelve, during a weekend of quality-time simulated for his younger stepsister, Jane; his canoe tipped, while sharing it with his mother. There had been a hard rain only two-hours before; trees had uprooted, casting sideways; one caught their canoe and tipped it. Twenty-feet, Jack shot through the river. The back of his orange life vest rising above his ears and off. His arms slashed at branches attached to trunks of long-dead trees. A weight gripped his feet and pulled him under, into rocks, past a roaring thunder, to a stop--into an underwater cell; bloody arms passed through branches, tattered flags, but his ribcage could not. A force pushed his face into a mess of tangled roots. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, a tightness in his throat.

“The whitebait themselves are very sensitive to river objects, but adept at dodging nets,” his step-father had said at breakfast that day, as Jack spattered the contents of his stomach around his tent. For Jane’s affection of hiding them in his shoe, had not worked in favor with his allergies, though they often agreed that her father was a know-it-all-goober.

In light, a face dangling translucent worms in dozens, hovered above him. Hey, he’s coming to! Into that of a concerned man, bearded, a tri-athlete from a canoe nearby, on vacation. I saw you go under, he said, but I found you! If it wasn’t for that tree that caught you, that water fall, man, you’re a lucky boy, he said. Next to a bawling Jane, saying, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jack.

revolt, tenderness, water tower

2010-05-10T18:00:00.003-05:00

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Lettuce wraps from now on. Not just no more bread, but also no more forks, chopsticks, spoons, etc., other than those utensils necessary to get the filling from its serving vessel into its lettuce vessel. Milk and granola lettuce wrap, pasta salad lettuce wrap, vegan chili lettuce wrap. A very thick, very tepid vegan chili. It is so fucking hot outside.

Today bicycling to a job interview I took a new route and discovered the town water tower. It was as one would imagine: white, twenty feet tall maybe, with a very fat head and a very thin, graffiti-sprayed shaft. But there were two surprises. The first surprise was that I could just stumble on the water tower of the town I had lived in for two years. The second surprise was that this water tower was just too small. The same had to be true of every water tower in the United States. How had I not realized this? I decided to investigate when I got home, but first I locked my bike outside the Jamba Juice and pulled my dress shirt out of my backpack.

The interview was very stupid. Stupidest among the questions was to name five tracks on the CD I would want with me were I stranded on a desert island. I said "'Orinoco Flow parentheses Sail Away end parentheses' by Enya" and four other songs free-association style. The manager's name was Jojo, strike one, and he wore fake-blue contact lenses, strike two. Strike three will happen tomorrow, I'm sure. He hired me on the spot because I have worked for Jamba Juice before. As I left the store, they were playing "Try a Little Tenderness" in the lobby over the sound of four simultaneous blendings.

One of the graffiti on the water tower is just the word "revolt" with an exclamation point after it. Biking home I thought very hard about the different meanings of that word.
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lychee, avid, busker

2010-04-27T16:21:00.005-05:00

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Owen swore by the lychee martinis at Congee Village, just below Delancey. “They’re fucking fantastic,” he told Wilhelm one night, never missing an opportunity to make an average sentence profane. “Your eyes will see the face of God.” Wilhelm nodded and tried his best to steer the conversation elsewhere; to him, the concept of a lychee martini sounded specifically horrific, like a dessert topping made with cough syrup.

“Once we’re done with the Avid, I’m gonna get one, I think.” Owen looked at Wilhelm with an addled eagerness. “You should come! There’s food made with blood. It’s a spectacle.” An editor by trade, Wilhelm was assembling a rough version of Owen’s film, Killer Commie Zombies. On a monitor behind them, an undead Karl Marx pursued a shrieking Joseph Stalin through the halls of the Kremlin. Wilhelm touched a button and the image froze. It was, Wilhelm thought, a ridiculous project, but he felt a certain debt to his old friend, and at times their conversational rapport was like none other in his life.

After finishing their night’s work, they walked south through Astor Place. Wilhelm remained uncertain as to his destination. Between songs, a busker eyed them, made enquiries towards procuring cash for the night. On their refusal, the busker chided them, striking at Owen’s affect, Wilhelm’s waistline. Wilhelm spun, arms tensing in unexpected ways. Owen pulled him back. “Not this guy, and not now. There’s better fights to be had.” Wilhelm didn’t fully understand what his friend meant, but he allowed himself to be withdrawn from combat. He would abstain from martinis, he thought, but something drawn from blood had a newly born appeal.
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cane toad, tassel, limp

2010-04-15T23:48:00.095-05:00

'Phaëton's dad lent him his chariot,' said the old man as he pissed into the urinal. 'The chariot was made of wood, and was pulled by fire breathing horses that could fly. Phaëton boasted that it was the fastest sun chariot in the galaxy.

'But he was a maniac in the sky. Everyone thought so. Phaëton was such a bad charioteer that he burnt up most of Africa, turning it into a desert. After that, his thirsty horses drained a bunch of rivers and lakes which annoyed a few, already crotchety fishermen.

'Something had to be done. A meeting was held, and one of the fishermen, Willie, a man with a limp and a pet cane toad, suggested that Zeus throw a thunderbolt at Phaëton and be done with it.

'Shortly after, everyone rose, tightened their tassels and caught up over finger sandwiches and good coffee.

'The next night, when Phaëton was gallivanting about the sky, pointing out monuments that had been erected in his father's honour, Zeus threw his thunderbolt. The chariot exploded! It rained down in lovely, orange meteorite tears. People murmured. Out of the crowd a child's voice sung, 'Thunderstruck! Yeah, yeah, yeah thunderstruck!'

'People gawked as Phaëton fell and celebrated his demise. No one missed the showy bastard, but sculptors groped for their clay, and later monuments were unveiled. Most were tacky.

'A few passerby, who didn't attend the meeting, were standing beneath the chariot when it exploded. They were burnt by the shower. One woman lost an eye. Her son wandered off into the desert. The family was reimbursed in exotic ointments and cloth,' concluded the old man as he zipped up his fly.

gun, thumb, jellyhead

2010-04-07T18:07:00.002-05:00

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gunblack robes of plumage drape bright damage soon abloom

on the maundering jellyhead. past rising strifes, redolent of a

linnet’s whispering clips in the air, hitchhike up its fuzzy neck.

a thumbing thru and thru to death dancing to

percussive kicks from the dicey quarry clamoring

now up then down cairn formations stacked so

grotesquely like a feisty child’s thumb at war.

this black horse

the scavenger espied afore

with talons twisted across its back galore

absconds to the boscage to watch the pomegranate

drops stain the windy sticks listing on the forest floor.

carnal skeins luff on this gusty petal pusher,

sprinkle winks of gore for wafting out to the

moor as the bird guesses, desperate in its

ugly flower head, the pains to take or duck:

life’s final chore.

it eschews the forest’s lee

& wanders out to the scream loud valley

where all its kind are lurking on a shrubbery

peeping out a cliff, dandling saliva threads

that corrode like notes from an impish harp,

assuming another husk of flesh will stumble

by so they won’t have to fly rings in rings on

the graying clouds, or wait patiently to see if

Death will flick its cigarette out the window

and find a parking spot.

the buzzard gacks a piss of blood

that hisses on a sweltering rock.

the clawed curly feet of his friends

unbutton from the bramble limbs and

smooch down slowly on the arid valley’s soil.

shocked to see its friends,

the buzzard forgets the

riven gash & flocks to see

his flouncy fellows who only

paused to worry over what

parts they all ate when last

they gathered over fallen carrion,

then realized

it didn’t matter

as they surrounded

their mate to help themselves

because they’d known each other

since they were vultures.
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polyp, flatworm, penumbra

2010-04-05T01:44:00.003-05:00

Ten percent cat, one part

penumbra, a flatworm, a polyp,

I take showers for the heat

you say, a blanket arithmetic, I

smother my skin with his clothes

which are dirty. Smothering your

smell, your smell I say, unfolds

the sky into a wilderness forbidden

in the city. A warm milk, a moist

gash, more than most you are the

sleeping cat balanced, a sun stretch

through my window, eight percent

polyester, two parts paper outside

in the thunder, the purple stain spills

shadows in pools through your teeth

when you smile, I am one hundred

limbs transfixed, millipedes, multiplied

fingers wrapped, my waist in the rain.

slumber, workhorse, decoupage

2010-02-21T23:47:00.019-06:00

Hard pressed to get sleepy, the workhorse, Charles, was doing everything he could do to wind down in the dark. He fitted himself between plastic sheets stretched above his mattress, to keep his blood and other body fluids from seeping into the spring covering.

He grabbed the rounded corners of elastic and with his arms in a Y, stretched the plastic taught smearing his face into a melted wax hologram. He lay still, closed his eyes and attempted to lose consciousness within the faint smell of urine and sweat. Claudia, his wife, walked in and flipped the light switch on.

Charles! You look like a decoupage.
Hold on, let me get my camera.

Charles pulled the sheet down to his chest, exasperated.

You'll do no such thing, woman!
I'm not your goddamn Reality TV...

Take an Ambien and chill out Han Solo. Or here, let me wrap my fingers around your neck while I lick your bug-eyes nasty.

It's not the same, said Charles. You know that.

Fine. I just came in here to get some cash anyway. I have to pay the Chinese delivery guy.

My wallet's on the dresser.
Did you get me anything?

Of course, baby. I ordered tons.
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Charles, one of these days I just know I'm going to come in here to a blue, bloated corpse.

Claudia, baby, no, that's why Bill's here.

Bill's a bird, Charles. A stupid, ugly bird.

Bill's not-just-a-bird. He's an African CawCaw; one of the smartest creatures in the galaxy. Bill's ancestors roosted at the edges of mausoleums to rescue premature burials during plagues. They can smell half-death because they're terrified of tragedy.
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Do me a favor, babe and try to be more of a sweetheart.
Apologize.

Fine.
Sooorrrry Bill.

RAWK! You're a fucker! HELLO?!

Yeaaah, I love you too.
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