Look, it isn’t necessary to be good all the time. When you’re alone especially, sometimes it’s OK to sneeze into your hands or to watch from behind the shades until the Jehovah’s Witnesses go away or to toss the charity mailing unread but keep the address labels, or to nap on the pile of clean laundry even after 6 p.m., wrinkles be damned and sleep rhythms too, and not to […]
Penthouse Wall to wall WASPs, named Wister the Third and Muffie Something-Hyphenated, are gregarious, garrulous but gorgeous: a cross-section of Republicans, both Right-Hand-of-God and Fuck-the-Poor sects, along with a few limousine liberals—the world’s whitest white men. They reel, high-stepping, group to group in elegant slow motion. Apt. 27A Ms. Bitch-with-Brass-Balls leans across the ebony and glass cocktail table, boosts her cocaine level to maximum for her height and weight. Boy-Toy […]
Pregnant? the fairies ask me on New Year’s Day, tap my belly, flat as a girl’s, but pudgier given all the free food. I’m not. My sister is. At nine weeks and an inch long, the fetus danced, waving its arms. At twelve weeks it wiggled, shimmying against the placenta. At fifteen, I ask her what she feels when her belly presses against her hand, if she’ll let me reach […]
Half of Vegas is abandoned still holding out “For Sale” signs, supplicating before receding glitter and moon-seen Luxor itself starved for sacrifice. “Who do we shoot?” Nobody thinks to change population and elevation same as a decade ago, flush with bodies, height, and feed— you have to anticipate “Maybe they need 500, so they send 2000.” Everyone, everything hides somewhere in Red Rock past the scurrying […]
If you pick up the horn and put it to your lips, it will sound, as surely as snow melts and winter moons wax before they wane, or vice-versa. Which comes first: December or January? the mouth or the lips? Sound defines the air, and air the sound, as warmth reveals the meaning of chills. Here is the horn, aching to wake, to breathe, to make a noise […]
It’s the clean slate, the board washed of yesterday, a new document page, a big open space under “Comments.” The sun rises over and outshines the fireworks display of last night, the glitter and silver of your mother’s party wear. Today lends a new brightness to snow and sand, benches and backyards, and to all your fresh plans, even if it’s a cloudy day. This year makes […]
The noise a pair of high-heeled shoes make when dancing on the patio. The slow-flapping sound of uncompressed laughter, weightless. Citronella torches define the periphery, beyond their flickering watch your step. Skinny crescent moon above, more decorative than light-casting. Who controls the scenes we live? I’ll find out which clowns pull the strings here, make this joyful milieu possible, then blackmail them if bribery fails. Hope not to kneecap the […]
Dude X wept, confessing his egregious violation. A bold strategy, but Mrs. Dude X remained quite pissed off. He pled to a mistake, a momentary moral spasm. Oh, more evidence? Okay. He owned a series of mistakes. Don’t rip a human being in two over a straight edge to make a ragged seam. See? She turned on the consequence machine. It made one hell of a racket, sucked up half […]
Springtime, Ingenue, I want one more chance to weave you garlands out of vines that overgrew the garret windows. We’ll be home together for another power outage of tree-bending gales, lightning percussing when the season-changer pushes through. The domestic form’s perfectible. I’ll need an appeal. Ingenue, they’d listen to you sooner than they’d grant me clemency on my own virtuous record. Tell them what I‘d do with one more spring […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 