after Vallejo I will die in Texas, on a day temperatures soar, 109 or 113, a blazing hellhole of a day, unlike soft days on the coast. I will die in Texas, perhaps on a Monday morning like this one, mercury skyrocketing. Yes, it will be a Monday and in the morning. As I conjure extravagant surf, succulent pines, music of draining tidal pools trickles my brain, and NBC’s meteorologist […]
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 […]
My daughter snips a femur from adhesive-backed felt, pelvis already attached to her short skirt. Zombie-cheerleaders lurch past. But, Bob will take first prize again; green branches enfold him, sprout from ears and top of head. The school crossing guard is Cat-in-the-Hat, and a man in half black/ half white walks two large dogs— white one on his black side, black on his white side. I pinch myself; ouch, I’m […]
seems disconnected from her brain. When she tries to explain her drowsiness, she tells her doctor, I fell asleep on Friday and didn’t wake up till Christmas. Embarrassed, she stammers … I mean, Sunday! … until Sunday. And when tries to say she cleans her nose with a Q-tip, out slips, toothpick. Her tongue has a mind of its own. She imagines it scanning grey matter, seizing any random word […]
with her son. He’s as peculiar as she, but he’s unaware. Puffed with delusion, he curses the cop who pulls him over—a peon who makes less than a quarter his salary. And, lately, he harbors strangely fascist ideas. Impressed with his own knowledge, he scoffs at acupuncture, hypnotism, hyperbaric chambers, anything he has not experienced. When the madwoman hears researchers found a link between cell phones and brain cancer, she […]
over symmetry, asks again and again if one eye, ear, breast, thumb, ankle is larger, longer, redder, stiffer or sharper than the other. The madwoman’s every ache is a tumor; every short breath, a heart attack; every gas pain, appendicitis; every muscle cramp, blood clot; and every red eye, imminent blindness. She won’t use public toilets or visit the sick at home or in hospital. She reads articles on rare […]
This might have been a love poem but a phrase stumbled, wiped out a whole line. It glanced away, distracted by a muscular policeman just as it stepped from the curb, and found itself sitting in a parking lot bruised and slightly bloodied, propped against a rusted Honda. When strangers offered aid the poem became surly, churlish; it had prepared for tenderness and passion: dressed in his favorite color, donned […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 