I got to Millbrook twelve years late, though the horsey set was still sunning itself in the cafes, their Lexuses polished to nubs and tied to the decorative posts at the curb. John had died before we could take up golf, or watch birds with the Audubons dragging their fancy Wellies through the mud, or cash in any of his hoped-for lottery winnings— though plenty well-off already, a bachelor, who […]
“They found her in the shallow end, amongst the reeds and weeds of the left hand bottom corner. Apparently, he used to take her to picnic there back when they were courting. She was wearing her Sunday dress and was three months gone, already. Dan said it was awful, her beautiful hair was full of crawling pond skaters, Jesus, gives me the heebie-jeebies. And there was actual frogspawn under one […]
This is not an elegy. It’s a blackberry. It’s a pumpkin shattered on concrete, the porch in the background unharmed and a river filled with children’s bodies floating into the Halloween of hospitals; I’ve worked too many years on an ambulance, the orange flashing lights memorized in my mind so that I see them in the dark of my body, in the deep twigs of my thoughts, so that a […]
When I was a teen, We’d make out pretty regularly. The royal We. It’d be fevers in the summer churches of Michigan. I’d shackle God. The grass asleep as if YHWH were mundane, and this passion of the ghosts that We were before I got lost in the military where it ended my belief—the shock that people in foxholes lose faith as easily as keys misplaced in couch hells—and lost […]
I’ve been sitting in this office all morning, trying like hell to keep my eyes open. I’ve even closed them for twenty minutes on the little couch in the cubicle. I found several pieces of Double Bubble gum and wedged the stone-hard cubes into my mouth. I’ve swallowed two cups of really bad coffee. I’ve fingered a dip of Skoal under my lower lip. If I had tea bags, I’d […]
When a roller skater meets another roller skater in an aisle between two walls of books, the stick I throw the stick to, or pick up to hit the snake with, is a snake. On Christmases, with cats, one cat sedated, by the time we start out for your mother’s it’s already dark. Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a past century, he attended a one-room […]
‘Show a leg, sailor,’ I nudge her ribs, wreathed in petals of sunlight as the creak-cry of gulls splits her gummed eyes. It’s always a summer morning here, even in November; her perfume of sweat and gunpowder pulls the tide below my belly. Last night, I shooed away a final customer – he pouted but he paid, attempted to remark before her eyebrow cocked under her hat – then she […]
Darth Vader pops a Xanax before going to the Galactic Aging Facility where his mother convalesces, sipping at caf and watching Tatooine weather holos. He waves at the receptionist, carries his stick-up holograms and before going further, rasps a deep metallic breath. He begins his march down the hallway of the decaying, hand bumps a Rodian with one leg and a sparking artificial limb. He palms the door control and […]
I saw him pick up two pairs of woolen socks, dirt cheap, maybe to keep his toes warm while he’s shooting his next film in Iceland. I walk up to him and ask him if he’d like my autograph. He smiles and says “Am I supposed to know you?” I smile back and say I’m the main stuntman for his next film. I tell him that in Iceland there are […]
In the southwest corner of my college campus stands a replica of Winged Victory, a classical Greek statue with two enormous wings spread perpendicular to her spine. There is nothing above her shoulders but the hint of a neck and the exact position of her upper extremities is left to the imagination. According to the oft-repeated tale, if a virgin ever graduated Winged Victory would sprout a head and arms […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 