Deus Ex Machina

Special Education sucked and even though something like that wouldn’t happen in today’s modern society, when it’s 1965 and it’s a pretty small town in the far far-away miles from any large town and you’re only in the third grade anyway and you still limp and one of your eyes droops and there’s “epilepsy” talk floating around downstairs when they think you’re asleep like you can’t use a dictionary anymore even if you already know what “epilepsy” and “thrombosis” and “embolism” and “intra-cerebral hemorrhage” more or less mean and it’s pretty obvious you need more attention than your old regular third-grade teacher can give you with a whole class full of regular normal kids so basically when it’s time for you to go back to school they send you into the big room with the mongoloids and the retards and the really messed up kids you hardly ever saw before with even their own special bus.

And that’s where they stuck me after I got out of the hospital. I still had physical therapy every afternoon after school with either my mom or a nurse pulling on my legs and arms usually until I cried and then a little bit longer. I also had speech therapy three times a week at school where I was excused from bead sorting exercises and went to the room by the nurse’s office and said “pa pa pa” for twenty minutes while the speech therapist held a mirror in front of my face saying “pa pa pa,” too, and I would try and try and try to keep watching her lipsticked lips and not ever look at the mirror but it was hard but at least I usually didn’t cry until I was on my way back to the Special Ed room and I could hear the hoots and moans of my new classmates. Sometimes some one or two of them would see me as I slipped sideways through a crack in the door and would say, “Hi, Naomi!” and then some other few would start saying “pa pa pa” because a lot of Special Ed kids took speech therapy and knew the exercise.

I usually just read library books all day at a table under the window anyway since I could still read and do math and everything even if my side was twitchy and I had all those scars. That’s what I was doing and that’s where I was when Diana finally came over, came rolling over with her arms all hooked up and crooked and her feet sort of pulling the wheelchair along. She was scooting herself toward me, little bit by little bit, and a foamy white rope of slobber was dangling from the corner of her crooked mouth and as she breathed it would go part way back in her mouth and then fall back out as she exhaled. No way was I looking up from my book and I tried to let my lengthening hair cover my face and eyes.

Finally, even though I was mostly looking straight at the pages of my book, a book of Greek mythology I had read and reread millions of times, I could look sort of sideways down past the edge of the book and see her navy blue Keds with the scuffed-up dirty toes from all her scooting right next to my everyday loafers which were kind of getting scuffed-up, too, because of my limp. I just had to look up and try to ignore her saliva string, the big dark wet spot on her corduroy jumper.

“Uh yeed?” she asked me.

“Huh?”

“Uh yeed?” she repeated and waved a twisted little arm sort of at my book.

It took me a second.

“Do I read?”

She nodded and made a noise.

“‘Course I read. Why else would I be sitting here?”

“Yeed a may?” she continued. “Yeed. A. May?”

I thought about it.

“Read to you?”

Again, she nodded and made the “yes” noise.

“Can’t you read?”

She looked at me for a moment, wobbling and squirming in her chair.

“Ant unna ayesh,” she said and waited for me to figure it out.

“You can’t turn the pages?”

She nodded vigorously and then twisted herself, small and knotted in the huge looking wheelchair, to gesture back over her shoulder with her chin, to point with her chin at the Special Ed teachers behind her.

“Ay ont ep may.” She tried to whisper but it didn’t really work since she had to struggle so much to say anything at all.

They wouldn’t help her and already it seemed that was about what to expect here in the big room and I, maybe now we, were pretty much on our own. Most of the Special Ed teachers spent most of their time walking around the tables wiping stuff off of people and pulling things out of their mouths and saying “Good. Good. Go-oood.”

“Jeez,” I said. “Scoot over in here and I’ll hold the book like this, see, and we can both read it but I’m not going to read aloud if you can read to yourself. Tell me when to turn the page, okay?”

“‘Kay,” she answered and we spent the rest of that period together and even all of the next period reading together. When the real ‘tards were doing zippers-buttons-snaps-&-bows, Diane and I were reading about the Gorgon, Persephone, and Io. I turned the pages and found out she a was faster reader than me even with all those Greek names and was always waiting for me to finish the page which made me a little bit nervous and I sort of starting skipping words to keep up.

“Have you read this one before?” I finally asked her.

“Yethsh!” and the force and the suddenness of her reply pushed another puddle of spit-foam out of Diane’s mouth and it dripped across her chin to splash in her lap. “Aye ofv ayih!”

“Yeah, I love it, too.”

We didn’t say another word to each other until it was time for special Special Ed recess when they made us go outside and play by ourselves and sometimes I would look at my old classroom and see the stuff my old friends had taped up on the windows like geometric snowflakes scissored out of huge sheets of newsprint or tempera paintings of some field trip they’d taken to the dairy farm or the state capital or someplace like that.

Public Displays of Affection

First of all, I've never liked the notion of people making out in public. Beyond the tasteful peck, I never felt comfortable doing it and I don't really feel comfortable when other people are doing it, especially when one of them is this girl I used to practically live with. It makes me wonder what else is going on in private, especially when she bends this guy who's not me's head way far back, her hand all along the side of his face, and she opens her eyes to search through the generalized movement in this bar to find my eyes upon her and she smiles while she's kissing him and it's all so very much on purpose, the way her pupils are pushed to their limits to keep me in sight and the glimpse of tooth I catch when she bites his lip and now I feel sorry for this guy which is something I really feel uncomfortable doing since he's leaning against a woman for whom I once had (okay, I admit, still have) strong feelings and I never liked him in the first place, even before he started doing things like leaning into Valerie so she could gnaw on his face and smirk at her ever-so-ex-boyfriend over his shoulder without him having any kind of clue whatsoever what she was doing or that even though I feel sorry for him, I still wouldn't mind being him.

These are complicated feelings I realize, but I also know I wouldn’t hate her so much if I didn’t still love her so terribly much. Or just so terribly. That’s why this stupid bar napkin is so full of such stupid scribblings. I guess that’s what I do best.

His hand is on her hip but thinking about drifting down to her ass. I remember when my hand used to do the same kind of thing but now all it, my hand, can do is remember and write about remembering. I can’t imagine she’s happy, that Valerie is enjoying this but I can imagine the pain she knows I feel makes the pain I know she feels seem reasonable, seem manageable, seem like it might be bearable in the long run. His hand is migrating and I wonder if it, his hand, is having a feeling. I can see the way she is slowly moving back and forth, the soft echo of movement in the past and movement in the future. It describes a kind of motion that expresses a kind of feeling that I haven’t been able to have in a long, long time.

I need another napkin.

The waitress has distracted me and Valerie has distracted her man enough to be able to scoop some of his money off the bar and even if he noticed, which I don’t think he did, I don’t think he’d care. After all, it’s only paper and, unless things have changed a lot which I don’t think they have, she’s not wearing any kind of underwear. I think I ordered another drink but I won’t be sure until it gets here. I’ve got my own money.

It is a drink but it’s not the drink I asked for. Should I care? Or should I pay? Is it really a question? Look out; here comes my money!

I can’t quite believe that Valerie sent this drink to me. Will this kind of strangeness never, ever stop? Why is she wiggling her fingers at me like that? Why am I waving back? Why am I putting this glass to my lips and wondering if it is poison? I already know it is poison. And it tastes very, very good.

Alternative + Function

Even from under the covers in a completely other room, she could hear the gnawing sound of the dot-matrix printer as it chewed through 10 or 20 or 75 or 350 new pages of his paper, his article, his poem, his thesis, his proposal, his short story, his dissertation, his novel, his book. She had lost track of them all, his projects and his product, and she couldn't tell the piles of paper that slouching around the apartment apart anymore. They had become furniture, had become places to put coffee cups and ashtrays. And every night there was the muted clatter of his fingers on the keys to the computer and then a moment of silence while the machine organized what he had told it and then there was the whining saw of the printer that would begin again and then continue and continue and continue for sometimes 10 and sometimes 20 and sometimes 180 minutes while the paper moved through it from crisp blankness to grey order, scrolls of text bordered by what she always thought of as albino caps, caps like the ammo she'd had for the six-guns she'd worn in grade school. These were her nights and she held the blankets close about her with the corner in her teeth, a pillow over her head and a pillow between her legs. These were the ways she slept.

Her mornings were easy. She would slip out of the bedroom and begin to make coffee. She would open the curtains and the blinds; she would find the morning paper and begin to read it. She would clean the kitchen and feed the pets–seed and water for the birds, a scoop of canned for the cat. He would find her at the table near the window and she would be drinking her coffee and reading her newspaper, the birds would be screeching from their cage and the cat would be lying across the patch of sunlight that slashed the tablecloth, the cat would be curled against a warming pile of computer paper.

"Well?" he'd ask her. "Did you read it? What did you think?"

"I thought it was interesting," she'd answer and pour herself another cup of coffee from the second pot she'd made, start looking for her horoscope to see what kind of day it was going to be.

Ikonography

One time we went to the river
to play with guns and
I have a photograph now
of her

She is barefoot here
on a sparkley flat part
Her dress is unbuttoned
and hitched up around her waist
The pistol is level and she has one eye closed

Here is also
a paper target
I saved I think that is
pretty good shooting

This is us
and I can see her right away
but what was me
is very hard to recognize

We were on our way back east, which shows,
and resting on her friend Jackie's porch
Simone has good color and shows her fine leg
to outline my sulleness

My sister's wedding was so funny
and here's a picture of it:

Simone is laughing
which was always something to see
My smallest cousin is hugging her knees
They became a blur of
white clothing and obscure familial relationships
Somebody wrote it all down on the back
and it says "R. w/girlfriend & Shawna (age 4), 1983"

Though I once had many hundreds of photographs of her
I have lost them mostly not wanting
to see Simone as a picture
or
a place to hang upon
but so more important to remember the way
she sat bold on a white tub's edge
to wash thick blood from her thighs

Catfish Laments

Walls of it
banks of it
rolling airborne moisture
is enough to wet these gills
and their pulsing red was pulse for you
An icthic shift of tense
from "being" to "having been" to "used to be"
I am motile
I am walking
across the highway

At the bottom of the aquarium
I am hiding behind the colorful gravel,
wedged behind the aerator,
upside down
Angels and tetras flash angular
but I am smoothly still
and remain so
even when the fingers tap our walls
When we are fed
I am waiting
whiskers stiff for the shreds that settle
down through solution

This place is porcelain
and we writhe within it, shallow
in memory of deep rivers
light laddered waters
and powerless against hooks and lines
how we rose confused and angry
to gasp against a thing called sky
above again ourselves

Angela Said the Safe Word

Angela said the safe word, the special word, the holy word that would make her Daddy stop beating her. Sometimes he would take off his belt and whip her bare legs while she screamed and sometimes he would stand over her bed and pummel her with his hands, slaps and fists both, and sometimes he would kick her when she fell to the floor. As much as his beatings hurt her, Angela was more deeply hurt simply by the fact that he wished to hurt her at all, that her own Daddy was the one. It wasn’t a stranger or a bad man or a boogey man or a monster. It was her own Daddy and he was the same Daddy who could give her a present, a stuffed animal from Antarctica, for no reason at all and she tried to tell him again, to remind him, but the blows came too thick and too hard.

“Penquin,” she tried to say but Daddy just kept swinging away.

*

Undercover Officer Angela said the safe word. If, at any point during the illegal transaction, she felt that things were going south, were getting too dangerous, she could say the safe word and the body wire she wore would transmit the signal to her fellow officers and her back-up would rush in, no question and no hesitation, guns drawn, ready to shoot and kill any person or thing that even appeared to threaten her.

Bad Boy Roy the big-time meth dealer kept looking at Angela funny, kept making comments about her breasts, kept trying to put his hands on her. When it became more than clear that all Roy’s thoughts regarding the illegal drug business had been replaced by thoughts more carnal if equally illegal, all Angela had to do was say something like “I need ice [underworld slang for high-grade methamphetemine] worse’r’n a penguin” or “I’m colder than a penguin’s tit in a brass bra” or even just “OH, shit, fellas…PENGUIN PENGUIN PENGUIN” and, within seconds, large numbers of the large men who were her fellow narcotics officers all armed with large weapons would burst through every possible door and window all of them screaming “GET DOWN POLICE GET DOWN POLICE POLICE GET DOWN.” It was a comfort to say the safe word and hear the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass, to watch Bad Boy Roy the big time meth dealer go flying across the cruddy room underneath a few hundred pounds of police officer or, perhaps, see the top of his head lift off after some coaxing with a hot load of double-ought buckshot.

Later, after all the arrests had been processed and the evidence catalogued and the reports written and the cops went to their cop bar to unwind and relax, Angela would tell the story again to everyone who hadn’t been there and she would tell them about the safe word and how it worked perfectly.

*

Angela said the safe word, the word once uttered that drew an immediate halt to whatever was happening. She hardly ever had used it in her edgier sex-play; the scenes were too contrived and her partners too trusted to ever really require its use. The boundaries between pain and pleasure had blurred within her over-stimulated nerves and there was little within her usual partners’ imaginations that even threatened to transgress what was left of her boundaries whether physical or otherwise. Angela couldn’t remember the last time she’d even thought about using the safe word.

“Penguin,” she said. “Penguin.”

Jeffery stopped what he was doing; he paused in his work, transfixed by the sudden intrusion of Angela’s humanity into their scenario. Her swift coup realigned the power in the room and he could physically feel it as control of the situation congealed around her.

“Penguin, motherfucker,” Angela snapped. “And I mean right motherfucking now.”

Chastened, Jeffery clawed at the knots to free her.

*

Angela said the safe word. Rarely did she ever resort to using it, that magic word which when uttered would draw an immediate halt to whatever was happening. It was the word to let her partner or partners know that things had gone just a bit too far and the scene should stop.

And there she was, cinched tight into a black latex corset, her limbs encased in elaborate rope bindings, her nipples transfixed with a nimbus of silver needles, her labia literally chained together through the piercings lining each vaginal lip, her anus filled with a thick butt-plug. And she didn’t like the way this game was going anymore and she wanted it to stop.

“Penguin,” Angela said. It was the safe word. “Penguin.”

Thomas drew himself upright and tall. He looked down upon Angela, upon what he had created of her.

“You really have no idea, do you?” he asked.

“Penguin?” she pleaded. “Oh, penguin penguin penguin….”

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up,” he told her and Thomas punctuated his words with blows to her face.

The safe word was “penguin” and it was the last intelligible word she ever spoke. She continued to make noises, lots of them, at varying volumes, but none of it had much of any kind of meaning and no one at all was listening.

*

Angela said the safe word, the magic word, the word she’d always used when things got too intense, too painful, too hurtful, and she wanted them to stop. She really couldn’t speak the safe word aloud since they’d removed her tongue and sewn her mouth shut. But she could say it in her head and she did, over and over again.

“Penguin,” Angela repeated in what was left of her conscious mind. “Penguin penguin penguin.”

Stored away as she was, put aside for the moment in a convenient place to await further use, Angela could contemplate and meditate upon the state of her suffering and the nature of the word “penguin.” The word rolled through her mind and gathered its own momentum, rolling over and over again to become independent of all meaning, a noise in spite of meaning. She conjured a giant black and white bird with a fierce yellow beak and blazing yellow eyes who would shield and shelter her, who would carry her under the ice to cool green refuge, who would at least take her head inside its mouth and crush her skull to make the torture stop, a big savior bird who would help her.

Let them have her corpse (and she’d seen what they did with corpses) if she could only salvage just a bit of her rational mind, a tiny portion able to think clearly through the clouds of unholy pain and torment if even for just a moment.

“Penguin,” Angela chanted inside the tiny cell she’d built inside her soul. “Penguin penguin penguin.”

*

Angela said the safe word. She fell forward through layers of darkness hot and moist like sodden, steaming cobwebs and she said “penguin” to evoke a field of ice, smooth and cool, blue and green and bright, a place to glide gently to a stop and bask under the bright Antarctic sun.

She no longer plummeted toward destruction beneath a lightning-forked sky and black-patinaed rocks no longer rushed upward to smash her lifeless among their savage angles. Angela was safe, alone and safe in an icy, lifeless wasteland of pristine, crystalline stasis. Perhaps forever, perhaps until her body hits the ground, Angela reclines and freezes.

*

She said the safe word. She uttered the designated and sanctified word, the word that closed the spell and shut down the linkage forged between dimensions, the word she had chosen to weave into the geometry of the spell and the word she could pull to collapse its structure. Any good spell should have such an abort switch, especially one with unknown consequences and this spell, designed to open interdimensional gateways, certainly qualified.

“Penguin,” she croaked in all its absurdity while before her spread her first glimpse of that new unfolding world her spell had revealed hidden just behind or just beneath or just alongside this world. It was a universe of teeth and spine, thorn and razor talon, and it had no limit and it was a world without breadth or width and Angela was trembling in a state beyond terror within the junction of her world and this other world, between her world of flesh and blood and that world of violence past reckoning, and she scrambled to close this doorway before it fully opened.

“Penguin,” she whispered in the face of all that gnashing and slashing. “Penguin, please.”

*

Angela hung there like the meat she had become, lolling as it were, on the hooks from which she depended. Scarcely more than a head and a torso left of her (and those remains still and continuously most fouly abused), the shreds of what had once been Angela drooled and pissed and shat mindlessly; she was scarred and scorned, branded and tattooed and pierced and sewn and severed and smeared with her own wastes, fucked beyond recognition and into oblivion, a monument to cruelty and pain transcendent. Her eyes rolled senselessly in her head; what they saw or did not see was no longer relevant. Snot and saliva mixed and roped down from her mouth, torn and pulped around the stumps of shattered teeth and the holes where teeth once had been.

The chains hanging from her tattered labia jingled as she stirred upon her hooks. That small part of Angela still capable of any kind of sustained thought was curled up inside her skull, smiling, and that part of Angela was again aroused by the sound of the chains and that part of Angela was content to remember that there had once been a word she could have used if she had wanted to save herself from complete and total erasure.

But she no longer did.

Hello! Hiroshima? Hello?

(is this line open?)

One city of blisters
is so much like my home town
except:
it always rains;
the girls on the street will cry into the arms of the boys
who look in different directions;
everyone speaks a different language
even when the meaning means the same things
because it's their way of listening for something different;
the fish in the restaurants is always very fresh
if not downright alive;
these trees are palm trees, though still ever green, and
so is moss smearing itself across all the concrete walls.

Except for that/these/those few things,
it's exactly the same as my home town
(also, the keloid scars on the back of the neck of the man on the street car that goes by the river that goes past the house where I live when I live in one particular city).

It's a double sunrise day in my hometown and
the mist or the fog or the smoke or whatever it is
comes out of the mountains and
threads itself through the trees on its way to lower ground.

The Memory Of Peaches In Post-Maoist Revolutionary China

It was Professor Chou again, this time and again, and again he was perched in every sense of the word, actually "perching" on the edge of our "shofa" and again he had another ream of forms and instructions for filling out forms spread across the coconut-fiber chest we used for a "ka-fei" table.

"Whatever you can do...," Professor Chou again said again. "It doesn't matter...anything...whatever...you can do..."

These particular forms were from a Swiss industrial firm that had somehow enmeshed itself in a joint-venture enterprise sponsoring geological research aimed at expanding the utilization of natural resources along China's western frontier. These particular forms were applications to a two-year executive training program, intensive language workshops and international business and management classes on the shores of Lake Geneva. I wondered where Chou got forms like this.

Professor Chou was in the Political Theory Department. His degree, apparently, was in Revolutionary Agronomy, whatever that might have been. His danwei , on the other hand, was based on his wife's employment in the Physical Education Department as a swimming instructor. However again, she actually worked and got her meal tickets and ration cards at the Foreign Language Institute across the road that connected the Number Four Road with the Number Nine Road since our school, Shaanxi Normal University, had no swimming pool and the Foreign Language Institute had a swimming pool (though, not surprisingly, the pool at the Institute was empty). On the third hand and because of shifting political winds, the Chou's assigned housing unit was actually part of the service staff and they lived among the cooks and groundskeepers who maintained the campus, faculty, and students. The Chou's was not an unheard of situation.

Lao Chou had joined the Red Guard when he was eleven years old, over 20 years ago. As a matter of fact, his initiation into the beautiful movement had involved the torching of his own school's Principal's family's collection of counter-revolutionary, priceless scrolls and prints. His current dependence on academia, especially the arcane academia created by the flourishing of decadent Western academic models and academic organizations, struck even Chou as ironic, considering how warm he remembered the flames from his ancient teacher's ancient library to have been. If Chou had been able to read well, he most certainly would have moved his lips. As it stood now, then, in 1985, Chou was most anxious to really put his university degree to use before it became a hindrance.

"What exactly is it you would like me to say here?" I asked him and his tea-cup had been empty for a good five minutes and there was no way I was going to move to refill it and we both knew what that meant, that it meant that I didn't want him to be there anymore and we both knew he was ignoring good manners and we both knew why. It was pathetic.

"The good things...errrr...," Chou said, the big smile spread across his face and his eyes out the window, on the desk-top's clutter, on the rug, and anywhere but at me. "The things that will make the Swedes accept me."

"They're Swiss," I told him again.

"They are," he replied and for several long and steadily getting longer minutes, he and I sat there, Professor Chou and I, and listened to the rattle of autumn leaves, big ones, hit the concrete as they fell from the maple trees that had been donated to the university years before by a Canadian delegation.

I still had my official student papers to look at, to mark upon, for tomorrow's classes and I also had a lesson to prepare for the following evening, for the "homen" night school inside the city walls where we moonlighted for wads, for fistfuls, for month's and month's wages of renmenbi .

I was going to be late meeting my wife and the African students at the College of Highway Knowledge dining hall for a Muslim dinner and bike ride into the city to watch the monkey opera in front of the State Department Store. They would wait, probably, until I arrived but the monkey opera guy had a strict schedule and would be gone eating snacks with his buddies at stalls set up under carbide lanterns, would be letting his monkey have sips from the tall green bottle of counterfeit, homemade, bootleg Xian Beer by 8:30 p.m.

Professor Chou had spent the 60s and 70s traveling the length and breadth of the People's Republic of China for free. Any train anywhere at any time was obligated to provide transportation to members of the beloved Red Guard; every restaurant, every home, every communal kitchen and warehouse was obligated to feed and clothe the vanguard of the beloved Chairman's thought.

Lao Chou's first sex had been one clear Mongolian night with a savage girl, a girl raised among the great herds of horses and shaggy two-humped camels, who'd braided red yarn into her hair and smelled of butter. They'd invaded the second-class cars of a westbound train and ridden for a week straight all the way from Nanjing and then they'd climbed aboard trucks, singing revolutionary songs, until they saw yurts and they'd jumped from the trucks to stand for a moment blinking in the middle of the great Steppe, alone together and come to bring the Great Helmsman's genius to the people who roamed there, tidal like the animals they tended.

I would not speak no matter how awkward this silence became. Whoever spoke first during this strange contest would lose. If I, no longer able to stand the tension building between us or the relentless and unbearable pressure generated by the steel will of Chou, cracked up and uttered human speech, I would be expected to neatly and carefully type up his application forms, his visa forms, his resume, his cover letter, and a letter of recommendation. If, however, I was able to withstand Chou's onslaught of manners, custom, "guanxi" , it would be unlikely that he would be spending any time in Zurich for a two-year training program.

We could both hear the early students, in pairs and in small groups and never under any circumstances alone, begin to leave the dormitories for the dining hall. The air began to glow as the slanting sunlight illuminated the dust and coal smoke hanging. I crossed my legs.

"I suppose you like peaches," Professor Lao said though he was looking at the quilt on our bed.

For a heartbeat, I thought he was referring to our housemaid, the country girl we'd nicknamed "Peaches" and who slept on a mat in the linen closet.

"I think maybe just about everyone likes peaches," the professor continued. "It's a pop'lar fruit."

It took another heartbeat for me to translate "pop'lar" into "popular." I was also inwardly ecstatic for having defeated my enemy.

"This time of year, errr...," Chou was practically babbling, pathetic. "This time of year...errrr...those peaches are ver' good. A lot of peoples are eating those peaches."

"Oh, yeah," I answered and I was struggling not to laugh, to jump on the coconut-fiber chest and dance across his sheets of blank spaces, to make up a victory aria and sing it, loudly. "Oh, yeah. Peaches are a hell of a fruit."

Lao Chou began to gather his paperwork and stuff it back into the baby-blue vinyl book-bag he used as a briefcase. It was the kind of "briefcase" a lot of the faculty acquired from the campus police lost and found department.

He stood up. I stood up and opened the door. Chou paused in the hallway, the book-bag against his stomach and the oily dandruff on his shoulders.

"Maybe...errr...I would please bring some of those good peaches," he almost whispered, eyes almost closed and looking down the hallway at the bicycles on the landing under the stairs and the refrigerator and the gas-ring.

"Thank you but please don't trouble yourself," I replied, my hand quite firmly on the doorknob.

Chou remained.

"My cousin's husband in the south has those kinds of trees," he said and I could barely hear him. "Maybe those fruits are ripen."

I looked thoughtful but I sure wasn't going to say anything and start things up all over again.

"Maybe they're ripen a long time ago."

We stood like that for a while and I suppose he was thinking about peaches because I was, strangely enough, thinking about Sweden.

"Okay," Chou finally said and in a normal voice. "Err...good bye." And he shook my hand and he waved at me standing there eighteen inches away before he turned away and walked away down the hall, the metal taps on his shoes snapping on the concrete floor.








From Artificial Rats & Electric Cats published by Camber Press, New York. (Click on the cover image for more information.)

Heat Strokes Across Your Jagged Eyeball

the vicious whisper of thigh and vinyl when they rip apart
these angry red, negative tucks and rolls
deserve to be soothed with gentle balm but
don't count on it
I'm kicking you out of the car

35 cents for a soft drink is the legacy I will leave you
my advice is look for a clean rest room to wash yourself
you've been a good enough daughter but
you're a lousy date

Novo Annum MCMXCIII (Em See Em Eks See Eye Eye Eye)

New Year's Day and lucky
with black-eyed peas,
a rosary on my dashboard and votive flames around the house,
an obsidian arrowhead and
one of the very first Transformers,
a rusty fishing lure (Daredevil small-spooned spinner),
and most of my baby teeth.
I need all the voodoo I can get.

The button on the cell phone is labeled
"redial"
which really means
"dial again"
and I just can't do that.
I'm looking for other numbers now.

For five dollars a minute I can talk to whoever I want
and get her to say the things I've got to hear or,
more accurately,
the amusing things I think I might like to hear her say
if that is, indeed, who I've been talking to.

For instance:
The one about the house in the tropics with a special room just for cockatoos and the way they, those crazy birds, had completely trashed it, the way one of them crawled up her leg that time by the pool, his talons only gentle pressure against her thigh
or
the time when we were driving to Boston and stayed in a Nebraska motel one night and she woke in the early morning, thick and still road drowsy, confused in those unfamiliar surroundings until she smiled to see me there with her, the way her hair fell back across her eyes as she relaxed to return to her dream
or
the curves her body made as she knelt at the edge of a significant geological feature, her anxious caution dissolving until she could look right into the chasm, could follow the descent of the little rocks she dropped as they fell and clattered the distance.

Another Mostly True Story

I was so angry at Richard Lacanatto, though now I cannot actually remember why, that I just hauled off and hit him on the back of the head with his brother’s softball bat and the “ping” of the aluminum when it connected surprised me, a trivial sound layered on top of the more serious crunch of Richie’s skull breaking and he was hurt, oh for sure and badly, and I knew, at 9-years old, that I was a now and would forever be a murderer and that I was going to jail and to hell, straight to my room and to the electric chair, and cops were going to beat me up and my dad was going to spank me and who knew what Mrs. Lacanatto would do?

This I pondered, sort of frozen in a building anguish, as I watched Richie begin to weave his way home, confused and saddened by my attack, too physically hurt to completely cry but tears of betrayal nonetheless leaked from his eyes. He made a noise like “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.”

So, of course, I never said anything and I never have said anything and I never will say anything after Richie stumbled into the street and was immediately struck by Mrs. Stellarman, returning from a card party in Ronkonkoma and more than slightly drunk. Richie died in the ambulance, they said, before even reaching the hospital. Mrs. Stellarman got in a lot of trouble but, since she was married to Mr. Stellarman, not a whole bunch happened to her but they did move away soon afterward. The Lancanattos were bereft. And I never told anyone what I had done and, even now, it’s just your word against mine.

Chlorine

I suppose it may not be the case in other cities, say for instance Los Angeles, California, maybe, but certainly here in Santa Teresa, the life of a "pool man" is not anything like glamorous or overly sexy or anything. I guess there's a kind of reputation for a pool man like for a lifeguard or a traveling salesman or a rock star. And I'm not saying that the reputation isn't possible maybe in a city where there's a lot of pools so the law of averages might tip in favor of "Dear Penthouse" kinds of experiences, but here in Santa Teresa there's about 25 pools all together counting four motels and the high school, the public park municipal and the Primitive Baptist's indoor/outdoor immersion tank (and this does not in any way shape or form include any kind of hot-tub or spa or Jacuzzi Brand bath-tub with built-in jets; I'm thinking to myself that maybe that's where the real action is for a town like Santa Teresa). Five or six of the private pools clean and service themselves, so I have about twenty pools on my clipboard and those are on different visitation schedules--some are weekly, some twice a week (usually Monday after the weekend and Friday before), motels every other day, high school daily, and municipal at least twice daily and emergency on-call for whatever (I wear a pager now; big whoop). It is seasonal work.

*

The most exciting thing to happen, really, on a pool job so far has been finding a drowned llama in the Purcell's one morning. I had to knock on the screen-door and say "Pool man" while Mrs. Purcell was fixing frozen waffles for her children. She came out with a very "what-is-it-now? what-do-you-want?" attitude even though this is a small town and I've known her since she went to high school with my oldest sister, Lorraine, and there's really only one supermarket in town so we do see each other from time to time anyway outside business.

"Could I talk to you outside for a second, Christy?" I asked her.

She just stood there at the screen door and had to do one of those wiping-her-hand-on-her-apron gestures but in like a real exasperated kind of way, like dragging her away from the toaster and her kids banging their sippy cups on the Formica was a total pain in the ass for her and I was a pointless jerk for doing it. She opened the screen door and stuck her head out the littlest little bit.

"What is it?" She sounded peeved. That is the perfect word for the way she sounded--peeved.

"Umm...that llama ya'll keep in the pen to the barn?" I started out asking her.

"Yes?" It was like she was deliberately trying to act like some teacher in grade school, the way she said "yes" and her voice rising up at the end.

"Well, he must of gotten loose last night or something," I told her.

She looked back over her shoulder for a second back into the kitchen like she had to keep an eye on those Eggo Brand toaster-waffles or something. You could tell that one of those kids was going to probably start crying pretty soon; you could hear it in all of their already-bored-in-the-morning voices all whining and irritated. And of course, the little color TV on the counter was also on about full blast with cartoon xylophone music and explosions.

Christi squinted down at me from the step-up when she turned around.

"Okay...?" She had an edge of the same whine as her kids building in her voice and she was waiting for me to fill in the blank, getting ready to say something like, “That’s not fair” or “Why do I have to do everything?”

"Well," I wanted to wait for just a few more seconds. "Well. I don't know how to say this...but...."

I could see her getting frustrated and she twisted around to look back at the toaster, two of the kids that were on the verge of a slap-fight, and quick back to me standing there already stinking of chlorine and hydrochloric acid with my ratty PE shorts over my bathing suit and my Chuck Taylors gray and falling to pieces from wading around in toxic chemicals with twelve feet of aluminum tubing and a leaf scooper in my hands.

I heard the toaster pop, that metallic springy noise they make, and I heard a kid sort of shriek and I heard a glass get knocked over.

"That llama's all drowned in the pool now," I told her and stepped back into the yard.

"What?" she said, her arm raised in mid-smack, one of her daughters frozen into a protective ball beneath her frozen hand. "What did you say? Hey, you...what? Get back here!"

But, I had already spun around and started walking back to my truck and dragging and banging my pole through the gravel on the ground behind me. I could hear at least two, maybe more, of those kids starting to cry back in there.

*

A llama may not look like all that much alive, kind of small and skinny, but they soak up pretty good and Starbright, as I learned that particular llama had been named, must have come in at six or seven hundred pounds of wet wool and bloated creature.

Cindy called Animal Control and that one-legged guy came out with his truck full of cats. First he snaked a loop around Starbright's hindquarters and we winched her out of the shallow end onto one of those blue plastic tarps we’d spread out on the lawn. Then the Animal Control guy turned his truck around and we winched old Starbright right up onto that little metal shelf on the back end of his city/county pick-up. All those cats made a hell of noise, too, their yowling kind of harmonizing with the whining grind of the winch. Then he drove her away and I dumped about forty pounds of chlorine into the water. You couldn't even see the bottom at the three-foot end, that's how much chlorine I dumped in.

Werewolves Everywhere You Look

Number One

Don's head felt like it was in a thing like a box or in a thing like maybe a real big fist and it was closing and Mark over there in the kitchen was not helping anything feel any different. Mötley Crüe was pounding out of the speakers of the boom box Don's sister had loaned them, the boom box she'd put on the windowsill and nobody had moved since. Maximum volume created maximum distortion and the music was set to both. It didn't matter that much to the boys, either of them; they'd memorized the whole album years before.

Mark was cutting oranges into quarters with a big commando-type knife. When he'd gotten about one thousand chunks of orange piled up on the counter, he jammed the knife into the formica surface. He starting scooping up orange quarters and dumping them into the refrigerator. Although the music prevented Don from actually hearing anything else, he did see Mark's lips move and Don knew that Mark had just said "Awl riot" in the way that was his, Mark's, trademark. It meant the same thing as "victory" or "how unusual" or "I can't think of anything else to say." It was like Don's own bandanna, like the one he had tied around his neck in ninth grade and it just became something he kept on doing; it become the thing he always did. People said, “Don. You know, the guy who has that bandanna around his neck all the time.” Everybody did things like that, like Mark always said "awl riot" and Don wore a bandanna around his neck and this girl or that girl wore a lot of gold-toned rings on every finger or another wore red eye shadow all the time or some such thing. Everybody did something that they did all the time.

The boys' apartment was a good apartment because almost everybody who lived in the complex worked day jobs of some kind or else had a bunch of kids that would keep them all pretty busy and out of the way. Nobody was out much during the weekdays and Don and Mark could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Don might bring over one of the guys from his baking industries classes or Mark might cruise one of the high school parking lots. Just like that, just about every day there was a party.

Don's headache was getting much better. It seemed to have a little life all its own, that headache. It came and went like an old friend though lately it was making more and more of its own decisions without asking Don and it, the headache, seemed to be getting desperate as if it were running out of time, running out of choices. Don was the guy who hated pain. He had never and probably would never get used to it. He was the kid who was scared of spankings because they hurt. He was the one who wouldn't fight, who would eat shit on the playground rather than risk getting hurt. Don used to lie awake in his little bed in his Mom's apartment trying to sleep and just keep seeing himself falling off his bike into gravel, getting "swats" from his PE teacher, burning up in some horrible car wreck.

Don tried to stop thinking about his headache specifically and about pain in general. He drank some more beer and looked at their clock with its electrical cord trailing down to the outlet. Don wondered if they sold aspirin at liquor stores. While he was doing that, the tape in the machine ended or stopped or something and in the shock of sudden silence, both boys realized that someone was knocking really loudly on the door.

"Whoa," said Mark.

Don opened the door and it was this friend of one of Mark's girlfriends; her name was Julie. She was sixteen and she liked to come over to the apartment when she was supposed to be in study hall and she'd wait around hoping someone would get her high or show her some deep attention and then she'd go back to school for social studies or hygiene class or something. This girl always wore a black, TV-type detective fedora kind of hat. It was her trademark.

"Hey, Don," she said.

"Hey, Julie," Don said.

She sat down on the living room floor and lit a Marlboro Light. It was the kind of cigarette she bought from a machine rather than risk get carded by convenience store clerks. Don went back into the kitchen near Mark.

"Did you guys ever have Mrs. Lamont ever?" Julie asked them. "For English?"

Neither Mark nor Don said anything. Don was looking through some empty cassette boxes, not thinking about his headache, and wondering where all the tapes were.

"Well?" Julie asked and she whipped her head around to look right at them and her black TV hat almost fell off. "I mean, did you?"

Don moved as quickly as he could to the front door and opened it back up. Sunlight came in sheets through it.

"Hey, Julie," Don sort of said. "I mean, see you later, okay?"

Julie just sat there a second and then she stood up really fast and just left.

"That was harsh," said Mark.

"Nah," Don said back. "Not really."

Number Two

It was extremely near closing time and, okay, I will admit that I was very drunk. I had run out of cash early in the evening and had been running a tab on my credit card. I was drinking shots of vodka and glasses of draft beer. I figured out a long time ago that those are the kinds of drinks you drink when you don't want to commune with other people. If you drink something with pineapple or grenadine or other vivid colors, you're asking for someone to talk to you. Even ice can be dangerous because it makes that attractive clinking sound on the way to your mouth. A shot and a beer meant something else altogether, something kind of morose and silent.

At least, that what I always thought until this guy at my left told the bartender to “give me another round and put it on that pussy's tab" and jerked his big thumb to his right which was directly at me. The bartender looked at me and I was pretty surprised and didn't really know what to say and then the drinks came up. Everybody within earshot was looking at me. I still didn't know what to do but I knew I didn't like what was being done. I didn't know what to do so I nodded and listened to the acid laughter drip out of the Thumb and his buddies drinking on my tab and basically the rest of the entire bar was laughing, too. They all seemed to have figured out that they had it made no matter what I was drinking. My choices had become extremely limited.

I finished my vodka, decided to leave the rest of my draft on the coaster, and slid off my stool in a humble, I'm-off-to-take-a-leak-Sir-but-I'll-be-right-back kind of way as if I was really worried about keeping on his good side, what he was going to do to me next, what he was really thinking about me. When I got near the exit door at the back of the room, I stopped and looked back toward the bar. I waited like that until the Thumb had the time to look over and wonder where I had gone off to and when I was getting back. He was still thinking about me, thinking about me paying for more drinks, and maybe even missing me. The bar was crowded enough, I figured, to keep him from just charging into me swinging his big fists and, I figured, he'd want to tell a few people what he was going to do to a drink-buying pussy like me. I figured that once he saw me, I'd have about half a minute to get ready. I kept staring at him until he looked over his shoulder, I locked my eyes onto his, I pointed my finger straight at him, I made a hooking kind of gesture, and I made my mouth make "You" real obvious. And then I crashed backward through the exit door out into the parking lot.

I was shaking and scared as hell, hyper-conscious of how bad all my calculations probably were, and how even my few seconds where fading away fast. I was just about ready to give it up and run when I found what I was looking for, a big flat piece of landscaping rock. I got to that rock, grabbed it, and the door swung open. The Thumb was alone. I took my swing and the rock split his nose cleanly down the middle, squashed it up under his right cheek. He just stood there and watched the blood ruin his nice shirt.

""Okay? Fair?" I tried to whisper. "Want to quit now?"

His eyes cleared up and he said, "Now, I'm going to kill you, now."

The rock bounced against his left ear. It sounded soft and wet when it hit but he didn't react the way I hoped. He made a noise like "woof" and then he made another noise that sounded like "fucker."

I started to really panic. I tried to think about what I should do next. I threw the rock straight at his mouth and ran. I figured that if I could get to my car and start it and drive, I could run back and forth over the Thumb until his pieces were too small to do me harm. He didn't follow me, though. I got my car door open and I twisted my key into my ignition and, as I drove out and away, I could see he was still standing there bleeding under the light of the “no entrance/exit only” sign.

Number Three

Even though he was pacing everywhere through the house, even though he acted like he was bored to distraction, Jackie really wasn't. He was just Jackie, Jackie here and there throughout the house.

Once in a while, he would stop at the door of the kids' room and call in.

"Are you kids okay? Do you need something?"

"Your mom will be home real soon. Okay? Kids?"

Stuff like that.

When he was out in the kitchen, he finished washing the dishes, scoured out the sink, scrubbed the cutlery a second and then a third time, scoured out the sink again, and started on his shirt and pants. He yelled toward the kids' room a lot.

"Cleaning up in here!"

"Getting things spic and span in the kitchen!"

Things like that to keep them posted on how things were going with him getting ready for their mother to come home.

The stains on his clothes were difficult and he couldn't even start to think about the stains on theirs or the other messes around the house he was going to have to start cleaning. His clothes took a lot of rubbing and scrubbing and some "god-shit-fuck-goddammits" before they came away clean (or cleaner than they’d been before he started trying to clean them). In between all those times he was scrubbing at his clothes, he was still pacing around the house only he was naked and looking out the windows and discovering that he was wandering away from the sink and his dirty dirty clothes again and that he was smoking a cigarette in the hallway near the bedrooms and the doors to theirs, the children's rooms.

But Jackie got everything all washed out and rinsed and hung up on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. When he saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he saw that he had no shirt on which made him look down and remember that he had no pants on either.

While he was in a closet getting fresh clothes, he heard the crunching noise from the gravel in the driveway. Jackie went lurching out into the hallway tangled up in his new, fresh, clean clothes; he was all tangled up in those arms and legs in an eagerly comical kind of way.

"Kids!" he called. "Hey, kids! Your mom's home."

Silk Cut

The smoke from a Japanese cigarette
curls backward to this boy's mouth
against the current of typhoon.
No way will any divine wind change
the way these blossoms
fall
in flame
again and again
and then stop falling.


(Originally published in Wild Dog Nights, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1993)

Another Step Toward True Democracy

(Xian, The People's Republic of China, 1986)

He remembered the oily feel of the mud as he dug bones with the rest of the work detail, the soft (almost silken) feel of the skulls and there were thousands of them, the way they tumbled in the air toward the piles heaped next to the Nanking riverbank.

He remembered the smell of yams baking in the marketplace oil drums, the cackle and cry of the yam men who held them smoking in their thick gloved hands, the miserable blister of yellow yam skin as it fell, peeled, to the dirty street.

He remembered the damp smell of forbidden books, the ones long hidden and poorly handled, the ways their pages opened as if the words themselves would tumble off the paper into dirty piles of useless ink.

He remembered the way his father gasped in the whitewashed hospital room, the smell of carbolic and the rotten mouths of nurses who could not even read, the way a choking man was mocked by medicines trapped inside glass cases.

He remembered the tears that wet his stomach, between the layers of quilted coat and threadbare trousers, and the way that Shan Nyu cried to create them with his penis in her mouth, the lights of the evening buses cutting through the dismal smokes of coal and diesel near the Bell Tower.

He remembered the way sugar tasted the first time it was in his tea.





[Originally published in "El Nopal: Journal of the Southwest Symposium" (University of New Mexico, 1991) and reprinted in Artificial Rats & Electric Cats: Communications from Transitional China, 1985-1986 (Camber Press, 2008). Click on title or book cover for more information.]

Sake, Beer, and the Rain

all day &
all night the
rolling voices of
other arguments bouncing
off the buildings rising
around us that
surround our
balcony hung with
children's clothes &
toys, some broken
by the bad kids in the
courtyard of grass & dirt & short bamboo &
a maple tree that will
turn serrated crimson long after we
are gone

She Saw An Eel

and it made her sick.
Sick and limply violent.
She wanted to put it in her mouth,
wanted to see how bad it could be.

"Quit that," he told her
and she stopped making her face.
She wrote E-E-L
on her palette with her tongue.


(originally published in the literary journal Tyounyi, New Mexico [1989] and reprinted in Slack magazine, Boulder, Colorado [1993])

Cool Turtles I Have Known

Okay. This is me and I want to tell you guys some stories I know about turtles; some of these are true stories about turtles, some are stories I only heard about turtles and some are maybe stories I made up about turtles.

Number One

I have a cousin and we’ll call him Gary because that’s what his mom and dad, my aunt and uncle, named him. His name is Gary and when he was a little boy, somebody brought a turtle over to his house and showed it to him. Gary didn’t know it was a turtle and he said “COOKIE!” really loud and he snatched the turtle up and he put it in his mouth.

Nobody got hurt. The turtle was okay and Gary was okay. Still, it was an important day for everybody that was there. We all heard about it later. It’s the kind of story that families tell over and over and over again. I don’t know what happened to the turtle.

Number Two

There was a turtle named Maybelline because she had such beautiful eyes because Maybelline is a kind of eye make-up that girls wear sometimes. Anyway, she lived here and there around the Rio Grande in New Mexico until one day a kid snatched her up and put her in a box and then drove her up the bosque into Albuquerque. For a while, Maybelline lived in the pet store that where the boy sold her. Then the pet store sold her to me.

It was pretty good when Maybelline came to stay with us. We had a bunch of pets then and she just fit right in and became part of the family.

Then, one dark night a terrible storm blew in to Albuquerque and, while the lightening flashed blue and the thunder rolled heavy, a strong blast of wind opened up the screen door. In her fright, Maybelline slipped out that open door and nobody noticed until it was too late! We looked and looked for Maybelline that night. We got some flashlights and we looked under the bushes and, even though it was a silly thing to do, we called out, “Maybelline! Oh, Maybelline! Where are you?”

And we were really sad when we didn’t find her. We stayed up extra late that night and got up extra early the next morning, but we couldn’t find Maybelline.

Well. One whole year went by and we sure missed Maybelline. We managed to get by, somehow, but we often thought of her and how her beautiful eyes would sparkle when she saw a tasty strawberry.

Here comes the good part. After all that time (remember, we waited one whole year) a friend of ours called up on the telephone.

“You guys like turtles, right?” he asked us.

We said, “Of course. You bet. Sure thing. No problem.” And then we asked him, “Why do you ask?”

He said, “I found this really good looking turtle in the middle of a very busy street so I stopped and I picked her up but I don’t want to keep her so I thought I would call you and see if you guys together would want to see that she gets a good home.”

“Sure. Of course. You bet. Sure thing. No problem.”” we said. “You bring that good looking turtle right over here as quickly as you can.”

(Have you guessed it yet?)

When that guy, our friend, came over with the turtle he had found we took one look and we knew right away that it was Maybelline. Who else would look at us with such beautiful eyes?

Number Three

When I was a really little boy, long before I could ever read a book by myself, I had a little turtle with red cheeks that lived in a bowl with a plastic palm tree on a plastic island in the middle. I named that turtle “Rockla” and it was the same kind of turtle with red cheeks that my cousin Gary thought was a cookie when he was a little boy.

Number Four

Just the other day I read in the newspaper about a man who called the emergency line in his home town, that 911 number, and said, “I hab a turdel ond by dose” and all the emergency operators thought he was joking until the paramedic guys showed up and had to take it, a real life turtle, off his, a real life guy’s, nose with some pliers.

Number Five

When I was a little kid I had some friends who were boys and who were brothers and they had a big turtle but I can’t remember what that turtle’s name was. Anyway, one hot summer day when little boys like us, my friends and me, start getting sleepy and turtles like theirs just start getting energized, that turtle that they had decided to go swimming and that’s the last we ever saw of that turtle and we all remember how the grown-ups that summer kept making fun of us because we let a turtle run away. They’d act like they were acting like us and talk in funny, slow-motion voices and pretend to run in slow-motion calling, “Cooommmme baaaaaack, tuuuuuurtle” in slow-motion voices.

We looked everywhere for that turtle but we could never find him.

Number Six

They told us one time that some people think the whole entire world rests on the back of one big big turtle and I remember thinking then, at that time, that if anybody could hold up the world, a turtle probably could. It might make a little, soft noise and it might make a little, soft tear, but you can bet that turtle would never let the world drop. No way, turtle!

Number Seven

On time when it was spring, we went to visit our friends Peter and Anne and they live way up in Taos, New Mexico. When we got up in the morning and they were making up the breakfast that we were going to eat, there was this big scratching sound from a big box they had. At first, nobody knew what it was and then we knew right away what we had heard. It was the turtles waking up. They had been sleeping all winter long in that cardboard box and then, that morning, they decided to wake up and look around.

We all went outside to eat our breakfasts and we watched the turtles blink at the sunshine they hadn’t seen in so long and then start taking big bites out of the daffodils which they hadn’t eaten since last year and we all kept taking big bites of pancakes and saying, “Good morning, turtles! Good morning, sleepyheads!”

Number Eight

One time a turtle saved my life. I was just going to college for my very second semester of my very first year and I was just walking down a very flat road in Sarasota, Florida, where my college was when I saw a sparkle in the bushes. I was much younger than I am now then and so I decided to go over and see what was sparkling there by the side of the road. It was a turtle in the weeds by the side of the road and the reason that turtle’s eyes were sparkling was because there was this crazy driver coming up behind me and he would have hit me unless his headlights had hit that turtle’s eyes and led me off the flat road to safety

Number Nine

Our latest turtle is really cool. We named her Cookie after the turtle my cousin Gary almost ate that time. This new Cookie got real sick one time and we had to take her to the veterinarian. The doctor told us all sorts of things we didn’t know about turtles. She told us they need Vitamin A for their eyes. She told us a vitamin shot every once in a while sure wouldn’t hurt them. She told us how old Cookie was by looking at one of her scales under a microscope. It turns out that Cookie is 6 years old.

Right now, Cookie is asleep in the garage in a box full of blankets and newspapers. That’s how she’ll spend the winter. When springtime comes, she’ll wake up and we’ll all be so glad to see her.

“Good morning, Cookie!” we will say. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

Bag of Guts

This is a true story and it happened in a town near here and it wasn’t that long ago. My friend’s cousin told it to him, he told it to me, and I’m telling it to you and it is totally true.

There was this kid named Tommy or Timmy Guttman or Tony Guttbaum or Guttfreid or Gutt-some-goddamn-thing-or-another. The important thing is that this kid’s last name started with Gutt. Maybe his family was from Germany or something. Whatever it was, his name started with Gutt and he was fat. I mean this kid was really fat. A complete pig. Enormous. Huge. Fat.

So, naturally, when this kid started school, the other kids, the normal-sized kids sort of latched on to him and started teasing him about being so fat. It was one of these really small towns with only one school so everybody knew each other from kindergarten until senior year. They started teasing Tommy or Tony or Timmy. Probably even some of the other fat kids at school teased him because, standing there next to Gutt-whatever, they didn’t look so fat anymore. It was practically fate or destiny that the other kids teased him, picked on him, and made up names for him. He’d been born for it. They called him “Jelly Belly,” “Porky Pig,” “Fatso,” “Blimp,” and whatever popped into their heads. By third grade, though, everyone had pretty much settled on calling him “Bag of Guts” because of his last name. And that’s the way it stayed until even some of the teachers thought of this kid as “Bag of Guts” like it was his real name. Hardly anyone even remembered what his first name was, that he even had a real name beside “Bag of Guts.”

By the time he got to high school, Bag of Guts weighed in around 400, maybe 500 pounds and his life was hell. He had taken so much shit for so long that it was pretty clear what the rest of his life was going to be like. He could barely make it to school anyway, could barely walk even, so he just sort of dropped out of school and nobody really came looking for him, no guidance counselors or truant officers came by the Bag of Guts’ house looking to get him to come back or anything. It made everyone’s lives a little easier to just not have him around. A few of the meanest, the most sadistic kids really did miss him but they just shifted their attention to the next closest, the next weakest kids and made their lives miserable instead. And some of those kids really, really missed the old Bag of Guts.

A year passes, maybe two years, and everyone is getting ready to graduate. Some kids are going off to college, some kids are going off to the army, some kids are just going to get a job, get pregnant, settle down, and settle in. The usual shit. Somebody spray-painted “Class of 19-whatever Rules” on some rocks. Graduation, caps and gowns, pomp and circumstance, best friends forever, don’t ever change, blah blah blah.

There was one big party on the night of graduation, a bonfire out at the end of a dirt road into the woods, woods just like these, and about half the newly graduated seniors were out there going “woo hoo” and playing music on car stereos, drinking beer and wine coolers and peppermint schnapps.

All I know, all anyone knows, is that no one came home from that party. When the cops went out there the next morning to check, the fire was still smoldering and the cars were still there, maybe just running out of batteries and still playing party music. What the cops did find out there in the woods, woods just like these, and what freaked everyone out so badly, was a huge burlap sack, a huge burlap sack that someone had made by taking regular size burlap sacks and sewing them all together, an enormous burlap bag stuffed full of teenaged hearts and livers and intestines. One big, gigantic bag of guts and nobody has seen that Guttman, Guttbaum, Guttfreid kid since.








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These Are Photographs

These are photographs, spread wing-like across this table,
and they sideways cut the membraned layers beneath my eyelids,
the slick part that slides across the part they call "hazel."
A twenty-sided construct rolls nearly as well as a sphere
and each side is a photograph
and when it stops rolling nineteen of them will not be facing up.
These clever arrangements of salts and metals
add together quickly, like an equation,
but can never solve, are never totaled;
the palm of this hand and the way it rests against that shoulder
remain so while other, clearer photographs develop.
This blur here implies motion.

Heroes of Language (Part II)

My grandfather told me stories about his friend, an Indian named Enchanted Medicine Dog, and it wasn't until I began working in the library that I was able to guess that his old buddy had been the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse.

My cat is named Pencil and it has recently become apparent that she actually wants to write. Her scrawlings, from stylus held most clumsily between paw and tooth, cannot begin to yet be called language, but there is a meaning rich with feline sensibility and a kind of creeping logic there.

My fish, lock in their glassy locus, have taken to strange loopings that, when traced with soap slivers or grease pens along the aquarium planes, reveal alphabets or perhaps pictograms that point to icthic futures.

My wife, when sleeping, groans softly and runs her hands along my scalp to trace another man's name there.

Accidental Seabirds: A Play

The Cast:

Natural Forces, male or female
Thing One, youthful male or female
Thing Two, youthful male or female
A Blacksmith, male
Mom, adult female
Dad, adult male
Junior, adolescent male
Sis, adolescent female
Little Bit, female child
A Booming Voice, male or female
The Crowd, male and female
(certainly, some of these roles may be played by the same actors)


[Pitch black stage. The sounds of movement--whispers, scuffles--grow to become audible but not nearly overwhelming enough to demand attention. Lights snap full on to bare stage with NATURAL FORCES way off to the back at the side. S/he speaks.]

NATURAL FORCES:

I am called Natural Forces and I will be hovering around the edges of things this evening. As you may recall from what you’ve called your educations, I am usually symbolically and always only dimly understood.

It is easier for your teachers to talk to you with puppets than to tell you the truth. They will tell you the sun is an orange in the sky and it is easier for you to conceive the sun an orange than otherwise. Your teachers will show you a few nuts and seeds; these will be called planets and set to turning around the orange sun. And it is fixed in your heads that you can imagine the solar system. There are so many people who think the sun is an orange surrounded by walnuts glued to thread and that is how they live.

They have shown you filmstrips about anthropomorphic subatomic particles, and have fixed in your heads the notions of emotive protons and neurons with subatomic attractions and repulsions and uncontrollable excitments and personal subatomic names on their subatomic sweaters. A molecule is conceived of as an arrangement of teeny weenie Styrofoam balls and toothpicks. And there is a glimmer in your heads of how the world is bent and stopped and started again every fraction of every instant and that glimmer is wrong.

There is no more comfortable way to see disease, the way in which the body falls apart to senselessness and rot, than to make it a cartoon, grimacing animunculus under Van Louenhook’s glass, little Disney germs in army helmets fighting against the little good guy germs of health and hygiene.

These illusions are better, make life much easier, than it would be facing the workings of my machinery. You may not perceive my motives; you are not equipped to see my consequences.

[dismissively]

Anyway, ‘nuff said. Check it out.


[Music of some sort. Nothing cheesy--a small ensemble of woodwinds or a gamalon or talk radio tapes played backwards.

THE CROWD filters onto the stage and NATURAL FORCES blends in with their activity, is quickly lost from sight. THE CROWD works in a friendly, cooperative fashion to construct a modular set that, at first, resembles some sort of medieval village. As the set is quickly completed, THE CROWD begins to assume roles within the context of the actions to follow; i.e. in one sequence, a particular CROWD member may assume the role of cafe patron while the principals emote and strut and, in another sequence, slip into the role of policeman. Etc.

THE CROWD breaks into small groups and begins to arrange itself in the manner of townspeople--shopping, selling, gossiping.

Enter two youths wearing THING ONE and THING TWO sweatshirts.]


THING ONE:

Oh, Thing Two. This whole Middle Ages stuff is absolutely terrible. I am getting absolutely, terribly sick and tired of alchemy and astrology. I ache for chemistry and astronomy. I need physics and biology. I want to read books written in a vernacular tongue. I want to grind lenses so that we can see some different things. I need to send and receive messages over great distances. I’m tired of talking to priests


THING TWO:

I’d like to go to Italy and sit in the sun and invent a machine, a machine mind you, that could fly. I would use it to find Prestor John in his Asian kingdom. I would fly to Africa and see the palace of She Who Is To Be Obeyed. I would like to visit the moon.

THING ONE:

Okay. That’s the idea. I think you’re on the right track. But rather than posit a future, I would rather take this time to dwell on the misery of the present.

You know. Cathedrals. Crusades. The Plagues. No cable. I really think we were born in the wrong century.

THING TWO:

Oh, yes, Thing One, I must agree. If we had lived in the Age of Philosophy or with the Noble Romans, think how we might have flourished! Think what possibilities for change may have existed for us. With what we know now, we could have constructed Pliny’s zoological garden. With the machines I may invent from linen and bronze, we could collect the griffen and giraffalope and those little pygmy guys with one eye in their tummies. We could do it, Thing One. We really could.

THING ONE:

Well, yeah. We could do that, too. But I thought more to think of things more new. To try to think of things not yet imaginable, to name a color unseen, to watch a sun blaze a dawn that is yet to be novaed into existence.

I was lamenting, Thing Two, our place in history when so much past and so much future weigh so heavily on this feeble slip called our present.

And we here, Thing Two, we rot in an Era of Closed Minds when change of any nature is viewed as heresy.

THING TWO:

Or the future! When things untold exist yet still in the minds of men unborn. Some earthly heaven yet to be terrestrial. The future time when all humors become equal within the tides of men; when angels return to earth to guide our hands upon the plows of Utopia.

[A member of THE CROWD steps slightly forward to insinuate his role into the consciousness of the audience. Things like this should happen periodically throughout the play; i.e., it would not be untoward for a member of THE CROWD to go offstage to retrieve, open, and drink a beverage. However and for sure, this time, THE CROWD member steps forward to announce...]

BLACKSMITH:

I am a character in another play altogether written by a friend of the author of this play and his name, the guy who wrote the little play within a play that I am in, is named Perry Novelli. I don’t know what the name of the play within a play is but I am the Blacksmith. I have a little part and it goes something like this:

[clears throat; THING ONE and THING TWO have become secondary, at least, and tertiary if possible. They fade while the BLACKSMITH takes his place]

[music/chorus/revolutionary opera]

Turkey and ham
Turkey and ham
The wind don't grow no
Turkey and ham

[lather, rinse, repeat]

[THE CROWD retreats to pantomimed applause as THING ONE and THING TWO casually wander back to their prominent marks]


THING ONE:

Ahem. Harumph.

Anyway.

Have you ever even thought about economics? I mean real economics, something beyond a tangible barter, something more than trading an animal’s skin for a bag of corn? About buying on credit? About the possibility of buying on a margin? About bankruptcy and rollovers and mergers and stock splits?

I’m just asking...

[THING TWO looks downright puzzled.]

And what about knowledge? What if everyone could read? What, Thing Two, if you can imagine, what if everyone could write? What new stories would we hear? What new languages would we learn? What kingdoms lie there dormant in those yeomen’s brains waiting to be structured and expressed through syntax? What empire of mind and soul is destined for some other aspirant’s grasp? And here we languish, dear Thing 2, in the Land of the Iron Sausage, under gentle dukedom’s hand, while even our poor local library has been sealed as tightly as the fists of our merchants and the knees of their glassy-eyed daughters.

[Some townspeople have begun to throw the two sidelong glances as the content of their conversation has become clear.]

THING TWO:

Perhaps our mouths should mimic our fellows’ minds and fists and knees. This broadcast of such sentiments might quickly be misunderstood.

THING ONE:

Hmm? Oh, piss on these, on these, on these...people!

[People have really started to notice now, have stopped what they are doing to listen, have even taken a few steps toward the two.]

Oh, God in Heaven, if only some wheel would turn; if only there did exist a lever and for that lever a fulcrum from which to start this dear world turning once again. And in which direction would such rolling take? I swear to you, Thing 2, that I would not care if this darkened rock climbed up toward some brighter light or teetered even further back toward the dung-heap from which it surely was once plucked. I wouldn’t give two snaps as long as we were moving.

THING TWO:
(anxiously)

I beg you stop this speculation and stop it in such a public manner in such a public place.

[THE CROWD is seriously interested in the conversation now and has begun to comment amongst itself. They mumble, “Peas and carrots. Peas and carrots.”]

THING ONE:

If there could only be a cleansing rain, a deluge of baptismal waters--or, of fire, if needs be must--to wash or burn or somehow scour these rusted armors of idiocy from the limbs of the brains in our heads. I crave the giddy liquor of potential, of chance, of uncertainty, and of transformation! I would drink most deeply from the cup of he who would offer me an unfamiliar draught.

THING TWO:
(emphatically)

Would you just shut the fuck up....

[As THE CROWDbegins to move in a concerted and menacing manner toward THING ONE and THING TWO, NATURAL FORCES steps forward to high visibility.]

NATURAL FORCES:

Pardon me; excuse me. The Mongol hordes are here.

[Stage goes to deep black. A single voice says “Oh, shit.” Again, there is the sound of shuffling. The lights slowly rise.]

[The village has been slightly modified and now looks more or less like a theme park. Fakiness is somehow emphasized, commercialism and product marketing can be reflected in the type and nature of visible advertising, souvenir-oriented “Shoppe” names, etc. Shopping type “musak” grows to an audible but unobtrusive level. THE CROWD settles into roles of park-goers, big animal characters, concessionaires, etc.]

[A family unit--DAD, MOM, SIS, JUNIOR, and LITTLE BIT enters. Costume cues should read tourist without screaming. Please no cliché Bermuda short, camera snapping, hideous sunglasses, etc. They are on vacation but they are more or less realistic.]

DAD:

Okay? Where exactly are we now? Who’s got that map. The one with all the zones in different colors. What zone is this?

[MOM pulls LITTLE BIT closer to her side and begins to dab at the child’s face with a tissue.]

MOM:

Spit.

[LITTLE BIT emits muffled, whining grunts of discomfort and embarrassment.]

DAD:

For Christ’s sake, who’s got the map? Junior? Come here, son.

JUNIOR:
[timidly]

I don’t know. I gave it to Sis.

[SIS is suddenly aware of the action and she freezes for an instant. Quickly though increasingly frantically, she inventories her pockets, bag, and immediate surroundings. No map.]

DAD:
[quiet, yet extremely menacing.]

Goddamn it. I gave it to you. Come here, son.

JUNIOR:

Honest, Dad. I gave it to her and she said she’d give it back and she didn’t and it’s not my fault, Dad. Honest.

[MOM looks up sharply at the sound of her son’s urgency and glances at her eldest daughter. LITTLE BIT has turned stiff.]

SIS:
[taking a hesitant few steps toward her father, a step back, another forward]

No, Dad. He’s right. It’s my fault. I used it to sit down on the curb and forgot to pick it up. I can get another.

DAD:
[doesn’t turn around, still stares calmly at JUNIOR]

Stay out of this, missy. Now, son, where is the map I gave you?

MOM:
[a gesture of reaching aborted; a glance at each of her children]

Frank?

DAD:
[as calmly as you please]

I said that all bitches should back the fuck off.

[They do, glancing at each other and at LITTLE BIT.]

JUNIOR:

No, dad, really, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry dad oh please I’m sorry I’ll go get another one right now.

[Passersby have begun to notice that something is wrong with the scene but it is not clear what the tension the family generates might mean]

MOM:

Frank? Please.

DAD:

I asked you a question, son. Where’s the map?

[NATURAL FORCES emerges from amongst the other park-goers. She looks at the family, the rage on one face, the fear on another, the loathing both self- and otherwise upon another. She gestures first to the audience and then to the family itself, an introduction of sorts.]

NATURAL FORCES:

An aneurysm, I think.

[S/he waves his/er finger around until it stops on MOM who drops like a rock, boom, as the lights go pitch black. A single voice says, “Whoa. Did you see that lady pass out?” More shuffling as the sets are once again modified. After a while, the small noises fade as the sound of rain rises. After sufficient duration, a lightning flash and a peal of thunder should startle everybody. The lights grow though only enough to simulate a dark, windy, rainy, thunderstorming night.]

[Dark. Wind. Rain. Thunder. And a figure against what we can now see is the parapet of a castle. Another figure carrying a flashlight or a lantern or a torch or something approaches from behind.]

THING ONE:
[sotto voco]

Thing Two! Thing Two! Is that you?

THING TWO:

Of course it is. Be quiet!

THING ONE:

Thank God! I’ve been out here for hours.

THING TWO:

Oh, Thing One, be serious. You’ve been out here for fifteen minutes at the very most.

THING ONE:

Well, it sure seems a lot longer than what you just said.

[pause]

Are you sure they’re asleep?

THING TWO:

They were. If you keep making so much noise, they’ll probably wake up.

THING ONE:
[whining]

Okay,. okay. I’m sorry.

[They move together closer to the edge of the stage and off to one side.]

THING TWO:

There, now. Do you feel any better.

THING ONE:
[drawing his jacket or cloak or space blanket or what ever closer about himself]

Yeah. A little.

[sniffles]

Okay. You start.

THING TWO:

All right.

[pause; deep breath]

All right. I like to pull the plug on the bathtub but then stay inside laying as flat as I possibly can and feel the sensation as the water drains away and the temperature changes and the texture of the change between bath water and air feels heavy like the gravity that follows the waterline to surround my limbs again with their own weight.

THING ONE:

Ooo. I like that. Do another. Do another.

THING TWO:

Very well, but just one. I like it when I am far away from the ocean, miles inland, days inland, with no trace of salt mingled in the atmosphere and I see a gull. There, somewhere near some pile of garbage, to see an ocean bird...it’s like being two places at the same time. The sound the bird makes.

THING ONE:

That was even better than the first. I like the ones about water. Do another one. Do another one with water in it.

THING TWO:

No. It’s your turn. You do one now.

THING ONE:

But you do them so well. I want to hear another of yours.

NATURAL FORCES:

I think not.

[Lightning crashes and strikes THING TWO dead. The stage, of course and once again, goes pitch black.]

A BOOMING VOICE:

That’s it, you two. I want you back in bed and asleep in five minutes or I’m coming down there.

[Again and of course, there is the usual scuffling and shuffling. The sounds of set rearrangement, so familiar and so comforting, again insinuate themselves throughout the theater.]

[Eventually, the house lights go up and everyone (audience, actors, staff) goes home.]

Most of the Twentieth Century and Practically All of the Twenty-First

Making love while bombs fell
Our narrow patch of floor
And dirt drenched blankets
All walls trembling as we
With shock and awe
Lamps swinging though not exactly wildly
In the age of “It’s just like a movie”
Not much like a movie at all
With Thanatos and Eros in the front row anyway,
On the glare horizon, cities burning.
Overhead, just above us here, cities burning.

Some other family’s heirlooms
And knick-knacks and trash now
Burned and dirty and water-damaged
Rarely worth even cursory scavenge
Just more things to walk upon
To kick aside to make a space
To make a space for dirt drenched blankets
To make a place to spend the night
And make love while bombs fall

11 Ways of Looking at Lisa

She's stealing, stealing, stealing money at work all the time. In her hands, credit card charge slips transform themselves and ones and fours and sevens become nines, threes fill in to eights, zeroes fall into unexpected but significant places, and the cash in the coffee can on her closet's top shelf rolls tightly around itself, a cocoon in which her brooding future incubates.

She never eats it herself but she often steals meat from the kitchen to bring home to her dog. Her boyfriend will often steal if from them both. She can smell it on his breath.

His drinks will almost certainly appear on some other drunk's tab and that is a kind of victory, a kind of seduction performed with alcohol and a BIC round-stic fine point pen and it will almost certainly work and he will certainly drink more and she will glow with the gifts she's given, setting up shots of raw vodka all around.

*

She's breaking things in the kitchen and it punctuates the things she says.

She's asking, "Are you happy now? [crash] Is this what you want? [crash] Is this the way you want things to be? [crash]" and the shards of Corning Ware and Pyrex and glass arrange themselves across the linoleum like messages, like codes, like hieroglyphic gestures and they glitter as they spin toward brief rest in litter under her 100 watt bulbs. There is a clarity to this performance, its meaning quite clear, yet it will remain a kind of performance.

"Are [smash] you [smash] happy [smash] now? [smash]" she wails, forlorn in anger and gathering repent.

He is thinking.

He says, "I'm thinking. I'm thinking."

*

She's working on the StairMaster and it's been 45 minutes. The sweat spreads but does not fall from her face, her lips, her chin; it outlines its own movement across her shoulders and down the furrows of her vertebrae. It is hard for her to concentrate on the article in the Harper's magazine she holds. She savors the movement of her thighs, her calves, her ass as she climbs and she lets the magazine slowly fold itself closed and then it slip to the floor beside the machine and she lays her forehead between her hands and she keeps climbing.

*

She's drinking and she's drunk and crawling around the living room floor, a mosaic of cassette tapes and CDs spread underneath her elbows and her knees and she's looking for something particular, a special song to accompany this special moment spread underneath her elbows and her knees and she's looking for something particular, a special song to accompany this special moment and she knows it here somewhere and if she can just remember who sings it and what album it's on and where that album is, she can listen to it over and over and over all night long and she keeps looking because she knows what she wants to hear.

*

She's dragging her nails across the plaster of the bedroom wall and making noise, plenty of noise, and it all means she likes having sex. Her back is arching and her shoulders toss and her breath goes in and out like cats gasp and it comes out like a long, drawn out "oh, fuck" and that noise rises and hardens as it escapes her swollen mouth and everything she does and says is absolutely inspiring and he's working at it hard, he's trying his best and she's rocking.

"Fuck, baby. Oh, fuck."

*

She's driving fast across west Texas plains in a car that's about to break down on roads she's deliberately not chosen, roads she's deliberately just taken for no reason at all. She has chosen not to add any oil to the engine and the temperature is rising and she's singing along to a radio station that has seemed to just appear on the dial and she really doesn't know the words to the songs, so the sounds she makes are just a split second behind the sounds the radio is making.

"Heartache hmm hmm hmm and whiskey hmm hmm hmm," she sings. "Lovin' arms hmm hmm hmm and freight trains moanin' hmm hmm hmm."

At the same time, she's thinking, "This is the life, sure enough."

*

She's getting ready for another party; she has them quarterly. She is vacuuming the living room carpet and cutting up the vegetables and working on her hair and working on her face and opening bottles of wine and setting out plates and napkins and silverware and picking out some music all more or less simultaneously and when guests start arriving she is more than ready.

*

She's screaming at the boys in the car who yelled at her but they're not listening; they're already way too far down the street for her voice to reach them though she can still hear the heavy thud the music they play makes.

"Fuck you!" she screams but it is a thin sound and is quickly lost in the air, unravels and disappears until only dogs can hear it.

"Fuck you, you fuckers!"

*

She's counting boyfriends like counting prayers with a rosary; she lays out their photographs like a collection of holy cards, like a dealer starting another game of casino blackjack with all the odds behind her. She makes a circle, she makes a star, she puts them in a long, long row. She picks them up like paper dolls.

"Hey, you!" she pretends one of the photographs says. "You were mean to Lisa."

"I was not," she pretends to make another picture say. "She's a bitch and she was mean to me."

"Take that back."

"Make me." And then she pretends the pictures fight and she jiggles them both across each other and the sounds she makes sound like fists hitting flesh and grunts of pain. She pretends the good guy's picture wins the fight and then she gathers all the photos together into one neat stack and puts them back in the envelope in the box in the drawer in the dresser in the room she calls "spare."

*

She's laughing and the dog is in the water and across the brown, flat river the new condominiums with red tile roofs are laddered up the mesa, rising like dull bees from the cottonwood bosque. Even Ray-Bans cannot control the vibrating reflection of the sun in the water in her eyes in the windows of the houses half a mile away.

*

She's sleeping while the morning sunlight enters the east window and he sits in the wing back chair that sits in the corner of her bedroom and he watches it, the light, and the way the sheets are tangled around her legs and the way the arrow of soft, fine down tracks her spine and the way the growing light has made her perspire and how each tiny hair has begun to glisten, to shine golden in the curves her back has made this morning.