1

Q uiet L ightning
s PAR K L E
& bLINK
as performed on
Apr 5 10
@
Gestalt

© 2010 by Evan Karp + Rajshree Chauhan

Design by Evan Karp

Promotional rights only.

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individual authors.

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For information:

http://qlightning.wordpress.com
lightning@evankarp.com

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contents
paul corman-roberts
manifesto of bad poetry 6

ryan peterson
i hope i am ugly 10
lizards v rodents; talent v art 11

william taylor jr.

to let others walk the world 12
lives like landfills; some new fire 13
portrait of 6th street on a tuesday afternoon 14

andrew o dugas
untitled (“i do not want to be reborn”) 16
untitled (“for a moment i am grateful to the terrorists”) 17

julia halprin jackson

this is you 22

caitlin myer
nude elderly male; way to go ed 25; 27

nicole alea
eternity is a big word; some things to know 29; 36

andrew paul nelson

wrinkles [ as part ii. of s’napse ] 39

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 mg martin
leroi jones likes neither of us 43
three cheers for arbitrary 45
da king of papā’iko 47

will clark
night wind | penetrant 49

jennifer capo
side effects 50

sara stroud
wrapped 54
reflections on a spit bucket; hurricane 55; 56

ian tuttle
scavenger hunt 57

tess patalano
withwithout | blank 60

shantih sekaran
mil wakes up 61

charlie getter
untitled (“all the seals left the dock”) 66
untitled (“there ain’t no better day”) 72

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 Q uiet Lightning
is

a monthly submission-based reading series

with 2 stipulations
you have to be able to be there to submit

you only get 5-8 min

submit

!
!

each month

1 attendee of those who put their names in a hat

gets 2 weeks to respond

via mail or email

to the last reading b4 break

it will be published

on the blog

and read at the subsequent

Quiet Lightning
!
!

5
 mANIFESTO oF bAD
pOETRY
Some come to poetry seeking enlightenment.
Some have come to poetry seeking identity.
Some have come to poetry seeking revolution.
Some have come to poetry for catharsis.
Some have come to get published.
Some come to get laid.

I say poets should come to poetry seeking all of the above, but even if all
poets could actually be made to agree to this, how would you get them to
agree to a method of achieving this multi-goaled pseudo ideal?

The answer, I declare, is bad poetry

and I mean that without irony.
Fuck irony anyway.
It has no place in bad poetry or great poetry.
Irony only belongs in the fair to middlin’ poetry.
Besides, irony has fucked me enough times I feel pretty well justified in
fucking it back.

I’m talking about really, really bad poetry, which is not as easy to produce as
you might think it would be.
Poetry, in the post-modern era, is the punk rock of literature.
But bad poetry requires truly Herculean lunkheadedness.

I’m talking lyrical ballads recounting right wing orgies involving Dick
Cheney and Barbara Bush.
I’m talking epic verses of young runaway Trotskyites holding marathon
shitting contests in theatre district parking lots.
I’m talking about High School diaries of abused goth girls that make Robert
Haas sound like G.G. Allin.

It’s not like these things are right up on the surface.

You have to dig in some fetid patches to come up with these truffles.

6
aNNOUNCING: tHE aBOMUNIST pOETRY sOCIETY

There will be some good poetry at first, of course.

There will always be some good poets who won’t be able to resist the
novelty.
But the novelty will wear off.
The good poets will drift away.
They will have no choice.

What will be left?

A stripped down gallery of fringe ass freaks:

frinks
emotional frinks
spiritual frinks
and the frinkishly deviant
a goulash of psyches impelled to push the envelope
to push the button of every upholder of good taste.
You name it
Transgendered Hell’s Angels
Abducted Scientologists
Lachrymologists
the mentally disabled
suicidal drag queens.

You know…Abomunists.

Mock, ridicule or be offended if you must. That’s the point.

This is not about negation for negation’s sake.
This is about creating a new kind of chaos in order to see what type of
structure emerges.

Good poetry, even if it is the best poetry ever produced, has lost the power to
effect the serious social change required because of its commodification.
Only the worst poetry will allow the discourse of a tolerable, practical
existence to endure.
Above the door to our reading alcove there shall be a sign:

“Leave your pride, dignity, and poses at the door.

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Bring in nothing but your fear, shame and disgust.”

We will make fun of the good poets.

We will have dartboards with Ezra Pound’s profile as the bull’s-eye.
Allen Ginsberg will grace our toilet paper, so that you won’t be able to tell
where the feces end, and Allan’s beard begins.
We shall encircle an effigy of William Blake and mercilessly taunt said
effigy that we are having a helluva lot more fun than he ever did...

(well not really, but every movement needs a few delusions doesn’t it?)

...and...

We shall worship before a vast, air blown portrait of Rod McKuen.

Only in exploring what most annoys us

what we would most rather not deal with
what we most dislike in other people
all the shit inside our animal selves we most want to pretend isn’t there...

...Only in this way, will we be able to pass through these obstacles.

Talented poets
Will pour forth the caramelized amber of their souls
Will dazzle the masses with a brilliant, shining resonance
Will elevate the noblest nature of our corrupt sloth

Talented poets will be enshrined

will be lionized
will have their praises sung

and forgotten by all but your neighborhood library and even then they’re not
so sure what they did with the index card.

But those talents shall never pass through the obstacles presented by the
Abomunist Poetry Society, and come out on the other side unchanged. When
all the free market liberals have finally managed to consume all the stuffy,
uncool intellectuals, we’ll be the ones left over to tell them what life was like
before they killed it all off. By that time hopefully, we will have figured out
how to take over the rest of the world. Thanks for coming tonight and we’ll
be taking out subscriptions to our online newsletter after the reading.

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9
 i hOPE i aM uGLY
i hope i am ugly.

i despise fucking

and i don’t even want the option.

i desire to be ugly and i am.

i know i am ugly,

i know i am ugly

on the inside,

where true ugliness resides.

a philanthropist

told me i wasn’t and

it made me want to

scream and fucking vomit,

because i hate flatterers

and gawkers

and i hate anything

that calls me beautiful.

and i hate

fucking.

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lIZARDS v. rODENTS
i spent a week tearing myself apart

and building myself back up

so i could wreck myself over again

but then i stopped

and dove headfirst into another person

who seemed so much better than you

and i took my tape-mended heart

and i gave it to her because i thought, foolishly,

that she could help me fix it because she

is good at crafts (but sadly not so very good at art).

tALENT v. aRT
i turned her car into art

like i tried to turn her life into art

but she didn’t get it because she has talent

and i don’t have any talent of my own,

so i make things that don’t require any talent

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that she, being talented, didn’t appreciate.

she is beautiful and she has an enormous ass

and she reminded me of you in all the ways

that she is nothing like you; she is nice and

she doesn’t read books full of pretentious psychobabble

and she isn’t from around here and she has smaller tits

than you and she’s quiet and she never loved me even though i loved her.

tO lET oTHERS wALK tHE

wORLD
I was born with a weak heart
into the winter months

all frightened eyes and nervous smile

I met the big

nothing early on

I took it inside and became immune

never bothered with the future

because the moment in hand
was always burning

abandoned dreams of justice

to sit beneath the sky
and watch things fall apart
in their fashion

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to let others walk the world
as if they had some place in it

left with my dreams of little rooms

with little windows
that look out upon the rain

sad music and wine

afternoons spent
in libraries and bars
with the drunks
and unemployed poets

hungry for any place

to escape an indifferent sun.

lIVES lIKE lANDFILLS

In spite of promises, oaths
and the best of intentions

I stand but dumbly by

as the hours slip

and spiral out.

She lies on the bed and cries,

she tells me she is broken.

I understand
but don't know what to do.

I suppose it's like this

everywhere,

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lives like landfills
of disappoints and regrets.

I too wish the days and the hours

were something more than this
gradual decline.

I wish the silent gods

would find new ways
for us to burn.

The day shrugs and gives

itself to the darkness

as I ignore the ringing

of the phone

on my way to the kitchen

in search of more wine.

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sOME nEW fIRE
I walk the downtown streets

in search of trouble
and salvation

some new fire in which to burn.

I am jealous of both the living

and the dead

lacking whatever strength it takes

to wrest some beauty from the day.

The void behind god's smile

shines brighter than the sun
that forgets our names

and this clinging sadness

is born not so much of life
but the lack thereof.

I ask the sky forgiveness

for my wasted days
as I waste the one in hand

wanting only to be emptied

of this emptiness

dreaming of anything
other than what is here.

The beautiful and the broken

walk up and down Columbus Avenue
beneath an indifferent sky

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and my only defense against the hours
is to destroy them as best I can.

pORTRAIT oF 6TH sTREET

oN a tUESDAY
aFTERNOON
The world is just knives and stones
forged by vengeful
bitter gods

we wander through stillborn days

tongues coated with

the metallic taste of despair

addled with loneliness

all the pretty suicides

smile sadly from every corner

beckoning with skinny fingers

as the afternoon teeters

and falls off its stool

any meaning you might

try and pin to it all
fades and tears like old handbills
from Market Street lamp posts

and all that remains

is whatever stares back at you
from spittle stained windows

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your wounded animal self
naked and ashamed

uglier even than your dreams.

uNTITLED
I do not want to be reborn,
I do not want
this life to be one of many lives

Not because I hate life but because I love it too much

I do not want to hear your ideas

about life as a wheel of pain
a thousand million revolutions
of purefying suffering.

When I am with a woman,

I don't think about yesterday's flame.
I don't think about tomorrow's flirtation.

When I look into her eyes,

I do not wonder if we've met in a past life.
I do not wonder if we will meet again in the next.

I give her all my attention,

anything less and her mood
the mood of the whole evening
can turn like milk.

It won't matter
how exquisite the wine
how tender the meat.

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The taste will be spoiled.

It won't matter
how low the candles
how soft the music
how blue the moon.

The magic will elude us.

When your wheel of pain spins around,

look for me at your funeral.

I'll be the one

sending his compliments to the chef,
I'll be the one
dancing with your widow.

If you cannot see

the woman here before you,
this beautiful woman
here tonight
opening herself to you,

(a gift that demands everything in return)

If you cannot see this,

if you cannot respond to this,
if you cannot tonight
meet this single moment with all your being,

what good are a thousand million lives?

What good is one?

18
uNTITLED
For a moment I am grateful to the terrorists
because the whole airport security thing
obliterates the whole hanging out at the gate thing.
What do I want to hang out for, she is leaving, it's not enough
I drove her to the airport?

One not real kiss, one not real hug and I am

already loping down the moving sidewalk
back to the parking garage, paying my four dollars,
goddamned rip off for fifteen minutes only, then
shooting down the ramp onto the highway back to town.

Already I am forgetting
her, I tell myself, and her absence
fills me like helium, so light even the car
feels like it could lift off any second.

What to do with the rest of the day

I realize the rest of the day is MY own!
Like tomorrow and the next day and all the days
after are MY own, too.

Already I am forgetting
her and back in MY apartment
I lie down on MY sofa for a nap,
the thing she hated most to see,
me relaxing not doing anything productive,
I really stretch out and nod off.

When I awake it is still quiet afternoon, and I remember

she is not there, the whole night still to come,
Saturday night, and I smile and go into
the bathroom to splash water on my face and
even drink from the faucet, another thing
she hated, and when I wipe my hands

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the towels are still damp from her last shower

I press my face into the dampness and

I smell her and I smell her
until I am damp with her too

20
tHIS iS yOU
At four you are stubborn, easily frustrated, with your very own sense of
fashion. You insist one time on wearing your tights inside out, with the red
string sticking out. You never talk to adults because you don’t like having to
look above people’s knees. When you are mad or in trouble, you draw two
little squares and write your parents’ initials in each one, carefully crossing
out the letters so they know exactly who is the target of your anger. Then, to
further the point, you write it out again: “AJ = YES LH = NO.” Somehow
the act of writing it out makes the feeling fade. Poof! You fear one thing:
whatever it is beneath your bed. You want only the purple Turtle Tot you saw
on the shelf at the toy store down the street.

At age ten you are pudgy, a bit tall for your age, with hair that you’ve never
bothered to cut and preferred not to brush. You hide Little House on the
Prairie inside your sidurim at Sunday School. You hide the book in your
knees, looking up expectantly between final prayer and the weekly blessing
of bread and wine. With that book between your legs, you wear that itchy
blue knit dress with the puffy sleeves, wishing you could’ve stayed home to
rake the lawn with your dad. You like how fragile the falling leaves are, and
how if you touch them, they shatter into tiny pieces. Your greatest wish: to
live out in a little cabin on the prairie with a posse of border collies and a
library full of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Your greatest fear: that your parents will
divorce, leaving you in this big old messy world with nothing but a pile of
books.

Nineteen and you are impossibly tall in your Doc Martens. Long, messy
hair. You Rollerblade to class wearing cutoff jeans and your mom’s old shirts
from the seventies. You’re not sure, but you might be in love for the very
first time with a boy from the school band. Your best friend buys you your
first vibrator. You volunteer for the local animal shelter, and come home one
day with an old tabby cat. You read and reread Sandra Cisneros and Junot
Diaz. Secretly you wish you were born in another country. Your latest fear is
what you will have to do when you finish your degree, but that’s a few years
away yet, so really the worry that consumes you the most is how to prolong
college as long as possible. You want more than anything to be unique, but

21
you don’t know how to do that without being like everybody else in
Berkeley.

Here you are at thirty: you finally cut your hair, and you’re less pudgy, but
not quite as thin as you once were. You have eyeglasses for the computer,
but secretly wish you could wear them all the time. You work for a nonprofit
organization that raises money for schools in Myanmar. You have a degree
in philosophy but spend most of your day on the phone or writing emails.
You sometimes wonder: just how many letters did Laura Ingalls Wilder have
to write? You make some money, enough to pay the rent for the apartment
you share with a young gay couple, but not enough to cover your health
expenses.
Your greatest desire: the bicycle messenger who delivers to your office every
Wednesday morning, who you believe will be there when you find the
perfect job, the one that pays you to travel the world to solve looming social
issues, all the while guaranteeing three – no, four—weeks of paid vacation
that you spend camping across country. Your greatest fear: that you will be
indefinitely dependent on your parents, and that your ovaries will shrivel due
to lack of use.

Forty-four, and now you start worrying about all those times you forgot the
sunscreen. There are days of absolute quandary, when you wake up to a loud
seven-year-old blowing raspberries on your stomach, and then you realize
that you are absolutely, indefinitely responsible for him. You blink often,
push back the glasses on your nose, wipe the sweat from the back of your
neck, and organize chore charts in the kitchen. You wonder often if you
settled for what you have, or if what you have is what requires you to settle
for everything else. You married that man across the table from you, the one
with a receding hairline and that impossibly optimistic grin. You’d like
memory to be chronological, but the day you met him and the day you
married him are one and the same in your mind. You minimize the New
York Times every time your boss walks past your desk, turn down NPR and
return to the latest finance report on the new schools in Myanmar. You worry
constantly: about your mother’s failing health, college funds for your kids,
the likelihood of earning a pension in your old age, your decreasing sexual
drive. You want the freedom you now miss; you want an open road, a quiet
evening, a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a book contract. You worry about how
much you want. And if you are allowed to want anything now that you are
responsible for smaller people with desires just as big.

22
At sixty, you find a stack of notes in your parent’s den. They are nearly as
old as you. First you find the “YES” notes. Some of them even feature stick
figure drawings of your mother and you. She’d kept them all, and had even
put little heart stickers on the best ones. You stop what you are doing, put
your hand to your chest, and remember your mother as best you can. You
remember the red tights, the time she read Farm Boy out loud until you fell
asleep, the toast she gave at your wedding, the Turtle Tot she bought you for
Christmas. You miss her suddenly, with a strength that knocks you down.
You give yourself a minute. Rearrange the notes in a neat pile. And then, just
as you are getting up to leave the room, and perhaps all the memories inside
it, you find the “NO” ones. She’d kept them too. You worry that she only
remembered the nos, and want so much to have a stack of yeses all your own
someday.

And now you at seventy-five, fine lines parting your brows, hips still sore
from the walk up the hill. You were said to have retired years ago, and yet
you know the truth: you’ve never stopped working. You volunteer at the
public library, and sometimes at the local clinic. Your husband quit teaching
a while back, and now spends most of the time in the garden, or choosing
ripe fruit at the farmer’s market. You have a little savings, but what you do
have you spend on your children. Oh, your children. You spent the first half
of your life planning for them, and the second half worrying about them.
You remember your desires over the years, and the fears that mirrored them,
and one by one they disappear – poof! One day, while taking a bubble bath
in the early afternoon, you envision each bubble as a different worry.
Divorce? Poof! Debt? Poof! Unrequited love? Poof, poof! Minor illness or
injury? Poof! One by one, you shatter them all, until there is just one left:
Loneliness. You watch as it raises high up over your head, over your aging
bones as they lay retired in the water, and pops with relish in the air above
you. Poof?

Poof.

nUDE eLDERLY mALE

Police blotter: nude elderly male

23
A South Buffalo Street caller reported a nude elderly man on a porch in the
area

Lloyd couldn't find his wallet. No, he knew he'd left it right there on the
coffee table, or maybe on the desk, on the kitchen counter, next to the bed.
How could a person find anything, all these papers, all this stuff? Why do we
have so much stuff? The mailman keeps bringing paper, slipping it in all
innocent through that slot in the door, you hear it shuck in and it’s another
layer of dirt on your grave, another thing, another piece of stuff, seventy-five
years of stuff piling up, report cards from when he was eight years old,
letters from his mother, bills, catalogs, instructions on how to use the
microwave, the toaster, the can opener, seventy-five years of paper, enough
to suffocate Lloyd enough to drown a city, and still it kept coming, still that
sinister little snick of the paper slipping through the slot, the whole world is
drowning in paper and tissue boxes and blankets and keychains with
people's names on them and postcards from Hawaii.

Lloyd's hands moved over the papers, the photographs in frames, the band-
aids, the tweezers, the reading glasses, it was enough, he was done with all
of it. Seventy-five years was enough, too much, it all had to go. His hands
locked down on a pile, magazines and Christmas cards and checkbooks;
holding it to his chest, his breath coming faster, he pushed open the door, out
into the light, and heaved all of it into the street.

No, that wasn't right. No, then he'd just shift it all to the street, to the outside
world, and he'd still be in the box, the mail still snicking in every day, no, he
had to get out, himself.

Lloyd left the door open, and walked out into the street.

Yes, this was better. The air breathed lightly on his cheek, springtime air.
There were cherry blossoms on the tree across the street. His feet were hot in
his shoes, so he unlaced them and stepped out, leaving them behind, then his
socks, one at a time. He put his feet in the strip of grass between sidewalk
and street and remembered the park where he played when he was a kid.
Grass like this, soft in April, so green it almost hurt to look, walking along
the sidewalk barefoot with his pal Harvey, ice cream dripping over the hand
that held the cone, their shirts off, and Lloyd unbuttoned his shirt, letting it
float gently to the ground, the breeze in his chest hair.

24
This was good, nothing else felt like this. His belt was next, then the pants,
jingling heavy to the ground, keys in the pocket, boxer shorts last.

Nothing closing him in, now. Lloyd took in a deep breath, and smiled. Down
the street was a big, deep porch, like he remembered from when he was a
kid, the kind with a porch swing.

Lloyd sat down on the broad steps, cement cool against his skin, and settled
back to watch the world go by.

wAY tO gO eD
Ed felt it right as the ball left his fingers, a perfect throw, rolling straight as
the path to God down the lane, lights shining off its surface. He closed his
eyes to hear the sweet clatter as the ball hit true, ten pins down.

"You ever hear anything so pretty?" asked Ed, turning back to his boys.

Cecil shook his head, slurping suds from his moustache, "You're on fire
tonight, Ed."

"Throwing with the angels," agreed Johnny, angling up to the ball return, his
long fingers slotting into his own ball.

Throwing with the angels. Ed nodded, in a state of grace, something special

tonight. He knew he had that magic 300 in his fingers, he just had to step
aside almost, a simple perfection speaking through him.

"Whatever happened to that Sherry?" asked Ed. He could still remember the
feel of her lips on his cheek last year, after his second 300 game, always
thought it was her nominated him for the Hall of Fame in Kalamazoo. The
way she looked at him sideways from behind the counter, shiny red lips in a
little smile like they had a private joke, just the two of them.

"She married that Kosanke fellow," Cecil slumping back from a sorry throw,
"From last year's All Star's? Moved out to...Illinois, I think."

25
"That girl had real class," Ed nodded his way back to the lane, last throw of
the game, head full of Sherry and her long brown hair. Even under the alley
uniform you could tell she was built like one of those girls on the mud flaps,
tiny little waist, hips rolling under the edge of the shirt. Too young for him,
but she let him dream. Ed held his hand over the air, thought again of her
breath on his cheek, her gentle voice in his ear: "Way to go, Ed."

His fingers slid into the holes like home, the ball warm and alive in his hand.

This is a good night, he thought, letting go, rolling true as the word of the
Lord, the boys jumping up almost before it hit, he could hear them yelling
his name, a perfect 300, stars shooting behind his eyelids, his heart swelling
up, he turned around to see their faces once before tilting to the floor,
Sherry's voice in his ear, calling him softly home.

"Way to go, Ed."

26
eTERNITY iS a bIG wORD
i. wORRY
on the top step of the last pyramid

before expansive desert

the word eternity

is engraved with an oyster knife

and next to its mother of pearl handle

is a letter written in victorian cursive

that says,

dear virginia woolf,

i heard you locked yourself

in smoky bedroom

and trusted the internet

enough to tell you

which rocks were heavy

enough for sinking.

and i heard you kissed

the bottom of the river

like you kissed sapphic sister

27
 open mouthed and breathless.

words strain invisible

because the ink from her quill

was sucked dry by baby teeth

and the first time i met lisa olsen

she was studying sleep

out of a text book

and she asked me how i

rest my head so often

and i said, eternity.

ii. fEAR
with reiki we are constantly

reclaiming our work with our bodies

and if she’s ever examined her hands

she’d see

worry, fear, anger, sadness, trying to,

and i know that each day

she drums her fingers

against the soil

of the valley of her home

28
and she might suck on white sage

bundled like a cigarette trying to

get smoke to cling to her clothes,

and she might write in her purple journal

about how the womyn that once wore

her used skirts and shoes

also dealt with death

and worry, fear, anger, sadness, trying to.

and i haven’t told her

how many times i’ve dreamt about arthur

and i don’t know if i’m supposed to

but i need her to know that the steel cage

that last held him

was no match

to the newcastle armor

that transcended paint

and pulled apart canvas’,

that even i know he was a leader

in a pack of delinquents,

and somewhere there is modern day camelot

29
and the knight slings paintbrushes,

and skateboards,

speaks spanish,

and will never cease to love her

because he’s a story,

so he’s always there,

because stories never die.

iii. aNGER
the second time i met lisa olsen

i picked the skin around worry,

flexed my forefinger at fear,

but she took on anger, sadness, and trying to

and each emotion represented by our fingers

ties into death

and we can flex the stages of mourning

without even getting out of bed

because we are attached to hand sketched

drawings of stick figures

evaporating into rose water

and i’ve never seen something so beautiful

30
as lisa olsen in a green sweater

in a coffee shop

drumming her fingers against her coffee cup.

iv. sADNESS
in the north inland valley

lisa olsen sketched out a letter to me

via virginia woolf dreaming about mrs. dalloway,

and on the vintage floral notecard

she knew that she

had survived,

for him she had survived,

now her and arthur live inside each other,

she said,

she being part,

she was positive,

of the trees at home,

had allowed her to become mist

as she wrapped her fingers into a fist

to blanket white energy

back to reverse

31
worry, fear, anger, sadness, trying to.

v. tRYING tO
the last time i met lisa olsen

she handed me the thoth deck,

used and pulsating,

and the first card i pulled

was the ace of cups

and if i told her what that means

i’d just have to say eternity.

and on the top step of the last pyramid

before expansive desert

i crafted raw apache tears into stone

that she now holds next to her hips,

the metamorphosis challenges grieving

and plants enough seedlings

along her jaw line to give way

to a forest of feathers

plucked from the spine of a late writer.

so if she could place me

32
between the palm of her fist

with wrapped up

worry, fear, anger, sadness, trying to,

and the intimacy of a moth wing

i’d gather up all the rose quartz in this

city of gull swarms

if not for a moment,

then eternity.

33
sOME tHINGS tO kNOW
i.
ze's manger was draped in red silk

with a bowl of cloves burning on either side

and when mary picked hir up for the first time

she smiled at the contrast of old razor scarred arms

and her new baby boi.

mary thought about joseph

and how he wouldn’t pay child support

and how her hormones needed to be refilled

and how the scars from her top surgery ached

and how the baby glowed like some radiating

force field of foreshadowed tragedy.

she named ze elvis

because ze would be the king of man,

and when ze started walking

ze would trip over hir lacy dresses

trying to reach g.i. joe out of the toy box.

34
mary thought about the moment,

9 months ago,

when two white angels

laid her on the surgery table

and saw petrie dish baby

mixed and ready to be inserted,

mary thought about god

and how he must have felt

the moment he dipped his hand into

the jar of fluidity

and she cried the last tears

before parenthood

and hoped that the surgery wouldn’t

be botched like some back alley

and she knew in that moment

that virgin means nothing

when it comes to babies.

ii.
most of the time i don’t even know what you’re saying.

35
iii.
on the 25th day during the rise of capricorn, the sun took the first breath
against the chest of an archangel, and in the shallowness of some dirt path
off a side road in nazareth was a burning bowl of the finest smells of
consecrated incense.

iv.
i didn’t make the incense myself. shaman david took 36 hours to mix,
measure, and pour the incense he blessed with holy water and prayers into
tiny mason jars that he labeled in gold ink. across the top it said: vashti. and i
brought this incense to the side of the manger because vashti was the
original feminist and if this tiny baby was going to amount to anything, ze
would be radical politics.

v.
and maybe he wasn’t born at all. maybe that night it was the moon that was
born and then broke off a piece of herself that grew into the sun. and maybe
there was no manger except to hold food for the mules and no carpenter that
walked across water and no water turning into blood and no blind man
taking visual interest in the architecture of jerusalem, but there was still
archangel michael and he still transitioned into a woman, but the artificial
insemination didn’t take to her lack of biological ovaries. and sometimes i
think i’m just praying to an oil painting with no soul and wandering eyes and
hella halos in different shades of gold and i’m lucky that at 12:02 am every
night the moon shines through my third story window and i can pray to her
crater face and cleanse when her body is full, and that is what i call religion.

wRINKLES
I. dON’T look aT mY wRINKLES
don't look
at my wrinkles
beguile me in yr
languid language
but please
dear God

36
 don't look at my
wrinkles

you may defecate

on my tombstone
spill wine in
my graveyard
five buck$ to find yr diffident
self upstairs where
you mash yr face in
the antiquated post-apocalyptic
fecal fatuity of the drunk
prophets who used to drink
here before the nymph's
inebriation became illegal
but not black and white
photographs of old people
don't expose how
my new is just not
new anymore
how my you is just
not you anymore
don't contrive an ending
I'm not dead yet…
don't visit my ghost towns
or salivate on my combed over
backwards pages of fallen idols
don't inquire in public as to
what happened to them
those of us who once stood
up for anything
and lied to ourselves

thou may worship false ideals

and build thy opulent sovereignty
on quicksand
but please don't
sit on my spleen
don't lift up my skirt
oh the trepidation btw my legs!

37
 these old lips ain't hip
to the drip drip that sags
on down past my knees please
don't look at my wrinkles
don't trace the slits
w/ yr fingertips
of my shallow curtain
don't even pique an eyebrow
to the new dead
skin populating the
pock-marked shapes
that frame in
this physiognomy
of extreme poverty
don't even raise a finger
to the once fecund figure
now only enervating
the wanna-be-beats
that skip perfectly in tune
w/ the hardly cacophonous
commerce in the street
and don't speak
of the epigonic
petulance of my past lovers
don't ameliorate that
abhorrent something that
once was
but isn't
and can't be
don't draw attention
to the diaphanously
glazed over look in my eyes
don't incense
my blacklisted
blonde persuasions
or the dissimulated realities
in which I was once reaching
in yr general direction
if wasn’t for sweaty altruism
that bastard!

38
which always gets in the way of things

do what you will w/ me

but please don't point out how
comfortable we wd be
if only we wd just give up
and start living again

II. sLEEPY eYED dAWN iN lOVE…

lust and despair we trust
nothing if not nostalgia for
corruptions of the past
do you have
anything to burn anything
w/ which to light yourself
on fire in front of her
anything to make this
idol relevant w/ words
the casual causal connecting dots
etching constellations btw the brown
spots traversing her back exposed
reasoning down
from heaven to tell you
something is bound
to happened
letting you know how
maybe if you disappeared
you might exist as a thing again
how you might have to leave
just to be somewhere
but as long as she still sings
you want to be right here
young and terrified
periodically beautiful
even if it's only lines
and shapes that excite
like the way she never exhales
delicately allowing the smoke
to find its own way out
or how she's rarely happy

39
 if she's not dancing

oh how the night

is perpetually too short
lived
please be my vespertine lover
my callow crepuscule bedroom eyes
the heavy quilt to militate
my sleep-walk
and the prophylaxis against
talking myself into a coma

III…

40
lEROI jONES lIKES
nEITHER oF uS
(aFTER aMIRI bARAKA)

6/10ths of 1% of americans
are sickly chupacabra
sucking the labor out of us.

us artistes & our jive: i’m sick in the stomach of it!

a-political? art for art’s sake? bohemian? anti-establishment?

poppycock!

oh yeah us artistes—
reformed middle class, green living, MUNI riding,
kumbaya singing, edumacated, bush & cheney hating,
tree smoking, neo-poetic
artistic
idealists.

the bourgeois feed us peanuts

so, we eat peanuts

the bourgeois feed us peanuts

so, we…

6/10ths of 1% of americans
love us: us: artistes

all too willing

to pick up hemmingway, v. woolf, bobby d., mr. marley,
gertrude stein, sal dalí, h.d., w.c.w., t.s.,
& all the rest

41
 of the artistic deities
who’ve created before us: us: artistes.

men who wear hair

on our faces & women
whose hair grows in uncomely places

us: artistes: sitting around writing clichés

about rainbows & sparrows &
cigarettes & sex.

ah! alliteration! ah! lineation!

oh! meter! oh! verse!...

art ain’t even close to as serious as life

in palestine, haiti, rwanda, chile myanmar, china, etc., etc., etc…

6/10ths of 1% of americans
love us: because we
the artistes are without sense enough
to harness the vigorous muscle
of the one thing we believe holds
any worth or any verve
this inanimately breathing vehicle: art!

next time you pick up your guitar

your brush (or)
your pen
to create a facsimile of the fact
that violets really are: blue

stop & think & say fuck you

&
fuck me, too.

until then we: the artistes

will be wearing blinders
will be led around by aesthetically deluded
umbilical chords
pulled along by the 6/10ths of 1% of americans

42
who run this america & laugh
all the way to the bank
at us: the artistes!

(i don’t know about you, but i’ve had it up to here with peanuts!)

tHREE cHEERS fOR

aRBITRARY
harbor no fear of these cannibalistic
artistic ballistics expelling forth from the mouths
of the poetic mystics.

face it: in the states: myanmarian faces are faceless

lost names that are renamed remain nameless.

the entire pedagogy of race is basically & insatiably

racist.

time is but a construct

human beings caught
& injected in the center
of tequila lollipops.

MICKEY MOUSE is a three fingered NAZI.

BETTY BOOP died of v.d. & is buried in KING KONG’s tit hair.
W.W.III began when TEXT MESSAGING slid out
of thin air’s vaginal canal singing
“YANKEE DOODLE WENT TO TOWN RIDING ON A…”

FRIED CHICKEN is a disease.

the past, current & future

administrations are families of blind eagles
circling grapefruit moons with no feet
to land on, while pigeons coo

43
haiku: spherical droppings
of persimmon like jism
rouged wings of aphids.

when i grow up i’d like to be

the first white JOHNNY COCHRAN
not a fireman.

for entertainment: eat a bucket

of MAYONNAISE, wrap yrself in seaweed
& smoke REEFER with the POPE.

suburban WIGGERS & country club WANKSTAS

are the new JIM CROW MINSTRELS,
BLACK FACED in dope high-top NIKES
& HELLA HECKA HYPHY TALL Ts.

let’s drop NAPALM on oklahoma

slaughter houses, please?
for PANGAEA had an orgasm
& the continents were born.

writing well has nothing to do with talent

fervor & dedication make the words shine
FUCKING is the same way
lovemaking has everything to do
with neither.

p.s.
BARBIE is the ugliest name.

dA kING oF pāPA‘IKO
i found a man today.
a man wit portagee slippas,
(you know, eh?: barefoot).
a man wit hair da color of laupāhoehoe bread

44
fruit. a man raised on carnation
milk & bread.
a plantation man.

today i found one man.

he get pukas een his palaka shirt.
dis man ride motorcycle.
he go derby jus fo’ watch da chickens dance.
da guy fix your car & lend
your maddah guys $20.
pau hana time he go keaukaha side
fo’ watch da keiki boxing match.

i found a man today.

a man who’s sweat smell
of waiakea uka rain.
(strong li’dat. natural.)
a man who cherish mountain
oysters.
a man who’d talk eye to eye
wit his worst enemy
befor’ scrappin’m.
a man who’s pidgin more pure
den one dove.

today i found one man.

he when build saddle road
all by hiself: bare hand.
his chess mo’ wide than waipi‘o.
hanabata days he taught all da dogs
fo’ swim at richardson’s.
dis guy: his voice booming
louda den airplane bridge.
he da perpetual may day king.

i found one man today.

& if can, can;
if no can: he always could:
portagee das why.
a man who’s taughts more complex

45
 than da stars ova peepeekeo.
a man who slow dance wit pele
on top kilauea.
da man who whisper
wit da cows in waimea.
a man who’s tent grade education
mo betta den one harvard kine,
oxford kine degree.
dis guy: he da real hawaiian supaman.
he get da mana een his lungs.
a man who’s wife mo’ nani
den one bouquet of lehua & plumeria.
one local boy trew & trew

i found one man today.

my grandfaddah
da king of papa‘iko.

nIGHT wIND
Eyes that have searched void, gather in predawn alleyways leading from
locked doors. Filamented blossoms opening their musk to midnight, even
this, early as newspaper. My way, moss-footed by neon, reflections and
streetcrosses by Folsom’s drooped arborium. Rustle the feathers of the
forgotten dead, and their pigeons. This air bereft of redwood or sage,
uninhabitable. Of bus hillside stall, the sooted sound. These, the eyes that
sought a peripatetic method of Pacific, found the way by headlamp.
"Completely dressed creatures," orbs seeking the base. The broad swatch of
Market bleeds out to Bay, a full array of color, and the droll of a common
creed.

pENETRANT
After dark, the sort of smog-laden Los Angeles

46
post-noir, evening sashay,
as if flattering Santa Anna. The word October

brings it a certain reddish hue, leaving McCarthy

congealed on Ethel Rosenberg's tongue
with a light flash and no questions.

Just the onward droll of progress down

the Santa Monica Freeway and the Chevy saddled up
on the river rampart.

Ragged blanket with unwashed skin,

that is your name. Toes curled with my hand
on your belly, or is it affectation.

The first penetrant, exploratory,

an orange midnight with so-confused-doves.
No time for punctuating the dart.

To whom was obviated order?

But for the overgrown flora condensing as constellations
on the borderlands where even minutemen stop

their slurs on queers, chewing

midday barbed wire . . .
Why we come out at night.

Always made sexier when we put hair on chests

and are foolish in the bathroom but who's watching?
Dead eyes.

But this is the forge of the undead and I swallowed the key.
That's it, come get it, luv.
Touch me but don't tell.

sIDE eFFECTS —part of a story—

“tO eVERY aCTION tHERE iS aLWAYS oPPOSED aN eQUAL

47
rEACTION.”

Natalie parks her 67’ ford mustang on the side street near the alley and then
checks the rearview mirror to be sure that she isn’t being followed.

It’s fucking broad daylight. She shakes her head a few times and slides over
to the passenger side as she cups her fingers around the long metal handle.
She can’t get Nate’s voice out of her head. “PLEASE don't go snooping
around Ryan’s, it's dangerous.” What does he think? I’m some naive college
girl. She pulls at the handle. I can take care of myself. She pushes at the door
with the bottom of her boot. The door flings open with a creak and her foot
hits he ground with a hop.

As she shoves out into the open air, she begins to feel exposed, nervous,
unsure. She questions herself as she turns the key and locks the car. She
looks over her shoulder. But it’s too late, because Natalie is driven by an
obsessive need to satisfy her questions and it keeps pulling her steps towards
the back alley.

Rounding the corner, she increases her stride passing the backs of old
modest paint chipped homes without windows. The road a mix of reddish
dirt, rocks, and broken blacktop. Her eyes case the alley in every direction as
she passes an aluminum trash bin, fallen on its side, its contents spilled like a
bum in the city passed out in his own vomit. A torn white plastic bag
exposes its insides, soils the road with paper plates, shredded lettuce, the
tops of carrots, opened ketchup packages, dirty laundry. A sour fish smell
lingers as she jumps over a pile of crumpled foil and smeared hotdogs that
look like little bits of fleshy road kill on the highway.

She sees Ryan's back door up ahead. Her stomach flutters and she hesitates
for a moment as she moves over to his side of the street, out of the middle
and near the garages. The sound of a crow squawking above is her only
comfort as she fixates on his house and imagines what really happened to
Ryan. An image of Ryan’s body on his bedroom floor lying in a puddle of
his own blood with a knife nearby flashes through her mind. It wasn’t
suicide. A disgust fills her as she tries to grasp what kind of person could
stand inches from another human, hold a sharp metal blade to his neck, feel
his pulse moving, hear his breath flowing, and press into his skin and flesh
while blood gushes out. What kind of person is so immune to life that they
continue to press deeper past a layer of fat, and In one swoop slice the veins

48
and arteries as nonchalantly as snipping cable wires to hook up a TV. No
regard for life. That’s fucking crazy. A cold chill brushes over her arms as
she checks behind her. Her senses are on edge, alive, keen. The sound of
gravel under her step crunching each time her foot hits the ground sounds
like the inside of her head when she chews on captain crunch. Loud and
rhythmic.

She hears a rustle behind and jumps into a space between the neighbor’s
garage and metal fence separating the houses. Her breathing stops. She
swallows and just stares at the rust overtaking the round metal spokes of the
gate. Her eyes scour for anything sharp. Nothing but a blade of grass. How
stupid am I. Why didn’t I fuckin bring my jack knife, she thinks. She can
feel her heart knocking on her chest as she quickly lies down on her stomach
as flat as possible to the ground. The cool dry earth on her face smells like
worms after a rainy day. She thinks of her mother buried underneath in a
grave in Southern Hills, Tulsa where she never visits. Why?

She lets out a slow steady stream of air and becomes one big ear as she
listens and inches her body up to the edge. A metal crash rings in her ears as
she closes her eyes and hopes it goes away. Do I run, do I stay, what the fuck
do I do, I want to go home, but don’t have one. I wish you would hold me in
your arms and tell me that everything is gonna be okay.

Her fingernails dig into the ground as she pulls herself one inch closer to the
edge and peeks around the corner. A baby raccoon near the hotdog mess. Are
you kidding me? A fucking raccoon! A pile air rushes out of her mouth like a
balloon as she rests her chin on the ground and regains composure. Back up
to her feet, she moves out of the cubby, stops, and just stares at the pesty
creature. The raccoon hears her and freezes. It’s big dark circled eyes stare
right back at her daring her to come closer.

“An animal,” she says. She turns and walks towards Ryan’s back door.
That’s who would fucking do it. An animal.

The raccoon continues to pull at the pieces of food without regard for her
presence while Natalie looks through the small glass window into Ryan’s
hallway. She feels a surge of adrenaline rushing through her. Immobilizing
her. Her hand almost turning the knob, but she hesitates and tries to calm her
nerves instead. I’m just being paranoid, she tells herself. In and out she
breathes as she watches the filthy stupid animal rummaging through the

49
trash. Its long claws have the agility of human hands sifting through the
broken plastic as if it’s tossing and sorting trash from treasure. Hmmm. She
shakes her head half a smile. Smart little fella.

She walks over to Ryan’s trashcan and pulls off the lid. An old newspaper
covered in plastic rests on top. She takes off the plastic, puts it over her hand
and tosses the paper. She pulls off the band holding her ponytail and uses it
to secure the bag around her wrist.

She moves the trashcan back between the garages, out of view of the alley,
and pulls out the tall clear bag. Cans of tuna, Healthy Choice boxes, coffee
grounds smeared all over the sides. She sets it on the ground and looks back
in the trash and sees something odd. She pulls out an oversized flannel shirt.
Pieces of old moldy lemons drop to the ground. Huh. She holds it at eye
level and studies the black and red squares. He would never wear this, he is
way too preppy…was too preppy, she corrects herself. She sets it on the
ground behind her.

She feels like one of those alcoholic Indians that wander the alleys with
glazed eyes, a red face, a brown bagged bottle still searching for their taken
land and settling on the white mans leftovers at 3am. Sad. Oddly enough,
she also feels like an investigator and it electrifies her.

50
wRAPPED
Do you like to dance,
he asked that first time,
after he taught me to measure and shoot—
because here we dance every day.

No, I thought, but didn’t say.

Instead I shimmied back,
and as he clasped their ends
the bands he used to bind my hands
unraveled to the floor.

I came back the next day and the next,

learned to gird my own fists and wrists
with narrow strips
longer than a man is tall.
I wound them around
until it became a daily meditation—

so I can send everything in myself,

and all the might I can draw
from the very ground into my body,
through these thin and bending twigs.

Scraps of cloth, acrid from past efforts,

will let these hands take a bad jab or crooked hook,
and bear the brunt of my bluntest pains
and my biggest self.

So I return again and again,

to true what is most skewed in me.
Every day, wet and spent,
I dance as the binds unfurl and fall away.

51
rEFLECTIONS oN a sPIT
bUCKET
My defenses are slack.
Too willing to take
one straight to the face
in hope of connecting,
my lips are tender targets.

Huffing and ducking,

slipping and jabbing,
I taste steely heat
filling my mouth
with the tang of
what I’m made of.

When the bell breaks us

he pulls my guard,
wet strings clinging,
and says rinse.
He says spit.

Above the bucket

I free a rosy cloud
to drift whole a moment
then dissolve,
pinking and mingling
with what others left before.

I slide through the ropes.

Someone takes my place
but I leave behind a reminder,
one small sign—
I was here.
I bled, too.

52
hURRICANE
With one good eye
he absorbs the world
and warms it.

Once a Hurricane,
he is steady as the rain
of summer afternoons,

washing me clean each day

when I see myself
through his one good eye.

53
sCAVENGER hUNT
It is just like him to send her on a scavenger hunt for her wedding ring. His
clues are all written in his meticulous, architect’s script, on heavy card stock
—placards at a table spreading from the ocean to the bay. Some clues
launch her like a bottle rocket. “Where first we kissed” shoots her to Coit
Tower. But other clues, like “I know you aren’t the only one, but you’re the
only one I’ve found,” stick her fast.

Now she stands in the fog at Eighth Avenue and Fulton, regarding the stone
pillars flanking a neglected side-entrance to Golden Gate Park. Atop each
stone pillar a cast metal beast prowls. The clue that sent her here says,
“Where lying lions would not dare.” It referred to their picnic celebrating
exactly two years of dating.

The day of the picnic it was sunny and hot. She carried two grocery bags
heavy with the typical picnic things. He had their blanket flung across his
back, looking like a young boy with a makeshift cape. At the pillars he had
stopped and regarded the animals.

“Look at these bears!” He’d said.

“They’re mountain lions,” she had replied.

“No no, they’re definitely bears. Wow.”

She had stood there in silent courtesy, her shoulders pulled down by the
groceries, as he darted back and forth between the pillars, eyeing each
creature in turn. He had said, “They’re guarding the park together. This is
like us, ready to fend off the dangers of the world, side by side.” She didn’t
mention the road dividing the beasts, or that since they were sculpture they
would never be together, never curl their carved flanks like two nestled
shields, never actually touch. Finally he had satisfied himself and they
walked on into the park, spreading out their picnic on a sunny lawn.

“What if we saw everything in the world completely differently?” He had

54
asked, after they had finished the picnic food.

“You mean, if we only saw in black and white? Or in four dimensions?”

“No. I mean you and me. I mean, like those bears. You thought they were
lions. Wouldn’t it be awful if everything we saw went into your brain as
something totally different from how it goes into my brain?”

“But it does.”

“No,” he said. “We see the same world, that’s why we love each other.”

They packed up the flimsy plastic champagne flutes and the cutting board
and the crumpled white butcher papers. He carefully rolled the blanket. She
held his hand when they left; she liked the heft of it in her hand.

That was over a year ago. Now, she examines the lions, or bears. She holds
the scavenger clue and stares at the first bear statue, then at the second, then
back at the first. They had both been wrong; one is a bear, the other a lion,
and they’re not guarding the park. Instead, they stalk each other from their
perches, preparing for a fight to the death.

He is always so sure of himself, especially when he is completely mistaken.

The next clue is stuck to the bear sculpture in a wax-paper envelope, the
kind that stamps come in, to protect it against the fog. He anticipates
everything. The clue says, “Where you found your favorite music.” There
is a sour tightening in her throat, as though she might throw up. She
remembers that day, early in their relationship, when they went to the used
record store on Haight Street. He told her all the bands he liked. He filled
her arms with records. That she didn’t have a record player was
inconsequential; he bought her one the next day. The music was so different
from anything she liked. She listened, and gradually learned to appreciate it,
but she never called it her favorite. It was the soundtrack to his world. For a
time, she thought it was their world. But now, holding this clue that says
“your favorite music,” as though she would not like any music at all if he
had not given it to her, she understands that it is his world. It has always
been his world.

She shivers and looks across the foggy street at the apartment buildings
along Fulton—grim four- and five-story structures, their simple bay

55
windows built onto the wall like afterthoughts. She imagines sitting high up
in one of those windows in a sweatshirt, watching this gate, waiting for the
bell to sound to start the duel between these two beasts. The muscular
brown bear arches his back while the conniving mountain lion coils, smaller,
slyer, more desperate.

She drops the clue. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the other eight
clues and drops them too. They land in a neat stack and splay out like a
small fan on the fog-soaked pavement. The dampness stains their borders,
and the moisture wicks in towards his inked script.

She turns her back on the gate and walks up 8th Avenue towards Clement
Street. Soon she is moving through the almost all-Chinese crowd. She takes
deep breaths. She passes duck carcasses hanging in windows, sun-bleached
posters advertising acupuncture, and tiny women in collarless jackets
hunched over wire pushcarts. The signs are all written in Chinese
calligraphy. The cold fog tickles her cheeks and mingles with the smell of
roast pork fat and citrus. At a corner she waits for the green light, and when
a police officer laughs at a joke and then responds in Chinese, the complete,
pervasive foreignness makes her heart pound. She is a fugitive and she has
made it across the border. She wonders how long it will take her to learn the
customs, to learn the language.

wITHWITHOUT
What is life without the threat of not having it? She stares at the note posted
on her fridge as if it were the barrel of a gun. She breaks two eggs into a
pan, amorphous sizzle. She thinks about swallowing blowfish meat, shallow
breathing, a piano hovering over her head all day long, and how walking
home alone is harder than crying home alone. She needs to empty herself.
To the restroom. Vague awareness of pubes. Two drops of blood ribbon
double helix in her toilet bowl. She looks down. So what if she dies? Life
blood leaks every day. The wrecking ball of her mind is hopelessly hopeful
about this.

56
bLANK
There is a process that must occur here where I write something meaningful
perhaps beautiful but there is also a house somewhere of fine volume that
asks me to stay to stay away from everywhere else. _____ would wish I
would stop whining about this place you don’t even know where it is he
gurgles death by water but oh the mania of its writhing ivy the five starred
hazard of its accommodations! Not yet has my heart written something all
day long all night long that could justify the traitor in me the one who wants
to sign the mortgage.

mIL wAKES uP
aN eXCERPT fROM tHIS tIME tOMORROW

He is certain, upon waking, that it has snowed. The trees that morning are
heavy with white, and through his open window slides a barely audible hum,
thin now but with a promise to grow, the swelling crescendo of a new
season.

It can’t be snow. This is March, this is San Francisco. It never snows in San
Francisco, not even in deadest winter, when the city finally sleeps.

Still, the fact remains: the tree outside is heavy with white. He puts on his
glasses and the world sharpens: cherry blossoms, fat and airy as popcorn,
have sprung open overnight.

Milan gets out of bed. He sneezes. The pollens have come and with them, a
certain set of problems. It begins with a peculiar pressure at the base of his
nose, weighing into his sinuses, a tickle and then the sense that something is
nudging its way—yes, here it is. He sneezes again, and a caterpillar, pimpled
and grey, creeps out of the tunnel of his nose.

Only its head makes it through initially—it’s a fat one, and a bit of a match
for Milan’s delicate nostril. He lets it work its own way out, knowing that to
pick it will mean a certain death by squashing, a rude interruption of its life

57
cycle. He knows from experience that caterpillar residue sticks like a bastard
to the nose hairs, that soaking one’s nose in hot water is no way to spend a
warm spring day.

From the back door, shoeless, comes Amma. The damp morning grass will
soak her feet, surely, and she will be cold. But who needs shoes when all
three of her children are home, under one roof, within reach of her ever-
loving arms? Who needs socks when her daughter, her emerald, is getting
married, at last, to a doctor from Marin? Even the crown of her head is round
with happiness; the streaks of grey are streaks of joy. Her hair flips skyward
with the thrill.

One cherry blossom pops straight off its branch and falls in girlish petals at
her feet. Milan squeezes his eyes shut and flexes his gut. He’s done this
before, but focus is essential—and yes, a faint pop, followed by another,
followed by a third. Cherry blossoms, in soft explosions, leap from the tree,
a few at first and then a whole shower of them, pouring down on Amma,
landing in her hair, on her shoulders, on the ground. She looks to the sky and
laughs, holds her palms out like a girl. Milan clenches his abdomen and
wills it to rain and rain the petals, until the ground is carpeted, the tree bare.

A quick nasal out-breath, and the caterpillar emerges. He lets it crawl onto
his finger and, reaching out the window, he guides it onto a branch. Be well,
little man, he says. Go make some silk.

Perhaps because of the caterpillar, maybe as a side effect of the cherry

blossom trick, or possibly because he hasn’t been to the dentist in seventeen
years, Milan has severe toothache. He’s spent the morning chewing on a wet
towel.

His mother grabs his head and tries to wrench open his jaw.

Amma!

Let me see. What’s hurting you?

Like a horse inspector, she pries his lips open.

A muffled protest as he tries to keep his lips shut, but there’s little he can do.

58
What—your own mother can’t look in your mouth? My own son? I
breastfed you for two years and this is the thanks I get? And she looks.

No one exactly blames Milan for the dentist who died, twelve minutes after
his appointment, of an embolism in the office kitchen, or for the hygienist
who went mad, shrieking, collapsing to the exam room floor, rolling into a
ball and muttering to her knees. They were thought to be two unfortunate
and wholly unrelated events. He was only a boy at the time, but Milan knew
what they saw. He’s seen it himself, countless times, and has grown used to
the sight of the universe and all its realms. Where most people have nothing
but warm, fetid air and the distant cave wall of a throat, Milan holds the
cosmos, all time, all space. Above his tongue and around the dingle-dangle
of his uvula, he holds all that ever was and will be: the planets and oceans
and stars and black holes, the galaxies waking and dying. And with the
galaxies and oceans and stars, he holds the past, present and future, the very
elements of certainty and potential. It is a portrait of the universe so
complete, so all-at-once, that most humans simply cannot digest it.

But Amma is no deader or madder than she was before she looked in his
mouth; she is, after all, his mother, and there are no cosmic vistas between
Milan’s molars that she hasn’t already seen. Since taking Milan in, she’s
spent much of her maternal energy convincing herself that he was just like
any other boy his age, that his various phenomena were minor
idiosyncrasies, just Milan being Milan being Milan.

All morning you’ve been chewing that towel, Amma says. Time to see the
D-E-N-T-I-S-T.

Milan hasn’t been to the dentist in years, for fear of committing homicide or
inciting hysteria. He rarely risks opening his mouth, which has turned him
into a quiet man. Some see him as taciturn, others as very intelligent. Either
way, he’s managed to build a life in which his condition poses few problems,
except on days like today.

As he reclines in the examination chair, the bib chained around his neck, he
fingers the instruments on the metal tray, his nerves surging at the thought of
someone catching him here, fingering these instruments. He hopes for a
young dentist, someone robust and easily distracted, someone from the
Wikipedia generation, whose only interest in the cosmos is limited to UFO
sightings. Such a dentist, he believes, might have a chance at surviving the

59
view between his lips.

She enters.

He stands, rips off the bib and charges for the door.

Stop! She puts her hand up. He stops. She is one foot shorter than he is. Sit
down, she orders.

She is so very pretty. She is too pretty to die in this office. She wears her hair
like a fräulein, in two braids strapped to the top of her head.

He fixes his gaze on the door. I feel fine now, he says.

Sit down.

The pain is gone.

Have a seat.

He looks down at her again, and sits. Ada Weinstein, goddess, tyrant, D.D.S.
Milan knows Ada Weinstein; she comes into the market every Thursday at
four, brings her own bags and buys soy milk, gallons of it at a time. With a
flick of her wrist, she pushes him back into the chair, and in a single,
practiced sweep, she rams her knee into his ribs.

Open up, Milan. She pronounces his name like the Italian city, which is what
most people do before they know him, before he musters the courage to tell
them that actually, the emphasis is on the first syllable. Now is not the time,
he senses, to correct her emphasis.

I should go.

Open up, now. She pushes her knee further into his ribs.

He squeezes his eyes shut, and silently, he prays, he pleads, he apologizes,

he bargains, he begs, and finally, he parts his lips.

She jabs the mirror in, clacks it between his teeth and forces them wider.
With one arm she reaches up and turns on the double-lamp, heatless as it

60
shines down.

Right, is all she says. That’s it, nice and wide. Is it just about here? She sinks
the pick into his molar and he squeals with pain.

There we go, she says. Let’s get some anaesthetic in there.

And that’s it. No hysterics. So far, no death. If she sees the universe and all
its realms between his jaws, she says nothing. Perhaps she’s seen it all
before, being a dentist. Perhaps she’s being polite, or so incredibly focused
that she sees nothing but one molar, one toothy wormhole.

He laughs with relief, the mirror still in his mouth.

She looks up. Everything alright?

He makes a sound that means yes.

And she gets to work, this woman of women. He leans into her gloved hand,
silky and solid inside his jaw. If there is pain, he feels none of it. She works
tidily, efficiently, and before he can ask her what she is, who she is, how she
came to be, she is pressing a filling into his molar and telling him to bite
down.

She picks up the long white tube and sprays his mouth. When he tries to
speak, to say something—anything—even a thank you would suffice—his
lips flap lamely, numbed by the anaesthetic and beyond his control. A trail of
dribble courses past his lips, down his chin, and onto the slick blue plain of
his bib.

When he opens his eyes, she is done, gone, her voice trilling brilliantly in
the room next door.

uNTITLED "aLL tHE

sEALS lEFT tHE dOCK..."
61
because…

All the seals left the dock

and I know they’re coming back

but they don’t have to

because

all the seals might have somewhere else to go

maybe they have appointments

and commitments

maybe they have meetings on rocks

where they have to talk

and figure out

where they have to be

All the seals left the dock

and they’re not coming back

they figured out that they have enough not to think

what we’re all about

and what are we about?

not what the seals want to think about!

62
and how much time do we have to make choices

are all the voices we had

all that mattered?

if I knew, I would say something profound

but I can’t

all the seals bailed on us

like Jesus

and the world of the rest of us

and I pray, but my words can’t find

a name to pray to

and I can only hope

that hope has wings

and carries souls on it

cuz my soul is small

and caught up in…

well…

caught up in

everything … well everything…

63
and I can find a way

away from everything

but that suggests

more than I’m given

I know that

youth equals lies

that time equals times

and nobody in our life

will figure

our life out

and my life tells not enough

to inform the rest of it

so why am I on the dock

looking around for a seal

left alone

left where they all should be

where they told me to be

and now they took off

64
and I hope they come back

because the seals in San Francisco

transcend metaphor

and we know nothing lasts forever

and I’m glad I don’t

because what good

would that be

the seals know me

and they’re not even seals

they’re sea lions

and I love you

in your way

and I love the sky,

it looks the right shade

and I pray the seals come back

for selfish reasons

for memories in a foreign language

for Minnesota tourists

with cameras

65
for that weird barking

they made

that made

this place—our place

sea lion seal and gringo alike

God tells me to scream

but fuck god

I don’t have to say anything

because I’m on fire

and my girl may not be true

but she means well

and all the world

it’s all going to hell

but that’s just my perspective

and hopefully

I won’t see it be so…

66
uNTITLED (tHERE aIN’T
nO bETTER dAY…)
fOR s.
there ain't no better day than this one....

there ain't no sun need to shine today,

we don't need no curing rain...

if a comet come hurtling toward San Francisco,

let it be so...

today's aura block out the cosmos,

evaporate the clouds

into rainbows

and drops so big

they hit the ground

with a plunk, plunk

washing away

all the pee & funk of

all the drunks

south of market...

there ain't no day better than this one...

67
when polar bears feed

they need nothing in the zoo

but salmons and each other

they roll on their fronts and backs

and they tuck into the

zookeeper’s filets

and sleep all day in the drowsy sunshine

and one polar bear say to the other

remember…

remember when we used to hunt…

ha!!! punt

there ain’t no day …

way …

there ain’t no better day than this one

I find your space

from behind

and dogs in the park

68
can’t quite bark

like you talk

to the pillow

in the morning’s sun and shine

I wake out of a pile

and smile

looking around me

and the dog says

take me to the park

with a bark

so I climb past

all the spiders

and find pants

and watch all the sleeping,

thinking

there ain’t no day better than this one

with welcoming places

69
soft and dark

sunny and grassy

in the park

meant for making out

where holding hands is erotic

and entry is elementary

and I wonder how it works

in the complicated world

when where I am is so easy to do

eat, drink sleep, screw

write this poem to you

drink a fernet and a beer or two

and I do know better

but not today

cuz today

there ain’t no better way

70
to spend a day

than right here

right now

in this place

with nothing to do

but being with you

in every imaginable way

and knowing you

we might invent a few

I’ve see the world up close

and it has a snarl on it’s face

and conspires, conspires

to put us in our place

and there ain’t no fall

so fast

as a fall from grace

and it comes apace

71
of course

but that doesn’t mean

there isn’t a today

or a day like this one

waiting to say

“hell, things can be right with the universe”

and that we’re in grace

gives me pause

because

it’s way up there

but hey

mountain climbers

scratch and pray

to say on a satellite phone

“guess where I am!”

and astronauts

72
unhitch their seatbelts

and let drops of tang

float around the capsule

and drink them

through a straw

and they know

they’re coming down again

but that don’t mean

they can’t enjoy

being up there

cuz there ain’t no day

like today

and that’s what I have to say

so I have a plan,

while we can,

let’s play … cool?

73
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