Studio

For safety’s sake, the iron escape folds up from the ground. Bad limb that won’t go down, I’m asking for it, party clothes the all of what I own. Even this cat I can’t claim, wandered-in thing clawing the low tulle in the closet, the dress my every memory, the cat a flame in an ashcan, batting the fringe of the window hanging: this is trauma.

Either that, or this is romance. He lived in an enormous house for artists, sufficiently dark and malformed to suggest the interior space of the body, small peace and the snaps of fever and light: ALMOST HEAVEN, he said. I hope to [...]

The Driver Says

Like eight darlings picking corn from their teeth. I know how this looks. Like Portuguese churches on the moon, the strong arm of a place where space moves behind time and a box of old Playboys is just how it feels. Getting knocked down by the white of a callery pear, mistaking London planes for sycamores. When you have been ruined by small events, waking up always feels like walking alone in a woods; there will be no mark from a glass of cold water on your bedside table and the sounds through an open window (crickets, a highway) will frame how little I care for you. [...]

Excerpts from my difficulty telling jokes

A shadow of a penis walks into a bar. No. A bar realizes it’s a Rabbi. No. A pope shits on a bear. Yes. A pope shits on a bear. Now we need a new pope. We have the bloody pointy hat just not the pope. A bear walks into a bar and asks what goes with pope. Fries, of course. How many light bulbs does it take to screw in the dark? Four. One to be left on in your head, one in mine, one to be smashed against the dark husk of night in celebration when the humping and lowing is over, [...]

Fire Island Song

It would be nice if you weren’t dead, you with your hair and skin flame-red and your way of getting me in bed. It would be nice if you weren’t dead.

It’s not time’s fault or even fate’s, though this second claim demands debate: Too many dead to live, you nearly said. You savored dread. You liked where it led.

You let death happen with your drinks and drugs, your tour of all the high points of despair. You were a living cigarette. You blistered and burned down. You let me down. This grates.

TERROR OF THE ZYGONS

Je sais bien, mais quand même.

This one they call the Doctor is a threat to us. Already he has found out too much. He must be destroyed. a very drab term Doctor comprises any passive attitude toward her oiled hand returned to my one, the Doctor, increasing her is she a threat until it popped out of us from the already. With each has, I found harder through too much. O, me alone! Extreme instance of which appears to be that in which threat is conditional upon suffering physical or mental much at the hands of the Doctor. The Doctor grew must and be as [...]

Chang’e

The man in the moon is a woman in China: Chang’e, moon goddess, twinkle-checked, chic night-speck in the black that smears and tacks like an anemone.

While the world sleeps, Chang’e sleeps next to her husband Houyi and his jade rabbit and jade arrows and penchant for archery.

Each night is lithe vinyl: stars dimpling like quartz in hand, the quilted scalp of space-time and Chang’e’s moon slowly fuguing into the middle: the fingers of gravity; the Chang’e yo-yo.

Thanks to Chang’e, the moon is eyed. Green fish have eyes in their pistachio hulls, so too spiders, and circa-bauble flies, and the tiny spacemen that float equidistant from the [...]

Mysterious Octopus

Today the government talks about a mysterious octopus which attacked civilians boning their hookers in the bushes by a lake. Pox-colored piranhas nest inside a stupa, they ordain deathless figs. I am fed up with spastic devas. There was another in my beans this morning.

I spend my day deleting vowels from my doctor's prescription. A group of journalists lines up to lick the gold off the city hall. In a sleazy bar, a group of young tourists eats rhino balls from shot glasses. The end of a year is not a string of pearls at all.

I download Depeche Mode & I download The Cure. I download [...]

First Letter to David Berman and John Hodgman

Dear David Berman and John Hodgman,

In Bulawayo the bon-bon trees laugh and dance and smile in the happy giggle sunshine pavilion as the candy corn fields blush and bloom.

In the late afternoon, school teachers in white paper cones decorate the white paper cones they’re wearing with potato prints of cornflowers stained with oolong flavorings.

I sit nearby pretending not to notice.

Would it surprise you to know I wore a barely discernible worldly half-smile?

I installed a park bench out in the bush beneath an acacia tree boiling with black leather squirrels the size of Jots and squinted my [...]

Bitterness in the Mouth

When did the word for stranger and bitterness in the mouth come to mean a kind of audacity? I’ve seen in some men a distinctly American gall— they glide over the rest of us in their socks like we’re one long hallway and they’re late for a banquet in their honor. Shameless they tell us they’ve done us a favor. We needed polishing. They needed traction. Frotteurs work like this— we come away wondering if we’ve been screwed, gorge rising as a hard little stranger gets off. Leslie McGrath’s Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage was a finalist for the 2009 Connecticut Book Award in poetry.

New [...]