“If there’s one thing you can say about Romney in his career as a politician is that there is nobody who he doesn’t consider expendable, whether that is a staffer, a friend, an ally, or any particular group of constituents who presume to think that, just because they elected him, he owes them something. He is Nixon without the awesome, class-bred insecurities. Nixon knew when he was being vicious. He gloried in it. The White House tapes drip with his self-indulgent tough-guy crap through which you can see the quivering little grocer’s son. That insecurity may be the only thing that saved the Republic. Willard Romney never has known that insecurity for a day in his life. He is casually vicious and he doesn’t even recognize that he is.”

“All I know is that everyone’s really mad about this JP Morgan mess. What on earth happened?”

Recording a rap song is like making a sex tape now. Like, even if you’re doing it just for fun, you probably shouldn’t, because it could get on to the internet. I feel a little guilty posting this, because its unclear whether or not it was ever intended for official release. But it’s not that big a deal, I guess. So, would you look to listen to Serena Williams’s rap song? The song, which is mercifully short, doesn’t yet have an actual title. But I’ll bet “I Win” is what she had in mind.

“Julien Berckmans, a real estate agent at Brussels-based Best Home Consult, took five calls from French citizens seeking to buy property in the Belgian capital after Hollande defeated President Nicolas Sarkozy on May 6.”
 — Rich people allegedly fleeing France in advance of regime change.

Mayor says one utility of stop & frisk is that it discourages gun possession, since NYers think they could be stopped by police.

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) May 11, 2012

“The number of guns that we’ve been finding has continued to go down, which says the program at this scale is doing a great job,” says mayor

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) May 11, 2012

Mike Bloomberg’s weekly Friday radio chit-chat time went short this week, but — like every Friday — he still managed to let a real doozy rip. (Previously: “usually when we roll up they frisk themselves.”) Something something “attachment mayoring.”

The Color Pink

Previously: Spring It On

Amy Jean Porter is an artist who likes to draw.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Letter to My Future Child

The way you don’t exist is remarkable
When I have been hotwired, cobbled from
Spongy tubes specifically to birth. At least to bud

Would be preferable, shedding a child
Like petals drooping from a center.
I apologize profusely to you,

But I am content in my selfishness and
My love of this girl I’ve created.
Today I watched the bees graze,

The perfect mix of threat and song and binge,
And I felt I, too, could bob and maneuver.
I guess they reminded me of you:

Your toddling bumble, your absent suckle,
Your mere addition to the swarm.
You would be a plump grub in honeysuckle

Were you to be anything, but you will not
Be. This is something I’ve decided.
There is only so much life to go around; I’ll take

Two rations. The petal and the pistil.
And, hey, the calyx. The ability to share is mythic,
Like you, and who needs another creature,

Another sea monster? I already have the
Swooping vertebrae of my back, I have my bones
Diving above and below my skin

Filled with just the right amount of people:
One. How could I bring a child into this world
When I want it all to myself?

Life is that right and full of love, flowers, et al.
I’m sorry for me, sure. But most of all, Little Bee,
I am sorry for you.

Thursday, September 3, 1987, 9:37 a.m., 9:39 a.m.

In the two minutes before my life begins you are
An empty head, the floppy torso of the domesticated dog-
Feral years absorbed in fetal breeding, the liquid piebald birthcoat,
Chutney blush of autumn. Marigold, pumpkin, cabbage.
Now a distal sister, newly minted, scallion-smooth.
They pluck us apart and place us a duel’s-length away:
Twenty paces of feet frozen in pomegranate arabesque
And eschewing approximate numerically correct toes.
The lactating bed, the barking tongs — my thoughts are still
Color and string, an espadrille, but I recognize
The solemnity of the occasion and cry. We shared our pooled blood
For eight months, we punted plump sprees, we planned glottal blots,
We kicked in semaphore, floating like canned beets.
Now twenty paces and two minutes away, I fumble for
My dual twin who stood with me in that chromosomal toffee
Then watched as I followed him as his slippery encore.
On my first birthday I was the center of the world, on my
First birthday he was the circumference a radius of two minutes
Away at all points, our flat circle heaved into
The mulling world for twenty-two years now.
Doubtless double, you are a scrawny apostle, you
Saw the world in its raw shimmer for two strange minutes,
You were whispered the world in those singular two minutes, you
Are pulling me two minutes ahead into the multidirectional light.

Megan Amram is a recent graduate of Harvard University and comedy writer living in Los Angeles.

The rest of the poems are right here, in The Poetry Section’s archives.. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Here you will find a picture of a calico lobster.

by Evelyn Everlady

Two years ago this month came Negroni Season, a terrifying installment in the incredible true tales of The Worst Boyfriend in the World. It has been three years since the first installment, Crazy Like a Foxwoods. (We’ll be wrapping this up in the year 2024.) Now it’s Negroni season once again — so let’s dive back in to learn what came next!

What kept me going during the first year of living together was the belief that if the Boyfriend could just quit drinking for good, as he occasionally attempted to do, we’d be home free.

And, even though my “Sober Sundays” initiative never took off, somehow that’s what actually happened. The Boyfriend got help and got sober. We moved out of our 300-square-foot West Village studio to a roomy Brooklyn apartment that had a shady backyard and fig trees. I quit smoking. He got really into the slow food movement and talked a lot about growing kale. We went to movies and to the farmer’s market and to museums. We cooked elaborate meals. We split the holidays between our respective families and went away for long weekends with friends. We were gripped with indecision over what kind of dining room table we should buy to best host dinner parties. We watched HBO on Sunday nights.

In short, we became exactly like every other annoying couple that live in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods. (You know.) And I couldn’t have been happier about it. So this is what normal feels like!

A few years went by. When my friends freaked out about their significant others, I felt decidedly unruffled: after all, I’d already passed my Big Relationship Hurdle. Once, during a snowstorm, we passed an elderly man and woman holding hands while making their way down the street. The Boyfriend whispered, “Don’t you think that’s going to be us one day?” I did.

But before we took the next step — into the inevitable baby making and mortgages and retirement plans and death — we both agreed that what we really wanted was to get a dog.

The Boyfriend and I both love dogs. (Oh my god I know, right? So much in common!) But we parted ways when it came to the kind we should get: I wanted some sort of shaggy, floppy-eared rescue mutt. He was dead set on a chocolate Lab — bred from the same bloodline of his previous dog (he was very concerned about proper breeding and in this respect was very much like his mother, but that’s another tale for another time) — and we had long debates on what we’d name it. I gave in on the Labrador argument, but I held tough on the name: Hank, after a character from one of my favorite novels, one that I had given the Boyfriend early on in our courtship.

Hypothetical Hank became a member of our household: “This is the dog park we should take Hank to,” one of us would say while passing a particularly nice leafy stretch. Or, “Let’s call him Henry when he’s bad.” “But Hank would never be bad!” And so on.

But then, what seemed to be out of the blue (but which never really is, I suppose), the Boyfriend got real down. He stopped going to therapy and support meetings. He started watching an inordinate amount of Adult Swim. He grew quieter, grouchier and stopped sleeping at night. I’d wake up and most often I’d find him sitting at the living room window, blowing cigarette smoke down towards the yard where he never did plant any kale. And then came the day that he told me he thought we needed a break.

He’d been offered a job for the summer in a northern seaside town, and he thought he should go. “I need some time to be on my own,” he said. “I need to clear my head.” He didn’t want to lose me, he stressed, but he thought if we were to continue on forever, it was an important step for him to see what living truly independently — free of alcohol and me — was like.

It was a weird summer. We saw each other only a couple of times and spoke infrequently — and when we did we agreed not to “ruin it” by talking about anything of consequence. When he invited me for a visit at the end of August, the Boyfriend surprised me by announcing he had made a reservation at a fancy hotel right on the ocean. I remember these as a very nice couple of days — we laughed a lot, ate well and slept easily.

And so, as fall came on, I did not expect to find a letter in my mailbox from the Boyfriend explaining he wouldn’t be returning to New York and that he thought it best we went our separate ways permanently. It was two pages long and written on heavy cream-colored paper that looked expensive, and the envelope had an X-Men stamp on it. I couldn’t get over that stupid stamp. Did he make a special trip to the post office to buy it or did he order a pack online? And who the fuck puts a comic book character stamp on a motherfucking break-up letter, anyway? Who sends a break up letter after so many years together? And, within the Marvel universe, doesn’t he prefer Spider-Man? Why was this information that I knew? And so on.

Anyway. I did all the things that one does when they get dumped and unexpectedly heartbroken: a dramatic (and ill-advised) haircut, excessive drinking, a joyous reunion with cigarettes and a lot of ‘but what do you think he meant by an X-Men stamp?’ deconstruction talk with patient friends.

A friend had seen him while on vacation with her husband. Of course, I grilled her: were there signs I didn’t see? Was there another woman? Women? Men? She told me that when she and the Boyfriend had met up for coffee she had come away convinced he was absolutely going to come back to New York, to me. Two glasses of wine later she admitted she thought he was planning to propose.

“He said he was getting a dog but he told me specifically not to tell you. I assumed he was going to surprise you with it when he came back,” she said. “Didn’t you guys always talk about getting a dog?”

I quit talking about the stamp.

By December, when the Boyfriend called to wish me happy holidays, I had regained some semblance of equilibrium. I concentrated on being as chillingly polite and unaffected as possible.

“So,” I said, “Did you get a dog yet?”

“I did,” The Boyfriend said. “He’s lying at my feet right now.”

“Sounds nice,” I said. “So what did you end up getting?”

There was a pause. “A chocolate Lab,” he said.

“Oh sure,” I said brightly. “No surprise there! Ha ha ha!”

The Boyfriend laughed too, a little uncomfortably.

“He’s a good boy,” he said.

“What’s his name?”

A longer pause. “Hank,” he said.

“Really,” I said. “Hank.”

The Boyfriend cleared his throat nervously. “Well, yes. Hank.”

“YOU TOOK MY DOG NAME?”

“Consider it an homage,” he said.

An. Homage.

(It’s possible I might be missing key parts of this, by the way. My brain, bless it, tends to quickly wipe a lot of uncomfortable things clean almost immediately — bleep bloop — in a way I always appreciate even at the cost of good storytelling.)

“So… how old is Hank,” I asked.

“He’s about 8 months,” he said.

I’m terrible at math — just terrible! — but I do know how some numbers work. Like how you get the puppy from the breeder when it’s about 12 weeks old, and also how we had broken up just a few months ago.

“So hang on, when did you get him?”

“Hmmm,” he said. “Late July, I think.”

I considered this. “Oh,” I said. “He was there in August when I was visiting?”

There was a much longer silence. “He was,” he said.

“IS THAT WHY WE WENT TO THAT HOTEL? BECAUSE YOU HAD A PUPPY AT YOUR HOUSE AND YOU DIDN’T WANT ME TO KNOW?”

“Well,” he said. “I sort of felt like I wanted to have this nice weekend with you, and if you knew about the dog you’d probably get the wrong impression. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“An impression like… that you had no plans of moving back to New York?”

“Uhhh…,” he said. And sighed. “Yes,” he said.

I don’t remember how that conversation ended. (Thank you, brain!)

I suppose I should admit now that this wasn’t even the end of our relationship. Because a couple of months later, we got back together.

In better news, Hank was indeed a very good boy and never ever needed to be called Henry.

Evelyn Everlady is the pen name of a young professional woman in New York City who has moved waayyyy on and can laugh about all of this now. Photo by Pete Markham.

“Before the show, ‘Hold It Now’ blared on the house speakers, and DMX, Just-Ice’s human beat-box, approached me. He gave me a pound and a hug and then complimented me on the song. He thought I was MCA, I realized. At the time, I was still waiting on my own record; being mistaken for MCA was salt on a deep open wound. But now it feels different.”
 — Former 3rd Bass MC Pete “Prime Minister Pete Nice” Nash reflects on his complicated relationship with Adam Yauch.

Here, Awl pal Bethlehem Shoals writes on the technical aspects of Yauch’s rhyme style. And go here to see a massive and beautiful memorial mural that the graffiti artist/t-shirt design crew Team Entree painted in Midwood, Brooklyn. [Via]