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Rose City Publishers
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15 minutes before I shove off to work back spasms suppressed lung my place a junkyard in the fields of strawberries and lust all the rain outside comes together upon my roof it’s a perfect nature of illiterates all the pretty girls gone all the sunflowers drowned by the wind and years and blowtorches the flames now scars set upon my body upon yours. Fall red eye scream thorn shadow cancers sunlight stone we are this and more the sun shines through the leaves and streaks the wood from where we sit. warm and waiting. Insomnia the ghosts come sideways diagonal vertical forwards backwards and up from the floorboards angry fellows one holds a clock the other a ring one a set of keys two are cradling a marble coffin and one has my face on a pole my heart wedged in my mouth that’s a new one, I think to myself normally he just laughs at me Christ, don’t tell me he's running out of ideas, too. Pornography a picture of a woman hangs in my mind she has no particular face no bones no paint just this feeling. In Our Youth In our youth we were lemmings against the sun the birch trees laughed and the water held wonder green shades covered our hair from the teeth of age and the captains waved from cloud scorched horizons and the wood of the pier was fresh the dust clean and cool the girls were beautiful and bright and loving our tan sculpted bodies locked together free of charge and money was optional and morning was optional dying a fairy tale our skin pure and uncombed by addiction our heart an easy power our stomachs a warm orange life was a theater of experience and the music smiled and the sky told truth and all of our hands showed promise. My Heart... is a black man with a gun in his back my heart is a pigeon frying on the shoulder of a statue my heart is a blade against a brick wall my heart is an unexplained pain in the groin my heart is strands hanging from a creature’s fang my heart is Miracle Whip in an Alabama fridge my heart is green in a dark green world my heart is an overprotected pimple on my eyebrow my heart is a broken pack of smokes my heart is 4,000 confusing pages my heart is a joke at the end of a serious movie my heart is static on the radio my heart is a fish broken in half by a boulder my heart is an overworked protruding sexual organ my heart is dust on the Vegas strip piss on Massachusetts strewn entrails on Ming in Bakersfield my heart is right in a gay universe my heart is a human spine at the bottom of Elliot Bay in February my heart is a semi in Tampa a pheasant’s heart blown to bits in the shrub my heart is a pimp at Walgreens my heart is a long scream after the slip on the edge. |
| Life for all of this I always hated walking home from work. I never made any real money. My manager was worse than my landlord. Her name was Shelly. Shelly was 6 feet tall. Once I called her Michelle. She told me she wasn’t a Michelle. I’d see her in Chinatown once in a while with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend worked in the kitchen. They lived kitchen with her long bird legs and long black straw hair. "I wish these guys would leave me alone! I keep telling them, I HAVE A BOYFRIEND!" Which she never did. She never told them. Her boyfriend was short and muscular. I didn’t like him. His brain was propelled by jealousy. He threatened me every other day. "Hey, man, when you talk to Shelly you keep it professional." "Give it a fucking break, Manny." "You just keep it professional." There was nothing professional about the job. I was either sick from the food or I was dodging the old gay men who lived in the smoking section. One time a professional basketball player stayed at the hotel. Shelly was on fire. She was going to his room and bothering him. She came into the kitchen. I had just turned in an order. Manny took the ticket. "What the fuck’s this word?" The word was Benedict. "The word is Benedict. Eggs Benedict." "You sure?" "Poached eggs over English muffins with hollandaise sauce." "Don’t tell me how to do MY job, motherfucker." Shelly came in around the corner. Her face was weak and crazy. A film of sweat formed tiny beads on her make-up. She was playing with her hair. "Manny, can you handle things down here for a minute?" Manny’s eyes lit up. He looked around and pressed his tongue against his cheek. "Yeah, I can handle it, baby." "Good. I’m taking Jamal Dupree a fruit basket. His team lost the game. I want to make sure he stays here next year." Manny was horrified. "Why the hell you doin’ that? He’s just a big dumb ape. He’ll get over it." She tossed her hair behind her shoulder. "Manny, I don’t appreciate your tone right now. We are working. I am the manager. I am trying to secure this account. You have nothing to worry about." She took off. Manny went to work. Half an hour later Shelly hadn’t returned. I walked into the kitchen and folded napkins. Manny was on the other side of the wheel. He talked to me through a skillet. It hung there between us. "Don’t you say a fuckin’ word, prick. You so much as give me one of those sarcastic smirks of yours and I’ll break your fuckin’ nose." I’d been putting up with him for two months. I never said anything to him because I didn’t want to lose my job. But the job wasn’t worth it anymore. "Tell you what, you sorry sack of shit, after work tonight I’ll meet you in the basement. I’ll give you the first swing. After your girl gets done screwing that big black cock I might even take a shot at her." "Your fuckin’ order’s up, dead man." But after work he had a fight with Shelly. I was waiting for him by the back door. He walked by in a huff, "Your lucky day, motherfucker." I never got to fight Manny because he had narced me off to Shelly about what I’d said to him. Shelly kept me after work. I sat across from her in her little office. "We need to talk about what you said to Manny." "Shelly, I only said that to get to him. I don’t think you would fool around like that." I was lying through my teeth, "Manny’s just worried that I’m going to try something with you. I would never do something like that." I had steered the conversation away. She looked at me. "Why not?" "Well, for one, you’re with Manny. For two, you’re my boss. And for three, let’s face it, you’re way out of my league." Her eyes lit up like Manny’s. They both had dull and dumb eyes. "I was going to fire you. I called you in here to let you go." I sat back and lit a smoke. King Cool. I had never shown an interest in her before because I had no interest in her. I could get that kind of trouble from a good looking woman. It wasn’t worth it with her. Her and her long bird legs and long black straw hair. But it was mostly her face, the way she needed attention. She would dry up and blow away without it. But sitting there facing the end of my job it occurred to me that I didn’t want to look for another one. It also occurred to me that I would have sex with her, if I had met her in a bar and I was leaving town the next day, some circumstance like that. For a second I thought of walking in Manny’s shoes. I'd rather eat a bullet. She crossed her bird legs and smiled at me. "I never knew you felt that way." "I’m just saying." We heard the back door open. A pair of shoes came running down the hallway. There was a slip, a grunt, and then walking. I shook my head at the desk. Manny peeked his head around the corner. She stared at him. "Sit down, Manny." He sat down next to me. "I don’t want any more trouble between you two. Shake hands." I smiled at Manny and put my hand out. "I ain’t shakin’ his fuckin’ hand, Shelly." "Manny, shake his hand." He did it. It killed him. She told him to wait in the car. She had to tell him a few times. He left. I asked her, "How’s Dupree?" "Oh, he’s fine. We had a good talk..." I put out my smoke. "I guess I’ll be leaving." She uncrossed her bird legs and sat forward, "I should go, too. Listen, you were wrong about my being out of your league. I want you to know that." "Thanks, Shelly. See you on Monday." She watched me leave. |
Poems
Hands On “There has to be a better way for this motherfucker to happen. Nothing is as powerful as fear, Jack. Not even Maiden.” We’ve been on the job now for over a year. Crack’s been dying for three. Some kind of motor deterioration or something to do with his nervous system. He lights his smoke and swallows his serum, “I’ve been taking triple the required minimum. If I could get more, I’d use it. It tastes like shit, but it chases that white shit like crazy.” It’s really crank, but everyone calls him Crack because Crack’s a lot funnier. Crank has longer staying power, and it kills Crack’s pain. He’s saving money for experimental surgery somewhere in Europe. We’re five miles off the Mississippi Delta. Two more weeks on this fucking rig and we get released for three weeks. Crack jumps on a plane for Austria, come to think of it, and I head back to Texas. My wife has her own troubles, a jaw full of TMJ and a busted wrist. It’s been one thing working on this shitpile but it’s been decent being away from the house during all that. We have one daughter, a so-called miracle baby because my wife was told she was sterile by two different doctors. We raise her and she runs off at seventeen. Now she moves in and out of the house. She’s been married four times and hasn’t had one single kid. I don’t know if it’s her luck or ours. But it makes her living with us a lot easier. She’ll be twenty-nine in August. Miracle my ass. But Crack’s problems outweigh any of ours. Especially Goate’s bullshit. He’s trying to tell us that it’s harder to stay rich than to be poor. He’ll rip off some bullshit about how some asshole stole the Mercedes symbol from the hood of his car, how his wife can’t keep honest help around her shop and a bunch of other droll and sickening shit we have to wade through long enough to get our checks. We stand there and empathize with the cocksucker. It never occurs to him that if he dropped dead none of us would blink. Crack snorts what has to be his sixteenth rail of the afternoon. I’ve never seen him off the shit and I never want to. He assures me that he screams in pain without it. Crack has a funny voice due to the blow and the vaccine. Not cartoon funny or strange funny, but damned-near-dead funny. It creeps me out, to be plain rude about it. We’ve been drilling here for weeks on end. It doesn’t make me feel one way or the other about how much the industry of my employ fucks Mother Nature in the ass. The way I see it she’s got it coming. I don’t know why that point of view is so offensive to people. Only difference is I face it directly, I don’t get to hide behind a regular life. Ask Crack about Mother Nature. |
An Early Rust It was the two of them now, and his father had again become the drunk, the juggler, hustler and petty thief he had been before meeting his wife, who had twenty-four years ago set him straight on a selfless, unfamiliar path. And no matter how worn the path had been by the old man, no matter how many sacrifices he made for his family, the hours worked to blood and bone, after the sudden absence of youth, only because he had loved a woman with faith in God, no matter how ingrained the path became beneath his heels, it slept there unknown under his skin, and up the path beyond his reach lay the bright shores of life after dark, barrooms and whores, embalmed cigarettes and heroin, all his lost hours, given over for the love of one woman who was now buried, and only the boy's need for him is what held his blood clean. The boy was seventeen, that night he was seventeen, and the lobby was full of them again, the beaten, the forgotten filth of women and fathers on the curbs of West Phoenix. The line of sickness, the stench of broken teeth. He stood among them, staring off to nothing, staring into nowhere like a Goddamned movie, like something that could make sense out of something else. He stood there, cut adrift, watching in the distance his childhood, laid out in the dead blood of his mother. A drunk in line pushed the boy's shoulder forward, to get closer to the street again, to an open wasteland of gutters littered with syringes, smiling with broken glass and shards of bone. All of nature's passions spent, all of God's forgotten grace descended and rotting, the guilt of God's plan and the bloody tears of war-torn angels. All the mysteries of children lacerated. |
Excerpts