AMYGDALA
1
Migratory birds that should be hopping a ride on the wind stroll between our legs. When did it become unlawful to squeal in pleasure? you ask. I shrug. What I call an attack of conscience another person might call the amygdala. I’m the most aggrieved of all the people on line, with a heart like a booby-trapped car.
2
The fat pharmacist wears a white coat he can’t quite button over his stomach. Smiling ingratiatingly, I hand him my prescription. He glances at it and just shakes his head. Ah, me! Another day without painkillers, another day as court jester to a humorless universe.
3
A rejoinder occurs to me only months later while watching the horse’s ears quiver. Official-looking documents stick to the bottom of the tall, steel-mesh fence where a noisy wind has blown them. The prisoner gripped by the elbow insists that’s not his signature. I go back inside just so I can listen instead to the baby babble. My point isn’t what you think it is, which is the point.
APOCALYPSE TANGO
Night crowded around, so dark I didn’t notice the shadow with red freckles on one hand raise a pistol with the other. The unwounded fled faster than the general laws of physics could explain. When did mercy become another thing to especially avoid? I slept under the For Sale by Owner sign on your lawn. It wasn’t safe anymore to think out loud. Rumors circulated through town as to why. Somebody said it was the woman upstairs; somebody else, electronics assembled in China. I felt cold spread like a stain of angels and rust along the inside of my skull.
MONKEYS WITH TYPEWRITERS
1
The season slowed in its turning to allow the sun to catch up. What I thought was thunder must have been the rumble of panic.
2
Squalid yellow light. An empty street. My clothes are old, but they’re clean.
3
We’re like the ships of Odysseus, my Lit professor said, always being blown off course. Or maybe I just imagined it, preferring the emptiness smoldering underneath everything. We’ve all lost things. We’ve all had things taken. And not only things. A roommate with wrists emphatically slit.
4
A door opened into a big room where an exam was underway. There were one million monkeys with typewriters at long tables. Some could have used my help spelling “catastrophe.”
5
Every day is somewhere we’ve never been before. It’s less a story than a situation.
6
The street was full of snow and the homeless. You joked that God must be living in another city under an assumed name. When we were little, the simple three-letter words on the blackboard, CAT RAT MAT HAT, seemed to me to make a song. Now there’s suicide attacks and Zoloft and the clock’s audible heartbeat. I wish I was a wolf in the mountains. Wolves, the book said, don’t wish to be found.
THE SCREAM
I want a clock without hands,
and someone to agree
that the moon looks
just like a frozen scream.
I want to find a tattoo
of a woman’s name
when I roll up my sleeve,
and for the millions
that regimes have murdered
to cross back over
on a bridge of bones.
I want to bang on a can
to spread the alarm.
ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEMISE
Sleep is a box with holes punched in the lid, and when you emerge from it, you’re amazed that I’m still scattered like musical clues all over the mall parking lot, unusually full for this time of year with naked blondes and images of the national bird and a few old winos, one of whom, singing something about Jesus’ wounds, cradles armfuls of the hymnals used to feed dumpster fires and supernovas.
CHILDREN OF PARADISE
Out back
flowed the same
river twice.
No other blue
was quite as blue
as the blue
of a blue Sno-
Cone.
ODE
You hid in the subzero darkness, your name, Blooma, Yiddish for flower. Retreating soldiers staggered down the road past your peasant father’s farm. Oh, doomed little girl, even stars disintegrate! The plum trees you loved have long since slit their wrists. Now whenever I think of you, I try picturing us standing on a small stone bridge over bright water, you pointing out a swan with a head like a big wedge of white wedding cake.
HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT
While
we somehow
sleep,
the old men
in orange
safety vests
scoop up
roadkill
with shovels
& fling it
into the future.
STORM COMING
1
I let the dog in.
Dogs don’t leave
fingerprints.
2
Every sad utterance
of the wind is a lie.
Every word it writes down
has another spelling.
3
Fireworks are illegal,
the dark & sparkling memory
of a garbled dream.
All night I hold
a match to the fuse.
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