I don’t understand why this is still a problem,” the ACS Director says, point-blank from behind the line of tiny crystal goblets filled with discreet, elegant sips of sherry. The Director’s flight, and that of every sherry-flight at the table, glistens in the muted light of the cabin. He stares on through the front windows of the yacht’s dining room into the night. The city is partially hidden on the horizon, and, up above it all, almost insignificant pin pricks of light lie scattered like fallen sequins.
I am locked up in a cell. The captors are conducting medical experiments on us. They give us metal wires to stick in our necks, which I know instinctively will erase our memories.
They crawled from shallow darkness out of a crack in the sidewalk. They each stood as tall as a man and a half. Their bodies were covered in hazelnut fur and their nose tendrils writhed like skinned octopi. There were three of them, and one of me.
I fell backward onto my ass in the street, whimpering and whining, completely expecting to have my brain eaten out backward from my skull like a stew by these terrible, loathsome, horror-inspiring… Psychic Moles from Outer Space!
When I was in the seventh grade I found a scalpel after school. I think it belonged to my mom. There was nowhere else it could have come from. And this scalpel almost glowed. The black, black, veiny marble counter it was sitting on reflected a kind of halo around the silver knife, anything but subtle.
“Hey, um!”
“Hey, excuse me!”
The waitress turned on one leg, her elbow on her hip, coffee pot in hand.
“Yeah, hun?” she responded.
“Why do you say that?”
Her face contorted into a question mark.
“What you called me just now,” he fired off, “and once before that.”
She was half waiting for a joke. “What do you mean?”
“I just can’t take it anymore! Have you ever thought that the people you call hun maybe don’t like being called hun?”
A fear to assert words in lines
That aren’t guided by the Drum of Rhyme
Prevents my pen from flowing free—
Producing reams for all to see.
Verses marching row by row,
Metered missiles sure in tow.
What wretched works! All deafened by
The unrelenting Drum of Rhyme.
In dreams above the horde I climb
And shout over the Drum of Rhyme:
“Drop your arms and wander wide,
Forget decorum—improvise!”
Awake I find the ranks unstirred,
Still plowing onwards as a herd.
My pen amongst them prints in time;
I too, march to the Drum of Rhyme.
For X
I was mercurial, and growing
lion vertebrae.
In the calloused silver of morning,
I’d pry the german summer
from its velvet coffer, offer it
the chemistry of a wingspan
when it tastes smoke. You were lodged
like a tooth in its fish fat.
Still, you arrived with water
chestnuts for eyes and a
cichlid lipped mouth
dilated for wanting.
These were the wet & wayward
beginnings, darkening where we let them.
Hesperus, the evening star,
once caught me peeling the skin
of an aspen and crawling inside,
where you sucked the bloodsap
from my wood. I unhorsed the horse
and unmooned the moon
licking the salt from your hooves.
