Behind the dune of plastics, hidden among the clumps of charred O-Rings and heaps of shapeless garbage, there is a large tank. In the tank are cockroaches. Every day, I climb onto the metal cover and contemplate the gray dawn that creeps through the hills of waste. Then I defecate inside the tank through the top hatch. Every day, my feces nourish thousands of hungry cockroaches. In the morning, I take my net and fish. The smell of the tank does not bother me. On the contrary. Sometimes I climb inside and catch the biggest cockroaches that hide at the bottom. Then I climb back up to the pot of water on the fire and cook breakfast, lunch, dinner. I eat fifty, seventy, ninety cockroaches a day. I also make a good, dark, bitter, thirst-quenching, nutritious broth from them. The cockroaches feed on my waste, I feed on them. Every day, I go for long walks through the sludge in search of more food for my farm: human excrement, remains of dead animals, or shapeless things. And then I collect fuel to keep the fire burning. This is my life. No one ever comes near. They are afraid, disgusted, pitying, horrified. They are shortsighted and confused, all moving towards their end, even if they run away in different directions. They run away and do not see the beauty. I do not run away. I see. And then, at sunset—gray, blurry, misty—I sit on a heap of garbage and smile, because life, every life, is wonderful.
In the bar, she stares at him constantly, which is embarrassing in and of itself, but also because she cannot seem to physically control it, and she knows his friends will notice (she somehow does not count herself in this body of people, although that is where she belongs; within this crowd, her desire isolates her, carves out a space of hot, silent shame), and she knows that they, his friends, will murmur to each other, that they will note her desperate, pathetic, puppy-dog presence, but she seems to have a physical impediment that means she can’t stop staring, and even when she forces herself to look at other people, she doesn’t see their faces but instead the overlay of his face, their mouths and faces moving and talking in a sick parody of his mouth and face, and when she glances across and sees him talking to another woman, it is as if she has been punched in the chest, it takes the wind out of her, she wants to cry, to scream, to cradle the other woman’s head in her hands and press down on her eyeballs until they turn to wet, soft mush. She spends so much time repressing this jealousy, certain that it is neither good for her nor appropriate for her feminist commitments, that it is a relief to simply thirst for blood.
TODAYToday a bully from my high school is coming by to beat me up one last time (he has cancer). AMERIKKKAOf course Amerikkka leads the league in serial killers. There are a great many serial killers in town right now—because of NYC’s favorable tax laws and enterprise zones and the big serial killer parade we have every year, and because in a lot of our restaurants serial killers eat free. A JOINERHere’s something you might not have known about me: I was a joiner in high school. Carbona Club, Whip-Its Society, Nutmeg Club, Friends of Cough Syrup, Society of Huffers & Baggers, Air Dusters Club, United Helium Party, Poppers & Snappers Study Group—I did just about everything. THE DARK WEBAnother strange aspect of the dark web is that some entrepreneurs have set up shops there. So you can stop and enjoy a hot dog. Or you can take a break at a little booth and get your photo taken with a monster (it’s really just a cardboard cutout, but it looks very real. And the teeth work). PROVERBCan’t have people looking up your cornhole. I think Benjamin Franklin was the first one to say that. BEATLEI’m told 60% of “A New Film About the New Beatles” had to be reshot because of me. Unfortunately, that was the end of my movie career. I checked around but nobody needed a Beatle right then, not even one with as much experience as I had. (I said I had a hundred years experience.) JAILHow did I end up in jail? When I got to Yuma I hadn’t slept in two weeks and hadn’t shaved or showered. My clothes smelled like farts and clams and were stiff from sweat and dirt. The police got dozens of calls claiming a caveman had just robbed the bank! I got a chuckle out of that one. RSVPSadly, due to a bean diet and other environmental factors, I will be unable to attend. THINGMy hand starred in the TV show The Addams Family. Yes, it’s true, Warren Beatty was definitely up for the part of Thing but I eventually snagged the role. I did an excellent job in the macabre/black comedy sitcom and to this day it’s still considered the best TV show of all time.
Someone saw some cloudsonce upon a time. So what?I can see them, too —a haikuBut better to have seen them a thousand years ago. I am not being sentimental. I like plumbing as much as anyone, and I know the more pollution, the more brilliant sunsets. But the first poems, you could write about anything. Day turning into night a real phenomenon, a mouth and another mouth. The first poems had no metaphors because nothing was like anything else yet.The kiss was a courting ritual involving, what else, food. A capybara feeding a berry to another capybara, baby birds, wolves translating deer. The first kisses were a promise of future fish, future strawberries: they were symbols, poems. What we want are practical morsels. Let’s nourish the fuck out of each other, a lover says. Hungry, we say, for anything we desire.The first poems were reports. The world was new and you only wanted to factcheck what you saw: are clouds white to you? White as pillowcases? White as teeth? Does billow mean the same to you as to me? How does a frog go? Is the sea far away or no distance at all? Does the moon look sad to you tonight as well? And every night?Why are there so many nature poems? I asked an English professor once. Well, there are just as many city poems, she said. She meant: you see what you want to see.The painters in the caves at Lascaux were saying, bison exist bison exist. Not nostalgizing or vision boarding: just stating the facts. Once upon a time, the facts were enough.
He flies into town, late, rents a room in the neighbourhood, meets her first thing in the morning, holds her, remembers how her mother looked, same dark eyes, same dark curl on the top of her head. Every six months, he catches milestones: crawling, walking, first words, kindergarten, high school. Same room, same turquoise couch, same breakfast snacks. Years. Back and forth. He becomes an intermittent constant.At home, he cleans out the extra room, installs a Murphy Bed, hangs her favorite poster. He investigates the local university, uses it as a lure she won’t resist.
We drank Prosecco on the number 31, escaping the confetti blizzard, the plastic champagne flute cheap between my lips but the ring heavy on my finger, while my parents returned to their hotel and we continued on the early bus—Who gets married at eight in the morning?—and some passengers clucked and said Cheers, but most looked out to the felt-clad streets where stony-faced bankers marched to the rain, then we chugged up a small mountain on a train, and still in my wedding dress with the matching red patent shoes, I whispered footsteps in snow strewn with autumn leaves, and later, after we thawed our bodies in steaming water and fucked in the bathtub, bones squeezed between ceramic and lobster-pink skin, I hid the bruises beneath an evening gown, and we toasted again, ate pizza and lit candles jammed into green glass bottles while I picked at wax cascades with manicured nails never knowing when this day, this love, this marriage, would end.
There is a bony woman measuring things on the playground. She has a long tape measure that hooks in place. One end hugs the edge of a railroad tie bordering the perimeter of the wood chips. She measures the circumference of the area. She measures by the slide, the length of the monkey bars, the distance from climbing pyramid to swing set, and writes the numbers down in a three-ring notebook. The kids pay her no mind. They screech and race each other to the swings and climb up ladders and hang upside down. The woman deposits the tape measure into the sag of her bag and flips the notebook closed. She is silent and slow as she walks up the street, disappearing past vinyl houses.
When he was a child, my dad lost two fingers working at the matchbox factory and declared three as his lucky number. He owned three of every shirt, prayed three times a day, and went to the Lygon casino on the third of each month. He ate ramen with three chopsticks, and sticky dots of broth sprayed across the table, onto his Tim Winton novels. We liked the crunch of Cajun grilled corn. We toothpicked kernels from between our teeth, and threw the cobs at each other's heads. Pretended to have seizures on the floor. On the drive to the convenience store after his AA meeting, he played Fleetwood Mac and The Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan’s voice pulsed through the speakers. He checked himself in the visor mirror and his smile vanished. “I look like a blobfish,” he said. But our faces shared the same geometry. The sunset pinked the clouds, the West Gate Bridge speared the skyline. He bought me rice crackers, and when the cashier wasn’t looking, I tucked a Reese’s peanut butter cup under my windbreaker. I ate at home in the shrine room. The pedestal fan blasted, and I leaned my forehead against the Maitreya statue to be kissed by the coolness of its marble. Dad kicked me out to pray, but I pressed my ear to the door, trying to hear his wishes, trying to become his god.
Owls hoot to each other across dusking hills—the medieval whorehouses in Genoa are rediscovering electricity—news of masts spotted earlier on the horizon has circled back to them, which they’d divined already, for the seagulls took off from the harbor walls hours before—still, the whores step out onto their balconies, float up to the blanched rooftops, hoot to each other through rising stalks of stars swaying in the dark grange of night—they’re dreaming of sleeping in silk dresses, bathing in gold florins, myrrh and musk, tracing with inward eyes the moonlit-draped, rudder-furrowed wakes of phosphorous, the billowing sash of earth’s shadow smothering stars, burgeoning sails and masts growing ever-taller, getting closer, buzzing, buzzing, shriller than the summoning bells behind their locked doors, until they get so close those suave ladies glean that most precious secret all those learned scribes and bishops are too afraid to whisper—the world is round.
Last night I dreamt we were lobsters. I was tucked behind a rock, hiding from the cod swimming overhead. The bright blue of your claw caught my attention; one in two million, deliciously unique.“You’re new here,” I rasped.“Lobsters can’t talk,” you replied.Your antenna twitched in my direction. I crouched in my shadowed crevice, waiting for the light to cease filtering to the ocean floor, for you to come and make me yours.But first, you had to prove yourself—fight your way to dominance.The reigning champion of our rocky oasis charged, his brown-green a stark contrast to your brilliant blue. My antennae twitched at the scent of him. But biology cannot overcome destiny, even for lobsters. I waited—wanting, wishing.You danced him across the ocean floor, kicking rocks with graceful sweeps of your uropods. His crusher claw came down on your abdomen; you bucked, curling your central tail fin to scoot away. He attempted another strike; you ripped through his rostrum, took his beady eye with your massive pincher claw.Your victory was decisive, his retreat swift.I was inundated with the scent of urine released from the sacs along your face. My antennule soaking up the smell of you, pleopods quivering in answer to your dominance. The neurons of my cardiac ganglion fired, heartbeat racing in anticipation of your tiny feelers running over my carapace.Finally—finally—you made your way to me among the rocks. We ran our bodies together, sharing pheromones laced with hope and promises of forever.Then you were gone. And I was alone, as always.Our offspring were many. They all grew to resemble you—perfect, miniature replicas of shining lapis-blue, with searching eyes and a drive to leave.Maybe tonight we’ll be swans, and you’ll stay.
