10.4 / July & August 2015

It’s always hectic here on the bridge, always full, always rushing, even in traffic. Because these days you don’t just work at work. Technology, that noose. Everyone is reachable all the time. Including traffic jams. Devices bring emails and conference calls and video chats in an uninterruptable river.

Anxiety of Influence Cal. Sentimentalism gone too far is sitting on the curb outside her building the whole night through. Cold and given up on cold for warm dreams of her cozy apartment exorcized of your petulance. Cal. I didn’t mean it, but I did.

Boys are rotten, made out of cotton! Girls are sexy, made out of Pepsi! When he failed to beat her racing time tables, she nicknamed him the little engine who couldn’t and it stuck. She hung very close, a spitball in his matte. She bore in his brain. She stuck in his craw.

According to the World Wide Web: the ice is melting. This might not be any of your business.

I flew in from L.A. the day before the audition and took public transportation from the airport to downtown Vancouver, ignoring stares from children, assholes and those who were just too slow to look away before they got caught.

Guns, knives, scissors, razorblades, letter openers, shards of light bulb, anything sharp. Cars, garages. Gas furnaces, gas stoves. Rubbing alcohol, real alcohol, rat poison, bleach.

My father was a Piraguero. With salsa blaring in one ear, he’d push his piragua cart, a contraption made of scrapped wheelchair parts and pieces of plywood, along pedestrian filled avenues, offering cups of shaved ice with flavored syrup. He was selling his piraguas when it happened: a crack of thunder.

She woke up fighting in Spanish – something about a missing necklace at the hotel. At least she thought it was Spanish – could’ve been Italian, or Portuguese, but was probably gibberish. Her ex-husband told her that she talked in her sleep, often in mangled languages. He became good at recognizing them.

As often, I discovered a new poem while shitting.

We’ve heard mimosas are a curative; that’s why we toast to health. Sun floods bright as orange juice past the cafe awning and makes our glasses glow. We lift them to each other and drink, seven women, seven like seven days or seven veils, like seven seas or seven seals.

Some nights, T-Boy leaned on the pay phone, the last in the neighborhood, and took late night wrong numbers from Chalmette

When she picked up the NY Times, mother made a comment: Good for you. Mother was a mean bear.

Fire smell in your hair. I am your shark, he sings, my foot voracious, burning in my joint as you open up, twist into the elegant crease of your waist, turn, curls flying, step right back into my arms’ closure.

A boy on swim team died in a motorcycle accident when I was 16. His name was Cameron, and I didn’t know him well except that he was a reasonable backstroker. The swim team wasn’t unkind to him; We didn’t realize he was there until he was gone.

My cuchi-hole lockbox was snaked by a man in a cowboy hat and whisky breath. Dry hands summer picked that cherry bit, girl crouched in a pleated skirt at the magazine stand. Cowboy mining riverbeds for gold.

There’s a hill, a lonely hill, in the middle of cornfields and forest patches. During the winter it’s covered with snow and in the summer, a green flowerless meadow. There are dandelions and weeds—some of which grow quite tall, knee to mid-thigh.