4.05 / May 2009

People fall away sometimes, gently with haiku lips, loudly on devil’s legs. The fall strips them somehow, the vines that shrivel around fat and thin branches shake and shiver as the limbs fall wide.

isdom Of The East A line of workers stretched out on the lawn of what seemed to be an estate, using picks and shovels to open a ditch. They were digging for an old sprinkler line with the aim of replacing it. It was a Saturday morning, and the Southern California sun was climbing higher.

  1) Flirtation We tossed them back and forth like grade school dodge ball champs. Every time I ducked beneath one I watched it sprout dark feathers and hover above us like a vulture, long after the conversation turned to something more appropriate.

“dance forms today are designed to stimulate the lusts and affections of the flesh” A woman in business clothes, slim skirt, heels, and hose, can constrain her climb to the copier top, on her toes: lower paper tray, upper paper tray, document handler, mangle, staple, fold, legal, A4, or 11 x 8 1/2.

That he was a fat man. Gut lapping the belt line, skin blue where the weight of flesh burst his veins. It can also be known that he was a thin man. His neck exposed sinews where tendons set his skull at the nape, a turn of head rounding out the crabapple in the throat.

I married my best friend’s girlfriend. But he doesn’t know it. His name was Bud Metzger, and he’s been dead five years. He drank too much Jack Daniels and Coke, passed out, and dropped a cigarette that torched his apartment.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_5/Junkins-Cloistered.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] These once shallow furrows now fold into fans across my brow, the spoils of my lamentations clinging like rust on blunt tools. I kiss your baby lips, flaunt you, my starry opal, as if I were a woman gutted by a womb in stasis, biology foiled.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_5/LaPerle-Popovers.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Eleanor was very heavy, but beautiful, rosy, sweet, and rolling with babies. She kept her triplet boys in the folds of her skin, all three at once, Edward, Dickey, and Tim, a little like kangaroos carry their young.

I held it, my small horrid. It fit in my lilypad palm. Beneath thin grey skin, its moldy organs flapped and fluttered. I found shelter in a book, placed it upon the soft and yellowed pages. At twilight it became restless and the cradle’s paper wings snapped shut.

In my pocket are the places we were supposed to visit. It was going to last us decades, until we were old enough to mostly live off of memories & storytelling, our bodies nearly consumed by our old age. You can barely read the names with all the coffee stains.

FOR my foyer sculpture, I shall incuse upon a monstrous bronze cone An image of my hated father, clothed only in the spirals of his hair. For it is the function of new bronze to sparkle, and of a young patriarch’s mane To give luster to the beautiful shoulder set on crime.

I slept with my son’s Spanish teacher. Or I should clarify, slept next to her. We’d both had too much to drink and dozed off on the pull-out couch in her apartment. Had we not drank so much at dinner I imagine I would have slept with her for real. This was a mistake.

In the last summer before he would be a man, Norman bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Florida. He bought it with his last handful of dollars. He had bought the dollars at a two percent loss with hundreds of rolled quarters.

We just passed the school girl outfits, and were moving onto the sex toys spanning down a long wall towards two thousand porno DVD’s, when the door opened and the bell went off.

An ichnology of antipathy, with bibliography and citations   Supposing truth is a woman, this tautology (and not—contra any falsifying conclusions your conditional curl of lip, your lapidary laugh or lift of brow, your dorsodominant shrug—dramatically dolorous—of collar may claim as full philoscoffical act of logical contradiction—and not, I say, a whining, nagging ghost—half liminal

that this rake’s rusty teeth refuse to bend back like new, that on the first November day leaves shiver before they die, & that to live in autumn is to die slowly while the children cartwheel on your front lawn which begs you, just begs you, for a leaf blower.