Ginger Ale

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The first newspaper
I ever read informed me
that I may or may not get cancer
from drinking ginger ale.
This frightens me from
a delicious drink most of my life,
before I realize I’d have to drink enough
ginger ale to drown a planet
of white laboratory mice
in order to die, to watch my spleen
or liver or whatever it is
your grandmother refers to as “the gizzard”
to dissolve like a salty snail
on the concrete. I had a friend
who cried when his pet chicken
was run over by a big green truck
delivering ginger ale. I had another
friend who laughed when I told her
chickens sleep in the trees.
I had a third friend who was a gymnast,
until he got drunk and broke his foot
climbing a tree, looking for a chicken.
Then he drank his way to the bottom
of a Styrofoam cup full of vodka
and ginger ale and ended up
three states away, taking only ten
of twelve steps. With those two steps
he had left over we danced
at a party where I met a guy
named Tyson, who had a tattoo
of a Colt .45 on one forearm
and a can of Canada Dry on the other.
He was the guy who asked everyone
if they were Formalists or if they thought
Allen Ginsberg was overrated.
Tyson had a mustache like a third eyebrow
over his lip, a mustache like every cop
you’ve ever been stopped by and fallen in love with.
But not a romantic love, it’s more patriotic than that,
because cop mustaches and cop cars,
like that poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
are about as American as it gets: Facial hair
and danger and red, white, and blue.
I don’t know that Tyson’s very patriotic,
but he seems like the kind of person
I’d be riding with when I get pulled over,
his blue eyes bloodshot, little red whips of veins
wrapped around the whites of his eyes.
“No officer, all he’s had to drink is ginger ale.”

Maryland Hacker

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A poet friend takes every opportunity
to offer up his impression of Bette Davis—
a parlor trick only red-headed girls with a love
for Broadway appreciate.
This friend tells poet jokes that aren’t funny
to anyone but him. He claims he wrote
a horror flick titled Maryland Hacker; a movie
about Edgar Allan Poe, except this time
Poe’s more than the broody, fashionable-coated bard
that the delicate & pale imitate in high school,
in this movie Mr. Poe has a penchant for butcher knives
& interrupting teenagers in the throes
of gratuitous sex. My friend plans to thread flash-forward
scenes from the future into the film,
snippets of William Carlos Williams instructing
Allan Ginsberg to turn his head & cough,
“To keep people guessing,” my friend says.
I try to explain to him that people’s lives are not ornate
kitsch machines, that even though these people are dead,
we have a responsibility to uphold their lives,
that Time is an old man burdened with all the memories
he’s ever had, a single, long-winded moment, & perhaps
maybe we owe something to that: even though
someone’s gone, there’s another someone there who will
remember. That’s when our red-headed friend Jacky walks by—