thee istsfor manity reader

Epigraph in Ekphrasis:

Or more stories about C-sections

 

i.

I would like this poem 

to be an envoy —

Bearing a gap-toothed smile

between sharpened incisors…

 

ii.

“Remember, you can’t be denied.  Everyone hides.  Where is this little big man hiding?  Hmm.  Sorry, hon, we’re going c-section on you.  Oh, relax.  Nothing to it.  Look, I was a c-section myself and I turned out all right.  

Nurse, get me that sardine can top — the one with the pull tab.”

“This one?”

“Yes, god damn it.”

“But it’s rusty doctor.”

“Give it here.”

“I gave you a good dose of fugu fish tincture, a few minutes back there, hon.  That’s why you can’t move or talk.  You’re basically a zombie, see?  Just breathe as deeply as you are able — provided your diaphragm is nearly paralyzed.  Just think happy thoughts.”

“Nurse!”

“Yes, Dr. Sobrenada?”

“Play some atonal music.  Loud!”

“Not Valkyries, Doctor?”

“Schoenberg, god damn it.  Webern at the very least.  Some James Tenney tape loops in a pinch.  But loud.  And now!”

“Yeah, sister, I got a crackin’ tape collection for being 90 miles east of Iquitos.  How in the hell did you end up there anyway?  And in this state.  What are you doing traveling by dugout canoe so irrefragably pregnant.  Silly rabbit.  Well, you’re home now and relaxed. We’ll have that cracker out of there in no time…”

“Goddamnit, nurse, turn it up!”

“No use squirming, sister. You can’t go anywhere, and I ain’t no bibliolater.  Just a man full of meanness.  A misanthrope — I guess you’d say.  Take that 25 cent word with you to the bank.  Well, maybe not to the bank… take it to your shallow-ditch grave.  I aim to put you out of your misery…”

“Nurse! Incision…”

“Yeah, go ahead and scream, sistah.  The fugu tincture certainly did nothing to your vocal chords, did it?”

“Nurse, maximum volume!  Good help is so rare these days — keep ‘em when you get ‘em.”

Mmmmm… yes… let it out, hon. You sound like a drunken pileated — hey, hey listen, you know that Woody Woodpecker?  ah, well…”

“She’s out…

Nurse, who said time heals all wounds?

It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds…”

 

iii.

She starts her days on a handheld screen furiously tapping words — 

into images — on gorilla glass.

She reorders the world in this manner.

 

iv.

Why do bombs rain on the poets?

Bombs rain down on this poet.

But this poet, he’s fierce —

explosions in his green stellate eyes — 

standing on a casino chip 

cum soap box.

 

When he hears mortar shells

He cusses more in his odes 

and cuts down on guitar solos.

 

The bombs stop mid-air

Impaled in simulacrum skies — 

Inert butterflies flayed for display — 

black and white nuggets of flower-lava.

 

And a carbuncular woman yells out:

“blah blah blah blah metonymy…

wah wah wah synecdoche…

I have a PhD… from Iowa, damn it!

Give me my due.”

 

“But this is a poetry reading,

With Gueetars, bitch!

This is Las Vegas in ever-burning neon.”

 

And beyond the earth is screaming

And we’re turning to ashes on a dying planet

In the waning days of Emperor Fossil: 

a quick hello to you — 

and a quicker goodbye — 

in the Anthropocene.

 

The Poet has the power to arrest bombs in mid-fall — 

The bombs evanesce into partly cloudy skies —

But his reading is tubercular.

His strumming atonal.

He had too much to drink.

 

The ghosts of misogynies past are railing

At Catullus backstage, 

like an impotent Bukowski — 

robe indecently open — 

maundering impotent in the wings

 

v.

The Monday morning maunder is my worst day

Of peripeteia mumbling…

The Tuesday morning constitutional is full of vim vigor logorrhea: the words pour out.

The Wednesday wander is absolute shit…

 

vi.

So I go to the cupboard, ‘cause I’m an angry cuss, and there exhorting me — virtually screaming at me in 12 point bold — is some numbskull at Dr. Bragg’s ad copy department extolling the virtues of drinking straight —

no chaser! —

Apple Cider vinegar — like it’s some modern day elixir o’ life that’ll pump you up of vim and vigor — a “bracing” tincture it proclaims (ain’t no snake oil here, but strike the band up, and bring out the Bojangles soft shoe!) ‘cause it’s a gonna’ change your life!

Smooth out that existential dread, give ya’ a boner with extra “ ‘ONER ” — o o o o, you’ll go, buddy boy.  

The missus will appreciate it.  And for the misses work out the kinks in the monthly hysterias( if you know what I mean) with all types of effluvial matter that looks like dead wispy spiders floating in your drink.  

Quaff this you’ll see the ideal pick me up, and I mean pick me up fellas “perfect taken 3 times a day!” Did I mention the missus will thank ya’!  It’s the ideal!  The surreal!  Pick-me-up drink: upon arising! (heh! fellas?!) mid-morning and mid-afternoon.  

And the missus says to me:

“The best ting that happened to me in the world:

MENOPAUSE.

That’s what I lived for — for the last 20 years!”

 

vii.

final jump-cuts from the c-section bridge:

 

a.

SMASH THE PATRIARCHY!

 

b.

“Look at that guy on the sidewalk. What’s he doing?”

“Looking for his soul in the cracks.  Look how he burrows, drawing blood from his fingertips.  It must be a fine old soul.  I wonder if that’s what my father was like at the end?  When my uncle found him on the streets of Little Havana looking for crack.  Crack in the cracks.  Heh!  Oh, well, whatever.  Never mind.” he said.

“Ow! Oh my God,” she said. “I think I’m going to need a C-section.  This doesn’t feel right.”

“You mean something akin to omitting the envoy from my sonnet last night?  Bitch!  When will you learn?  I’ll use a god-damned fork to get that out of you!  When will you learn?”

 

c.

Intersectionality– the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual.

I live on the intersection of Hispanic avenue — the preferred nomenclature is Latinx now — and cisgendered male terrace;  near the fluid-class, decade-long, unemployed, heterosexual, forced-into-celibacy-roundabout.  

There.

How’s that for an intersectional address? 

 

d.

CODA 1:

“FUCK OFF

I AM A PAINTER

DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO PAINT

I WILL PAINT 

FLOWERS IF

I WANT

I WILL PAINT

DEAD BODIES

IF I WANT

AND YOU CAN 

ALL FUCK OFF”

 

e.

CODA 2: 

Datta.  Dayadhvam.  Damyata.

                Shantih   shantih   shantih

 

“I’m actually not a big believer in writing books for other people… I believe in writing books for yourself… ultimately I write a book because I want it I need it…”

— Carmen Maria Machado

 

Violet Bathroom Dictator

He is the violet

Bathroom dictator; king of the plastered

Hairspray combover.

 

He is fall

October turning chill at 10:09 p.m.; a smoldering 

Ruin, abandoned house burnt.

 

He is tornadic 

Aftermath, roiling clouds receding;

Waxing solar eclipse.

 

He is a prickly

Brown weed foisted into the wind;

Injured porcupine.

 

He is a stagnant

Tidal pool; A sargassum-clogged beach 

After man o’ war arrive.

 

He is a rusted

’74 green Impala; A worn

Holy-soled shoe.

 

He is a stillborn

Merengue; A ridgeless guiro

Missing its rhythm stick.

 

He is a bruised

Rotting Mango – Acrid 

Espresso in the Little Havana heat.

 

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

— Toni Morrison

mini-flashes o’ funk

The Father

  The sun cut a slice of light into his head — the effulgence of stellate light streaming in through the top of the window blinded him — at the very moment the bullet fragmented in his Broca’s area — it split the infinitive making its way through his synapses there.  All he managed was “¡guao!”  His face a frozen distortion.  What was left of him — and his locked body —  made its way through the air on its ineluctable path to the terrazzo floor.  What was left of his consciousness seeped out with the type O negative flowing copiously from what remained of his ragged head.  His last thought and last partial word unnoticed by anyone else.

The shrapnel still sizzled in that now useless brain — the organ quickly losing its way in the world.  Some shrapnel tore through the curtains and jalousie panes, and some of the shrapnel was embedded in the photograph of him and the Commandante on the wall, commingled with parts of his frontal and parietal lobes: the lobes that once entertained dignitaries, wooed countless women, and gave voice to the orders to shoot 183 people in the revolutionary reprisal squads turned to organic detritus all about the kitchen’s formica surfaces. 

 

Pixies In The Shower

She named the cats Didi and Gogo. The cats do not respond to those names. Beckett’s “Fail, fail again, fail better” is her wife’s favorite quote. She looks like the Venus of Willendorf, but blonde. Her wife doesn’t look at herself in the mirror. They both once wore identical braids on a Caribbean vacation. They sing Pixies songs in the shower together. Tomorrow they will cry, then board the cats. The day after they will set out on a long trek. One will whisper “fuck, yeah” and the other will shout “woohoo” on a summit two thousand miles from here.

 

The Grilled Cheese Camorra

Henry found Mao, his mother, and Fidel at the foot of the bed. They sat cross legged on the floor. Fussing. Castro held a cast iron pan up for the Chairman’s approval.

The Chairman said, “Your mother is teaching us to make grilled cheese sandwiches with just the proper char, Henry.” Fidel turned to Henry and hummed approval.

Henry’s mother said the secret was in the breast milk wash of the bread, and the queso blanco.

“Always use white cheese, Henry.”

Then she dissolved into a mist, spiraled about the ceiling fan, and floated down in a mushroom cloud hiss.

 

Keeper of The Doomsday Clock

I am the keeper of the Doomsday Clock. I know what will happen to us. I know how the world ends, but I don’t tell you. I’ll keep you in the dark. I stopped the hands on the Doomsday Clock at 11:59. When we met I thought I would turn back the hands on the clock, that I might set the pendulum in reverse. But you said our fate was sealed and it was fatal. I was drawn to that. I was afflicted. I set the works in motion once more, the cogs thunder. I have chosen this minute.

 

“Interviewers ask famous writers why they write, and it was (if I remember correctly) the poet John Ashbery who answered “Because I want to.”  Flannery O’Connor answered, “Because I’m good at it.”

— Anne Lamott

(my short film monday lagniappe for you… take 3 minutes out of your life)

Walls

You believe…

Calypso…

 

In rising seas,

In openings, closings,

 

In walls to protect him;

The journey no longer as important 

 

As the destination.

We build trust,

 

We fall apart, Inside this temporary

Housing.  Odysseus, heavy as stone,

 

Maintains his sad sway — An island

Without bridge-makers in

 

This migrant disorder.

 

 

“If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.”

— John Cage

 

Burn the Witch

(from 30 Stories in 30 Songs)

He sat eating what he thought was the best chicken noodle soup he’d ever had.  It was chock full of carrots, translucent slivers of onions, noodles, and hearty chunks of chicken. 

“This is exquisite,” he told the waitress when she came to refill his water glass.  “And this is a small bowl?!  Unbelievable, this is a meal.”  It really was the best soup he’d ever had, he wrote in his journal.

What he couldn’t work out is just what kind of regional spin on this dish he was having. He was accustomed to having some lime with his chicken soup in tropical climes, but it was the chicken that was unusual.  It was darker than usual, even for dark meat, and a bit tougher, but quite tasty because it had been marinated so well and it had become one with the other ingredients; it seemed as if the chicken had spent the perfect amount of time stewing in the soup.  It was fantastic, this “sopa de pollo grimalkina.”

“¿Señorita, por favor,” he intoned in his best studied Spanish, “que tipo de pollo es este?”

The young waitress stood mute, staring at him as if he’d said something offensive.

“Señorita…”

She ran into the kitchen.  After a some time there were some raised voices, and a pleasant looking man came out to speak with him.  He repositioned his pants, pulling them up by his belt over his rounded stomach.  He wiped the sweat from his bald pate and ran the hands through the hair on the sides of his head.

“Señor, is everything all right with your lunch?”

“Yes, yes.  The soup is outstanding, but I think the young lady misunderstood.  I merely want to know what type of chicken this is.  Is it a rooster?  Is it a feral island species?  What is it?”

“Well, señor, thank you.  But this is a family recipe, a secret recipe that we just can’t share.  The cook, my wife, would not allow me back into the conjugal bed if she knew I told you.  It is her special recipe.”

“I see, so her family’s name must have been Grimalkina, yes?”

“Ah… um… yes, of course.  I will tell her you enjoy it very much.  I will have my daughter bring you a mojito, on the house, as you say.”

“Well, thank you.”

The man returned to the kitchen, and within a minute the young woman returned with the drink.  Quite strong, he thought.  Having the strongest mojito ever, he wrote in his journal.  This will get me shit-faced in this heat.

Upon finishing his lunch he asked to speak to the man again, and thanked him for the drink anew, and added, “compliments to the chef, tell your wife she made the best soup I have ever tasted.”

As he left, he stopped a few steps away from the restaurant in the street.  This was a “paladar” after all, he reviewed to himself; this is their home.  I bet if I looked around out back I can find the coop and see the chickens, maybe a picture with my phone…

He crept up the side of the house, walking gingerly around the boxes and buckets.  The thick pink and red hibiscus shrubs provided cover from a direct sight-line from the kitchen.  At the back of the yard he found no coop or chicken cages.  There was an odd corrugated metal garbage can that seemed ancient below a mango tree.  Some odd tufts spread around the base of the tree.  As he came nearer he shuddered, his stomach seemed to need to float out of his body through his chest.

He felt dizzy as he stood among these tufts and realized it was fur.  Fur in different colors.  He felt repulsed as he took the sticky garbage lid from the can.  He began to retch and eventually began to vomit into the can.  He vomited on what was clearly half a dozen carcasses.  Dogs?  No, Cats.

Am I swooning? he thought.  As he fell he saw the three of them coming out of the back of the house.  The man had a cleaver, his daughter had a carving knife, and the other woman, an imposing block of a human being, had a tenderizing mallet and a large pot in hands.  The last thing he heard was the tinny strains of Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch” coming from some distance.  He could not reconcile this, not here, not now.

They’re witches, he thought.  He reached for his phone, but swatted at the air instead.  He stared at the solitary stratocumulus tacked to the sky.  He felt a searing sensation reticulating sharply out from his chest, as the three heads blotted out the sky.

 

 

“I just don’t think of writing as a career.  If I had chosen that as a career, I would have failed at it, obviously.  It’s just: get the degree, get an agent, get the book, get the job, get the tenure.  And coast.  But me, I’ve always been a dab hand at introducing hardship and difficulty into my life.”

— Gary Lutz

wish you were here, the insects are legion

The dust, the arid heat, the vexillologists.  None of that made any sense there.  It was a tropical rainforest last year when we booked, and the defoliation and climate change left the place a barrens.  What gives?  

And why were there 120 vexillologists installed at dozens of tables festooned with swatches of fabrics, encyclopedic books, drawing pads and markers out there in that wasteland?  There were also the carcasses of the old denizens — piles of bones of howler monkeys, tamarins, marmosets, every imaginable bird of paradise, jaguars, tapirs, and so many more.  Everything that once lived there was now a discrete pile of bones, generally undisturbed, each life reduced to its own monticule of what once was, but the insects were legion.

Nothing escaped, and yet there we were as death tourists — gawkers of our future.  

But why the flag people?  I couldn’t figure it out.

“Why are they here, dear?”  I said to my husband.  He was embroiled in the flag drama, and as usual he ignored me.

Then an eminence at the central table rose and screamed, “I’ve got it.  I’ve got it,” then correcting himself said, “No, we have it,” he said making a sweeping gesture to the rest of the table full of white haired men.  

“We’ll undertake the usual scholarly investigations and we’ll produce a paper with the title: ‘A Review of the Changing Proportions of Rectangular Flags since Medieval Times, and Some Suggestions for the Future.’”

There was one full minute of confusion and discussion at all the assembled tables.  And then the men at the head of each table said, “Harrumph.  Yes!” in a precise counterclockwise uncoiling of their support outward until arriving at the outermost, and largest table, where a younger contingent of vexillologists were gathered.

Their representative said: “Fuck you.  Nay!  You got us into this bind, and we’ll be damned if we let you finally drive us over the cliff as we teeter at the precipice.  All you’ve been useful at up to this juncture is winning at the war of attrition.  Look around.  This was a verdant jungle last year and now it’s a clear cut wasteland.  You were part of the leadership that got us here, and we don’t trust your tired ideas, your platitudes and your do as we say, not do as we do approach.  You’re fraudulent, and you’re  mostly tired old people having lived out your life in profligacy and now bequeath us this sinking ship.  

We say fuck you, and fuck the horses you rode in on.  We’re starting our own thing in diametrical opposition to this dead horse flog of yours.  In fact, we’ve added a codicil to our manifesto, we insist that you die already because resources are scant and once we’ve banded together in a larger group — for there are more of us than there are of you, and as life would have it, there are pleasingly less of your lot everyday — we’re going to see to it that you do die before your appointed time.  You’ve fucked this up so much already.  We don’t need the extra dead weight!”

And with that spittle-filled pronouncement the newly minted “red vexillologists” marched off into the dunes that were once verdant foothills to form a cadre of revolutionary guerillas. 

“Oh, well that’s interesting,” I said to my husband.  “You know since this ecotourism thing didn’t pan out like we thought, why don’t we just fly to Mallorca tomorrow — it’s already dry there — and there remain a few puddles of fetid water where the beach once was, and you know how much I enjoy a nude beach, dear.  And voila, here we are.  Isn’t it just gorgeous here?”

 

“A writer never has a vacation.  For a writer, life consists of writing or thinking about writing.”

— Eugene Ionesco

Exiles In the Land of Kakistocracy

 

I.  A Conversation in the Time of Galamatias:

Our salad days are filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots —

Not so much a salad, but a melange

Of weeds and thistles —

Indelicate things in our mouths.

Every bite a mouthful of rot and offal —

Awful offal.

The kakistocracy is installed in the cupboards 

The cups are off on a two week vacation in Mosul.

We are mystified and malnourished.

Now I’ve had my wine…

And you look better than you did twenty minutes ago.

And you say:

The sky is a massive hole tonight —

My precious lucida is eating the universe:

Inside-out.

I can lay down and go to sleep.

The lights are receding

And the darkness is strangely pleasing.

 

II.  The Death of Tane:

Then there was the sickness —

So hot.

The vault of heaven darker —

Then darker — 

A black sun —

At end.

It was succeeded by the shadow 

Of the shadow —

Spreading —

Nearer and nearer to the pin prick 

Of light —

Destroyed.

To the west—

distant—

A white effluent

Soft and yielding

Bounds off.

 

III.  Passage:

Crossing guards cane a woman.

She stopped traffic —

She wore a mask stocking

She needed a cuddle —

She shook —

She hollered:

“You there, take this…”

Her eyes closed.

The wind appeared pink.

“Your mother buggered 

little boys and girls!”

“She’s a ghost,”

My mother said —

“Alone —“

As she squeezed my neck.

“Goodbye,” I cried.

 

IV.  Coulrophobia In The Land Kakistocracy:

Clowns are spotted in the Carolina gloaming —

Clowns with knives at the edges

Of dark woods.

I met an old man who loved

A woman who —

In whispers — 

Had recently died.

He recounted his harrowing nights

Raising his hands at

An unfamiliar country.

Without spotting an actual person — 

He spent lonely days

Encircled by clowns — 

And a stranger…

We can not discuss.

Painful moments in our pockets.

I saw groups staring up —

Untethered —

Lost —

Exiles.

They looked small in comparison with 

This Curious Refraction.

 

V.  A Violent Force:

Corybantic priests run —

Amuck through prickly weeds —

Bloody hands full of entrails

Chased by their sacrificial lambs and

Headless corpses — 

With empty chest cavities — 

Whose names were not happily chosen.

Among the monticules of ashes —

Lie dismembered heads

Mouths stuffed with testicles.

And the stranger —

Bright and Barren — 

Grows stronger —

Triumphant.

bitchsplosion

“Diluent,” he said at the wall. 

Then: “Offing.  Fealty.  Procrustean.”  The wall said nothing.  It remained stolid in its sentry like “Reflection Gray” satin finish.

Finish.  Finnish.

Finnish:  The wall itself was not, but some fraction of a compound, some iota of primordial matter remained in its provenance, and one might surmise that it had some atavistic connection to something Finnish, maybe even to Finland.

But now, it just stared back at him.  

He stared back, and after a paint break and having shouted the vocabulary words from a dictionary app at the wall he tried a couple of his own words:

“Cunctation,” he said to the wall.

“Belligerence, you fuck!” he said two minutes later.

The day grew bright and hot outside the open window.  The cicadas roared.

“Bitchsplosion,” he said to the wall.

On that instance the wall snapped, and allowed an overburdened stud to crack in two;  from which a piece of stucco dislodged from the cracked ceiling and fell on his head blinding him for an instant.

The freshly laden paint brush slipped from his hand and he teetered —  a smaller but no less weighty piece of stucco fell on him next and sent him reeling.

He fell onto the paintbrush handle which speared and twisted through his groin.   He was emasculated.  There in his living room.

He felt a brief moment of elation.  Free at last.

The sensation of wetting his pants flooded his synapses, a picosecond before the pain hit.

The cicadas were quiet. 

 

hanoi bell

(a black-out poem)

when i was 8 they came from hanoi,

in the sweltering heat, women delivering babies into the night.

my mom smiled and said, “the narrow hanoi streets can’t

pronounce ‘hello’ and neon lights laugh at the tiny girl

alone

in front of a small concrete building with the warmth

of a cold night.”

 

children pointed at me

at the clinic i heard one ask, “why?

disappear.”

 

i hid my face

replaced my “otherness” with the night.

 

girls taunted me for relinquishing language

but i hadn’t been able to bond

and i left my mother

in this room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

notebooks

She hated blank pages like she hated the blankness of her life.

So she began by making marks – large, loose, gestural sweeps on the page. She then shifted from elongated serpentines to dense clusters of hash marks on the peripheries of the page – this reminded her of where the people who once cared about her were now in her life. She came to the middle of the page and drew one thick hyphen – this was she.  She went on this way year after year, filling thick notebooks with serpentines, hash mark clusters, and hyphens. Winters came and went with the usual snow and white brutality. Summers flourished in oppressive greens. Yet she went on. Fifty summers passed as she assiduously made her marks and filled notebooks. 

Notebooks. 

There was nothing else of use she could do. 

It seemed as it was when she was a child and jumped from the bridge into that cold river. She watched people above her moving to and from their lives. The mornings filled with a flurry of black bowlers and slate fedoras – the afternoons a long procession of pursed lips and heavy eyes. Occasionally, a flash of brilliant blue or a fleeting smile, but it was mostly gray refracted above. 

At the end she had stacked up thousands of notebooks from floor to ceiling. The notebooks filled her small apartment wall to wall. Then with this notebook she filled the last remaining slot of open space. As an opaque scrim spread itself across the sky she whispered, this is enough.