today I almost saw Tracey’s smile
I mean boob
while she was sweeping the old floors
chez dupree
we talk about our Nadja
who draws surprising butterflies
how she isn’t crazy but the world is
okay, she’s a little crazy but the world is
full of places like Paris
like the 20th century
I could take photographs
when all writers were French
bumping into Nadjas at the café
with wild hair & armpits
will the squishy Americans
know what to do with her tears?

New Orleans

killed it on a Monday night in July
in the way some writers never sit down to write
& some musicians never play
she was beautiful in this way & so many others
a city that faces the people

MAGICAL BEASTS

the magical beast who lives in Wisconsin
believes in tiny practicing gods
who take shape in the frozen river, dairy cows
& leaves stuck on leaves
she preaches on birch cliffs
to river cliffs
around the echoes of hikers
who have shame for their cold tomatoes
her icy fur keeps the river warm
& the tiny gods practice their moves
in the snow

consulting

everybody’s everybody
is not your everybody
for our kind of experts
who are the kind of consults
made happy by green pens
& most everything
put into our hands
can be used again

Two Tadpoles in Iowa

please come home to the ye olde pond
said the tadpole to her tadpole lover
I want a divorce
before we redo the master bathroom
or install another fan

if we could just touch everything & have it feel good
things would be better said her tadpole lover

the tadpole felt they were no longer talking about the divorce thing
& wanted to leave Iowa
if we could just go crazy like we did when we were sane

it’s true they were lovers said the voice in the sky
it’s true that most tadpoles are stoic
but most false statements begin with the word “most”
to try & mislead the stoics

please don’t move to Colorado
said the tadpole lover
I hate to see you go

seven is seven
without the romantic crickets
at five
god & the devil
are both the same

without speaking
the world pulled me into light
when before I happened in a belly
things happen at me now, I figure
time is movement toward oceans
like a sandy baby with a spade digging for China
but when I grew I lost sand to the road
& like Hansel & Gretel
entered an oven because an older woman told me to
which only made me want to write backwards
toward the beach with sandy handfuls

summer came in boobies
unarranged in a daisy
of she loves me
like an outdoor cat
with possibilities
or free range chickens
who all go to the slaughterhouse
but first a little sunlight

Essay on Handwriting

my mother who has her very own handwriting that ties into my very own handwriting if worth a thing we are tied this way into our letters by our wrists in an ancestral orbit of one’s own making using ancient muscles like a family who rolls family sushi or a family who carves family totems or any other motion that ties a family into motion when I was small I scribbled into my hands like my mother’s wild with crayons I hugged her letters written on my kindergarten things the way her handwriting came running with the markers came running with the tissue box a sudden comfort how her handwriting warms my mailbox with letters even now warms my fridge how my mother will die into her letters how my grandmother did & for what it is worth if worth a thing children will find mysteries within our wrist bends not holy but muscular discovering similarities in our rhythms to write stories some letters meek like the e sometimes reads like an a even so most never catch all the love we make with our hands even in stories even so I type very fast now away from the old motion into a new motion away from one’s own making together into a very long story about hands

the best

floated down the river in a paperhat
folded into a diamond
folded into a triangle
then two diamonds kissing
into a boat
sent by a girl who just learned how to fold paperhats
because her father was a good man
it happened around breakfast
in the way poems get away with things
smaller than books
in the way the idea of the best
is not better than a paperhat
which is just the very best
sent by a girl who kept having birthdays
one after the next
because she was a girl wild with life
floating down the river in a paperhat
against her father’s wishes to stop time
because he was a good man
folding time around breakfast
in the way time gets away with things
smaller than a poem
into a diamond then a triangle

Mary Won’t Come Out of the Bayou for her Commitment Ceremony

you were a sudden crocodile
looking for adventure
whose kindness brought mosquitoes
to my lap

in the cattails with Jesus
your boobies are still boobies
hearts still hearts
don’t ask what I believe

those days we smelled of
cheap pancakes across America
wild with sweet tea
your prayers in a knot

Mary come out of the bayou
enough girls pretty for Jesus
you are not above
my sweet nothings

so many
tiny angles
to my ow.

a girl died in Iran today
I watched her

on the cement
father tell her
stay awake
don’t be afraid
but she was tired
of things like this.

Missed Connection: You Dance as Abby

you dance as Abby in the doorway the curtains hate to close on your evening white is the absence of Abby you were all but yellow heels about an inch tall & your glitter in another life did you dance for a mirror & not a circle of men I came for your movement every Saturday this was Saturday January 5th I sit on the left not stage left but my left the table with faces I am 44 you look younger handsome the son of a doctor but I am not a doctor not poor either miserable with black hair a little gray like Clooney with a broken nose remember my green tie & tall we are the same height I noticed I don’t usually do these things but what the hell I followed you out only white ankles New York is cold you were in front of me I was toward you I was walking in back of the yellow heels you were checking your voicemail on an old slider Hello I quivered into your black gloves holding a key unsurprised your makeup gone I think your eyes are blue New York is cold who are you? & you shiver I dance as Abby got into your car I scared you I’m sorry you drove toward main street going north in a silver ford with a license plate full of numbers you forgot your turn signal but I never got your real name? 

aux neighbor

do not think your chair is lost
i borrowed it to sit & write.
the kitchen knife too.
waiting for the postman
to bring me letters. I wanted
coffee but it got too late in the
day so I wanted a soda. the
sound opening. I watch you
post pictures of your cat
on the internet.

cricket
gummy bear

Poem by DeWitt Brinson

To MyL

My Fluless
Mot Fullness
Mellifluous

Mellon
May’s Lone
Million
Mel Lions

Might Die On This

May’s Own Mellifluous Millions
March On My Lone Mel
My Lion Fruit


Written for Mel Coyle with the utmost affection by her enamored friend DeWitt Brinson on this the 3rd week of April in the two-thousandth and ninth year.

Riding on the City of New Orleans

Anabasis

Baton Rouge, la

A few months earlier, a man on the bus shook his cock at me. I saw him behind me between the seats. There were five other men on the bus, not including the man driving and the man security guard with a gun strapped to his thigh. My girlfriend J. continued her story like there wasn’t a man jerking his cock. She had not seen him yet. I tried to focus on her story. The hand moved faster over the cock. Some story about a student and her thesis defense. “That isn’t right,” I said shaking my head. Ignore the cock. A story of ethics. I would not draw her attention to the moving faster hand over the cock. Protect her. I was doing it. The masculine thing. I would not let her see that men did this. White girls of the north girls, small girls white and with too much luggage. Protect her. The man with the cock stood up. He moved up the aisle closer to us. He took a seat inches from her, inches from me, talking about  a student and her thesis defense. No one noticed. The security guard sat behind the driver staring into a portable DVD player. A horror film. I was alert. Protect her. “Stop talking,” I demanded to J.

“What?” she said.

“Stop talking. I’m going to ask you to stand up.”

“Why?”

“We’re moving to the front. Now.” She stood up. Protect her.

I didn’t look at the man with the cock’s face. We just walked as fast as we could to the front and sat down behind the security guard who turned around and held up a DVD. “Have you seen this film?” I didn’t tell him what I saw.

 

 New Orleans, la

The cheapest way from Baton Rouge to New Orleans is the LA Swift. The bus ride costs five dollars but you get on at Florida and 22nd. Not the best neighborhood. The reader should know the writer means the neighborhood is black and the houses facing the station have crooked venetian filthy blinds.

A few months earlier, a man on the bus shook his cock at me and my girlfriend. Then girlfriend. This time I am alone. I gather my bags closely on the bus, but am relived that the bus is mostly full of women in work uniforms. One next to me is tossing sunflower seeds into her mouth. I can hear the crack of the shell through my headphones.

The driver hears it too. “Who makin’ that crackin’ back there?”

“ME,” says the cracking girl.

“Well ME better quit crackin’ or ME will be off the bus,” says the angry driver.

“You a rude ass!” the cracking woman is yelling. Your ass is rude! Ain’ he rude?” she asks me.

“Yeah, that was pretty rude.” I say. We laugh. She likes the shirt I’m wearing that has the Morton salt girl holding an umbrella. I relax.

I get off the bus and fumble with my bags at the street corner, flushed, and caught off guard by the wind gusts off the gulf, off Lake Pontchartrain. I can barely stand. The writer would like the reader to know her bags are too heavy and needs help. A big man walks up with gold teeth and asks, “Do you need help?”

“No thanks. I just have to catch my bearings.” The wind took my face. His teeth are all gold.

“Your what?” he asks.

“My bearings?” it becomes a question.

“Oh,” he says.

Conrad Albrizio painted the mural inside the New Orleans’ Union Station. Otherwise the large room with high ceilings is nothing special. Albrizio painted some murals at the university I attend, but I never really looked at them. I have three hours before the train called the City of New Orleans arrives. I really look at Albrizio’s mural. People inside the passenger terminal divide themselves at great lengths. The direction of chairs systematically divides the passengers. There are two great rows of uncomfortable plastic orange chairs and each pair of rows are facing away from the other, so that if a person sat behind me our backs would touch, and that is why no one ever chooses a seat behind another person. I assign myself a seat nine seats away from the closest person. I realize it is the man with all gold teeth who is rubbing a stick of women’s deodorant all over his body. The scent is powder fresh. I used to wear it. Now everyone is facing away from the nearest person staring into their own private space. This is common sense. I am staring at Albrizio’s mural. The slaves with heavy shovels and the Native Americans with angular faces staring with suspicion at a ship full of colonial men with straight backs. All the women are yelling with their hands on their cheeks like Munch’s “The Scream” painting. The fields turn into corn and then into slaves and then into cotton and then into factories but the faces of the people never change. The suspicions never leave. It is common sense not to look up at history. A little boy with blonde hair rolls his army tank across the tile making machine gun noises with his tongue. He is in the jungle. The little soldiers in his hand are dying. “Oh no! Get out!” the little soldiers squeak. “Quit bein’ stupid and sit in your chair,” his mother yanks him by the collar. When the little boy with blonde hair hides behind the vending machines I see him laughing. His mother panics. I let her panic for ten seconds 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 then, “Excuse me ma’am. Your boy is hiding over there.” She yanks him by the collar. She is raising a boy in the jungle, a man. The American man is forever the American boy.

I take a seat inside Subway. A few men working make me aware I have a vagina between my legs. They wink, whistle. My vagina gapes. It is so big, so gaping things start falling into it like sandwiches. Watches. Straws. The jukebox machine falls into my vagina. Neon signs. Bell peppers. The little boy with blonde hair. Receipts. An elderly woman’s electronic poker.  Plastic orange chairs. Shoelaces. Luggage. Albrizio’s mural. The man who fills the vending machine winks. Both fall into my vagina.

Hammond, la

 A gorgeous Australian backpacker sits in front of me with a light blonde beard and throws his chair into the reclining position without warning. What an asshole. What a gorgeous asshole. He immediately gets on the phone to call a buddy.

“Oh you wouldn’t believe New Orleans! Yeah, yeah man I did it all. No man, it’s not like Vegas. It’s a hot mess here mate you wouldn’t believe how much fun. I learned all about African American culture! Have you heard of Tupac? Yeah, shot in Vegas actually. A guy named Biggie Smalls. I know it’s grand!” Everybody on the train is forced to listen to the gorgeous asshole. The writer would like the reader to know everybody, means everybody black is staring.

 Hazlehurst, ms

The towns we pass have hardware stores, general stores, a barber shop and a church at the core. Someone is rocking on their wraparound with a cigarette. His hands are in his lap yesterday, tomorrow and right now he is rocking. His white linen shirt stifles his chest and the air is so heavy with moisture that only his house and porch are postponing the thick air from collapsing the roof into the kitchen where his wife fans her brow. The old man’s house is dying around him with his hands in his lap. The Southern home a tender home. The wood structure stays wet to touch. Blackgreen mold lives and crawls on the outside and it doesn’t just go away. It rots. The loud speaker would like the writer to know to leave her shoes on at all times. For her own safety.

 Jackson, ms

I text J. “I am in Jackson and can’t wait.” The reader should know the writer is pulling the reader in close to her. Always J. The reader should know the writer is distracted from love. There is a Penny Lane. I look how J. thinks I look good. Keep her from wanting me. Nobody hurts her like I do. Let J. want me. She returns my text. “No penises yet? Good sign.” The conductor is pointing at me and the gorgeous asshole. “Move your bags to the floor. We’re going to have a full train in Memphis.” The reader should know there is a Penny Lane. A poet in the beer light. She has everything she needs she’s an artist she don’t look back. A rare bird. I am too sweet for rock n’ roll. The writer would like you do know she is pulling you in too close. That she confessed. I’ll get older.

Yazoo City, mi

I am the whistle. I hear it in bed. The bark of a neighbor’s dog, sirens, students home from a kegger, loud and mean. Noises that make people lonely in their beds. A reminder. A night sigh. I am the whistle. I mean I am the passenger in the belly of the sigh. The choo-choo…

 

Newbern, tn

2:30 a.m. The conductor is yelling at the gorgeous asshole. “I asked you to move your bags three hours ago!” The gorgeous asshole mumbles something in his sleep and shifts his weighty backpacking gear. Barely. A three hundred pound woman takes her seat next to me. So large that it is impossible for our bodies not to be touching. I acknowledge her with a sleepy nod. 3:00 a.m. The gorgeous asshole is yelling. The writer would like reader to know that the conductor is black like Samuel J. Jackson and the Australian is white like Mel Gibson.

     Mel Gibson

You’re not listening to me. Just listen-

 

     Samuel L. Jackson

You don’t seem to realize I don’t have to listen to you.

 

     Mel Gibson

Why would a man wake a sleeping man? I just got comfor-

 

     Samuel L. Jackson

Cause you paid for one seat. You get one seat. The train is full. i told you that three hours ago.

 

Mel Gibson stands up, enters the aisle and tries to physically intimate Samuel J. Jackson.

 

     Samuel L. Jackson

SIR I’M GONNA ASK YOU TO SIT DOWN RIGHT NOW.

 

     Mel Gibson

Let me ask you-I just don’t get you man. There are fifteen empty seats on this train and you put someone next to me.

 

Mel Gibson points at the thin chic looking black woman in the seat next to his backpack. The full train of passengers is awake and watching the scene unfold including a horrified twenty-something white girl who was previously asleep.

 

     Samuel L. Jackson

DO YOU GET THAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO GET LEFT SOMEWHERE BETWEEN NEWBERN AND CHICAGO? CAN YOU GET THAT SIR? SEE THAT GIRL? I ASKED HER TO MOVE HER STUFF THREE HOURS AGO AND SHE MOVED IT. SEE WHY WE DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM?

 

     Mel Gibson

But-

 

     Samuel L. Jackson (cont’d)

AND LOOK AT THE ONE THAT SAT DOWN NEXT TO HER.

 

Samuel L. Jackson points at the 300lb black woman. Points out her body in the gaze of other bodies. Her thick waist is convex to the twenty-something girl’s concave. Samuel L. Jackson is forcing the train to look at her fat. The twenty-something girl is horrified at both men but too ashamed to look at the woman sitting beside her.

 

Twenty-something girl to Mel Gibson

               (simple and direct)

Sit down.

 

 

Carbondale, il

 

When I wake up everything outside my window looks like home around the unglacilated tip of Illinois. The woman is no longer next to me. The swamps have hardened into frozen cornfield patches that divide the countryside. The Midwest is wide as the sky high. From a plane the grids look like a great quilt of green, some greener, some yellow, or brown but from the train I am able to see the farmhouse guarding each quilted square and the bicycles leaning on the porch. A body just knows its home. When Mom and I took trips she always said, “It’s so beautiful.” I’d take off my headphones for her. Let her Led Zeppelin enter my earspace.            

            “Do you see it?” she asks. This is what it feels like to be old. Cornfields and Led Zeppelin. So I would pretend we were running away from our city block to start over with new names in the country. I first heard “Going to California.” I thought for sure I knew what the song was about. I won’t miss anyone.

Katabasis

 Champaign-Urbana, il

 To say goodbye is to die a little. The last of her blue hat. She is your favorite record with a scratch. You heard so many times you anticipate the skip. Here it comes. You are comforted. See that person with the suitcase is someone coming back. The faces look the same. A Grandma gets up to leave and her grandson runs after her.

            “Little Baby it’s goodbye for a little while.” He is returned to his father’s lap. The station in Champaign-Urbana is new. Nothing spooks its walls. The floor is carpet. The record skips.

 

Effingham, il

 The night train. The conductor puts the lights off to trick your body into sleeping. Usually, it takes me hours to doze but I am a child in the backseat whose safe Mother is driving listening to “Hotel California.” I am running away with Mom again. New life. New names. The writer would like the reader to know she won’t miss anyone. J. stopped kissing into me. Now I never knew her mouth. We give things up for things. One smell of the South will delete this.

 Winona, ms

 When the swamps come back that feels okay too. I immediately need coffee. I open up the foil of my poptart and see it hasn’t survived. Crumbs fall into my palm. shit. I sleepwalk to the food cart where I imagine the usual sleepy bodies swaying while they wait for the kiosk to open with cereals and coffee. Instead, I stumble into a cart full of laughing drunks. I nearly fall over.

            “Baby take a seat right here!” a young black man points across from him. I have my homework in one hand and a broken poptart in the other. For a second, I think of running back to my seat but what the hell. why not? The young man immediately snatches my homework pages. Long articles. Twenty, thirty stapled weakly pages.

            “You in school?” He flips through the pages and sees the word Harvard. “HAAAHHHHVAD,” he mouths loudly. His can of Budlight almost loses his balance. I realize these people started drinking last night and continued well into the morning. I was in the wrong part of the train.

            “Maestro” he extends his hand. We shake.

A woman at the table over orders a Jim Bean. A man leans over her wearing a knit Obama hat.

            “Baby let me get that for you. Put your money away. Baby when you gonna call me?”  The woman introduces herself as Pearly. Her teeth are covered in pearls. The man with the Obama hat is T. I tell Maestro I’m from Chicago.

            “Which parts?”

            “My parents live in Beverly.” He laughs. “Oh where the rich folks is. That’s gonna be me one day. You know what I want? Liquor, a hot wife and tons of money. And a servant that just runs my money bags around. I’ma business man.” He holds out the “z” in bizzzzzness.

 

            “I’m gonna have all this money for my wife. Cause you know, dey need money too. Not just cookin’ and cleanin. They like to do their own thing now and then.”

            “No, they just like to cook and clean,” I say but he doesn’t catch my sarcasm and finishes his beer.

            “You got any babies? Good, wait on that. You got your school.”

            “Don’t have to worry about that anytime soon,” I tell him. Our conversation catches the attention of a small town white man with a goatee. Maestro launches into a polemic against fat wives. “You gotta keep your woman thin! You can’t be takin’ an oversized woman to the club. Everyone be laughin’ at you.” Maestro asks Goatee man about his wife.

            “No problems with my wife,” he passes around his cell phone with a picture. Her cleavage is at the forefront and she’s wearing a lot of makeup.

            “Pretty,” I say.

            “Yeah, you just have to find someone you’re crazy about. Cause Maestro doesn’t know it yet. You’re gonna take your fat woman to the club anyway and love her the same.”

Maestro looks hurt, “It ain’ easy to find a wife in the south. Most girls want to go around drunk all day off their asses not working. I already got a baby mama. But when I find the one I’ma ditch all that nonsense.” I’m surprised but I don’t show it. Maestro is a father? He changes the conversation. “You visit New Orleans?”

I tell him last time I visited I got a terrible flu. “God is punishing those people,” he tells me, “They got twelve year olds on crack. The South didn’t used to be like that. I ask my sister what happen to all the farms? They sold and the real southerners gone to hickville. At least you tryin’ something with your life. And you gonna want a man who’s doin’ somethin’ wit his. You gotta have lots of babies. Many of these kids down here gettin’ kilt on their windows. Women dyin’. It’s goin bad.”

Maestro and I deal with our different versions of New Orleans. Babies dying? I tell him my degree is pretty useless anyway. He watches me write a few things down. The writer would like the reader to know she is the enemy.

 Our conversation is interrupted with the smell of burnt rubber. A man comes over on the loudspeaker to tell us we’ll be stopped for awhile. A woman from the back bursts into the food cart, “I saw it! We hit a car! The wheels blew out into the road. It’s going to be awhile…” We collectively sigh.

 

Crystal Springs, ms

 some people on the train saw the car wheels scatter from its frame like the car filled with air & blew the tires into the swamp. i felt nothing. it was like hitting a mosquito. why do I assume it’s a man? a woman gives her brains back to the buttons & knobs that hurt her. she wouldn’t do it here. but heard the conductor over the loudspeaker remain outside Crystal Springs for some time. some time. when before, thirty minutes before, a man sat in his car on the tracks with his foot on the go. & our time was coming in the train & his time was sitting in the car. & our time was coming in the train & his time was sitting in the car. his focus on the shiny parts. the shiny parts were because he ran his palm across the wheel too much. he ran his palm across the wheel. he ran his palm across the wheel again like every morning. he couldn’t make any morning now. now he would. no agency. but to sit. i will sit here & let time act on me. let the time act on me. & our time was coming in the train. & the smell of burnt rubber.

 

Hammond, la

Out my window it looks hot and swampy. I’m still wearing my winter jacket and sweatshirt. Every swamp tree sits on its own island of root. The man with the goatee tells me my route from New Orleans to Baton Rouge is about an hour out of my way. He can give me a ride from Hammond. I politely decline. A scene of me piling into the van with the large tank topped breasts and big makeup, with their two children thumbing away on their Nintendo crosses my mind. I see cold fries under the seats and greasy toys in the cup holders. It’s another thing to split the country with steel. All our bodies pout to go home. The ones carrying secret hearts between one place and another place to occupy what’s weird and stationary, so the train is a great unifying force that divides us. Throwing it all beneath the train. One smell of the South will delete this. 

little andrei codrescu

was the best dressed prince in Sibiu:
long lashes gilded trousers & wool
the strength of twelve idiot lambs.
he had more red things on than black.
at the square the prince looked up
at statues of history removed his
infant frills & placed his feet in the
public fountain where secret police
held out bitter sweets. the 20th century
was a vessel. little andrei cried.
pigeons acted out.

Werm

At the peak of the Chicago summer, the memory of my parents feels young, both in their early thirties had a youthful reluctance to turning on the air conditioning wall unit and so the four of us suffered in the upwards ninety degree heat. My father just painted our front door red and the new shade took in the sun. I complained the new door was hotter to touch, though I cannot remember what color it was before. Maybe brown. 

My parents were always advising me to play in traffic, especially if I hung around the house too much. My mother would have long conversations on the phone with her girlfriends, and would tap the phone cord against the kitchen table she sat in while she drank iced tea, laughing the laugh she reserved for her friends, sometimes painting her nails or drawing little faces on the catalogue people. Looking up from her business she would notice I was watching her and snap, “What are you doing inside? Go play in traffic. It’s gorgeous outside.”

She was probably right. I decided to organize a picnic in the backyard. “I’ll call you outside when it’s all ready Mom,” I told her as a I happily gathered random materials: shoelaces, water bottles, my favorite books, walkie-talkies. “Are you going to bring all that stuff back inside? Last time you left the ketchup out there were had to throw it out.”

With all intent to do right, I gathered the picnic over several trips up and down the steps of our octagon bungalow. “Don’t be too long,” she reminded. I took this to mean we had errands to run, but I cannot remember exactly what, only that within the hour my Mother would hang up the phone and try to drag me out of the sunshine and into the frontseat.

I started with the packet of fruit snacks and finished with the juice box turned warm. I felt remotely annoyed with the heat, but knowing the inside of the house would offer little relief I grabbed a walkie-talkie and a stick and marched up and down the gangway. The strange etymology of this word, meaning the narrow alley between two houses, would not strike me as strange until I moved to the suburbs (1).

During my stick march, I looked down and saw a fat earthworm running its head along the pavement cracks, instinctually trying to reenter the cool habitat beneath the heated world of humans. Kneeling close to the specimen, I compared its skin to my own finger. A pinkish textured worm with a system of lines specific to the individual thing. In kindergarten we held up our hands to our neighbor’s and saw God made us all special and different. I mimicked the motion of the worm against the sun filtering between the houses but my bones broke the wiggle pattern of movement. It occurred to me that God was capable of mistakes, even cutting corners, and it was entirely possible God slipped worms over our bones to make fingers. That would explain why I was almost, but not quite able to do the worm with my own hand. But did God make mistakes? I had so many questions for my first grade teacher, but it being summer and not knowing yet who she may be (she because men didn’t teach at the Catholic elementary school level) I had to save these questions for later. Worried I might forget, I ran inside to grab my notebook and crayons. First, I would draw the worm, then I would write the question as a caption below. I drew a large ship, and Noah in robes at the front calling a set of earthworms forward with his own worm fingers. Unable to write the sentence, I just wrote “werm” and decided this drawing would serve as a reminder to ask the question.

Each time the earthworm would get close to reentering the grass, I would pick it up and return it to the middle of the sidewalk, like training a puppy. The combination of heat and oil from my fingers caused the worm to lose moisture and random bits of gravel and dirt collected in the prints of skin. Worried the bits might tear its delicate outsides, I filled a toy from the sandbox with water and poured it onto the worm’s dried body. It swam in the gutter of the sidewalk.

What I knew about worms then, is what I know about worms now and although I have never bothered to confirm this knowledge, everyone knows that cutting a worm in half would not kill it, but create two worms. If I had two worms, they could make baby worms (2).

At once, I decided I wanted two worms and that I would give one to my brother when he got home. God should ask all humans to find a worm, cut it in half and create two worms. Children make creation of all worms possible I decided. Without children worms stay in one piece and cannot continue on. I lifted the worm close to my face and considered where to make the incision. Exactly in half seemed fair, even though that would delegate the fatty band, what looked anatomically important, to the upper half, leaving the lower half skinny and without. I wondered if the worm’s movements were always in conflict, the upper half headed in the soil, with the lower half headed for the sky, and that this was how the worm ended up in the middle of the pavement in the first place. My stick would create a new peace. I lifted it above my head pausing above the worm’s body on second thought to re-grip for accuracy, lowered the tip a few millimeters away from the point of incision, and struck hard. This move easily severed the worm in two. I was surprised to see it bleed red, something that seemed so human. Perfectly okay for dogs or even elephants but not worms. Blood filled the cracks in its skin like my own knuckle filler with blood after a papercut a few days earlier.

The worm’s upper half wiggled on, though partially tethered by skin to the cement where I had acted. The bottom half laid motionless. This was the first indication I screwed up. I wiped the sweat out from behind my knees and found a leaf to entice the second half back to life. With no progress, I picked up the stick and stabbed for the second time into the bottom half of the worm. A gooey white pus stuck to the tip of the stick I held up to the sun. A sudden madness came over me and below I saw the third upper half still moving, alive with a little dried blood caked on its wound like the cuts my brother got in the corner of his mouth. What I thought to be its head, poked upward like a puppet controlled by the paralyzed half of its body pinned to the cement. With this I stabbed again. I drove the stick directly into its fatty band whose pus ran yellow like baby chicks out of the pouch, not white. That was where the worm babies lived. I rubbed its guts into the sidewalk and kicked the rest of the worm bits into the grass where it had been inching its way all along. I would not give my brother a worm when he got home. I thought of a story my Dad told us frequently before bed. The one where he and a group of his friends were aiming rocks at a baby bunny. None of the boys were a good enough shot, but eventually my Dad’s rock hit the bunny in the head and it died right there. He told me he felt terrible but all his friends congratulated him on killing the baby bunny. He told me to be kind to animals. I threw the stick in my neighbor’s yard and ran inside.

My mother was still on the phone. The cord wrapped around her fingers, tapping the table where she was scribbling faces. I snuck past her into my bedroom. “Did you clean up everything outside?”
“Yes!” I shouted as I shoved everything under my bed. I bet my Mom never killed a thing in her life. She wouldn’t understand why I did it. I took out the worm drawing and crumpled it up. Why couldn’t I be eight? Then I could go to confession and God would forgive me. I took my cross off its nail on the wall and slid it in my drawer. I knew there must be millions of worms and one death would not matter, and I even probably ran over some on accident when riding my bike or just walking without looking down but I knew this was different. I remembered Moses and the Ten Commandments. Had I killed? I got out my children’s Bible and tried to find a picture of what hell looked like when my Mom burst into the room. “What are you doing reading that?” I slammed it shut and followed her out to the van where I sat in silence.

By dinner, I had almost forgotten about the worm until my Mom put a plate of spaghetti in front of me. “Do you want me to cut it up for you?”
“No!” I was quick to say and went for the garlic bread.

I cannot remember exactly how I forgave myself for what I had done, but I do remember having a section in my nightly prayers dedicated to the all the happy worms in the world. A few years later, I caught some of the neighborhood boys frying a worm with a magnifying glass and I begged them to stop until I cried. “Boys will do that,” my babysitter told me, but I knew it had nothing to do with being boys. Either they would figure it out, or they wouldn’t.

(1). As it happens, the word gangway comes from the Old English gangwe (C1000) and predates the word gangster to mean a gang of criminals (1896). This fact surprised me since as child I assumed the gangway was the preferred passage for criminals who intended to rob us. When my bike was stolen I was sure it was because the gangway allowed the burglars access to an infrastructure beyond the uses of citizens who meant well.

(2). I would not learn that worms were capable of reproducing solo until I turned eight.

let the faucet drip
let the faucet drip

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little walt whitman

loved to have his picture taken outside Jersey.
he felt no truer sense of potpourri with the
back & forth motion of sunshine & his
mother’s wind chimes blowing in the porch.
when she slipped on the green dress walt
ran at the zipper. could he keep her safe from
alone? in a sunny room with an open fire
he felt tame wondering about origins &
what the birds see.

the corn took photographs we drove

my little desire flowers on your head

a sculpture park in skokie we looked

good told you some poems fill the

drawer just for you not like gifts 

like pinky swears birthday candles 

fountain coins counting past the 

cemetery piñatas white summer 

berries tan around your ankles we 

stuck our hands out the frontseat

you were twentytwentyonetwentytwo

with me

most poems are really just
two lines

AWP

The couple distracted everyone at the reading
The constant he’s so she’s so

        He the cinnabon
        She the fruit cup

On the outside
the serious ears of poesy

        He the translation
        She the mother tongue

whose heads metric bobbed
& gave righteous sighs
to say the poetry was great!
Chicago! is great!

On the inside bobbed
logistically to the couples’ bed

        He the gourd
        She the kumquat

envious to how this husband
sees this wife in the way
only a husband can see
a wife’s quotidian
with no bra folding the laundry
on the computer, reading
so there is no God
but for this man

        He the sunken anvil
        She the water chestnut

so all that me or any other
could only utter: I thought
the two of them did a great job
up there on stage together

GAY ANIMALS SHAPES POEM

I write about a bird and it’s a gay bird.
-Brian Teare

Hey check out that gay bird over there that’s a really gay bird Look at its gay feathers on its gay gay breast I’d like to see that gay bird naked with its gay naked beak Hey check out that gay dog licking with its gay tongue I want to touch it. Hey check out that gay tiger writing with its gay tiger paw that’s one gay paw look at its gay fag paw Hey look at that gay elephant over there with its gay gay hooves wow that’s one gay elephant I’d like to squeeze that gay elephant’s gay into a double gay Wow check out that gay hippo that’s one homo of a hippo I want to ride it into the sunshine with a megaphone Hey check out that gay Camel it’s so butch I want to take it to a field and throw softballs back and forth that Camel’s so g-a-y you ever see a camel so gay and the cacti and the Saudis and the prickly pears and the sand plateaus have a desertload of gay camel humps I want to take it out back and shave that gay camel bald Hey check out that gay jungle its gotten really gay lately I want to squeeze my gay ass all over that gay jungle’s gay and make a really really gay gay gay gay gay gay zoo!

Switch

The woman who lives here killed her baby in her stomach so the courts ruled it didn’t count. I’m not sure she doesn’t have knives for fingers. People crowd around the countertops with jokes and dipping hands for the salsa and chips and I can see your white teeth smiling in the dark. We can attach meaning to color and fish. From certain angles, I’m tying a shoelace, but from mine, I’m knelt in curiosity over the beacon of sunlight tunneling through my knee. The cap is missing, blown out, rolling along the pantry wall. House guests occasionally knock the hunky cartilage against the door. The hole in my knee is real. I stick my hand through it and show your white teeth. See? 

It’s my flashlight knee. Someone lost all the doors at the cabin so we can’t find a place to be naked. The people crowded in the kitchen over salsa don’t mind that nothing’s private at the lake. And nothing’s private at the lake. We can attach meaning to water and frogs. Following you around with this light is tired but I love your white summer berries, holes in my socks and tan around your ankles. Have you read a dream before? you ask, but I don’t understand. Not really. Children move the grass for our bodies.

Everything’s ajar. The woman didn’t kill her baby anymore so we understand the party. Now the baby’s turning one and the mother’s pulling presents out her belly. She sings for her baby.

“From zero until twenty-one your body is growing tissue by tissue. You will enjoy so many summers at the lake, build sandcastles and hold your breath under water for a very long time, eat sprinkle cones, ride your bicycle, try cigarettes in the alley and have disguises. Soon you will be covered in hair, going along by the pull of your senses. One day baby, something will happen as it happened to me and everyone you know but you won’t notice. The ON switch inside you, will turn OFF. When you’ve just sipped a beer, entered a street from the pavement, hung up the telephone, kissed someone you love, avoided an accident, or in your very dear bed in your very dear dream it will happen to you baby. From that instance of switch, you begin dying until you are dead.”

The cellar is cool and we found the last privacy. I’m sorry I couldn’t provide and you’re mad again. I’m sorry you have so many things left to fix and need advice on cameras, I couldn’t provide and you’re mad again. We can attach meaning to roses and legs. We liked the feeling of talking crowds outside knowing our end. The identical nightstands, with identical buttons, with identical teapots. It hurts because a year ago we were skipping class, reading at the fountain and occupying moments in each other’s minds.

We can attach meaning to crickets and skin. Truth but no logic. Following you around with this light is tired but I love you in the morning, deer in the fields and our humid sheets. I’m the moon in the sky. My sinuses cave, my ear drums collapse and I suffocate out there. The knee cap drifts by in absence made of tiny stars. After two minutes, I’m dying. Water evaporates off my lip into Jesus. A poet holds my hand but I’m ugly. So do something beautiful the angel says. Protect everyone. I remember listening to Istanbul. Death is private but if you call so many people it becomes joy.

     toast the ocean     margarine spirits
     adorable waves & your curfew
     sneezing     adopt me
     pardon age      lips on your neck
     after school