Our February Shout Out

simply must go to the Silver Jews. My asthma and fear of close walls and underground things almost kept me from the cavern where they played their last show. If you listen closely to the tape, the baby crying is me.

Locust taxes

Love Letter from a Sunny Place

Dylan Thomas rakes his yard and

fashions a breast out of brown leaves.

Brown is an accurate shade of his mother’s

tit after she nursed for him for three years.

He swears there is a collection of teeth there in the leaves

grown after his infancy bribe to eat the good earth

all day, to give innocence back to

whoever mistakenly gave him the

vowels of their body. To eat meat straight

from the ribs is good, he thinks, and will win

him his place in hell. He sold his mother

to God and angels everywhere.

For the promise of a big steak, he pursed his lips

and sucked the white, dovish wings out of the sky

and said, here is something in return, I think.

I’ve had the face a baby my whole life,

which is too long. Savor these bright cheeks

and pug nose for your holiday things. I’ll stick my

lips in the punch bowl, right in.

Dylan is digging in the cold again

and doesn’t know why. To be the bones

of a rabid dog who, in turn, bit his owner

would be great, finally done with panting,

howling at wood smoke, burying hope and music and weather

with other things not meant for the animal world.

Bargaining is a funny death, he reckons,

if death means romancing oneself in a Motel 6,

somewhere warm and sunny like Arizona,

beating the thin wall a few times before

a voice answers back:

There’s a fierce dog tugging your trousers, dear Dylan.

Goodness darling! the holes in your brain must be as big as fists.

First Birthday, A Happy Day

I wrote this poem. It's about a salamander I saw on my birthday, the day I took shape. I ran out of steam, though. I ended on a part of speech I don't know the name for.

HaPpY DaY!

The octopus might swim like a woman
but under the waves he tells stories only a man could.

Dangers are skies, the sirens tell us everything
we need to know. It is to fabricate a beneficent God
to explain geological movements, a carousel
in the city park, encased now in molten glass,
all the horses blowing sulfurous.
As if to say: this is not a joke. Get real, give me a nickel
for memory, for memory becomes feral in the rain,
soaked to the loam, where our ancestors
are telling guttural jokes about the lateness of the day.

A salamander on the trail this afternoon, all orange
as Halloween dipped in kerosene.
Does he breathe to the same God
that we do? Jacob Boehme passed out under
The linden trees, muttering a new poetry
Of

Photo Booth

I took this photo of myself today. In a photo booth downtown in an all-night diner. It cost me ten dollars, an absurd amount. Some woman stole an entire set of my photos. I'm feeling frazzled today. My bra doesn't fit.

My bra doesn't fit.

That lady thief had a baby with her. I couldn't stand the look of them. The baby was unadvanced. It kept chewing on the chairs. After all, I had found a pubic hair in my hummus in this same room, several years before, when I was eating there. I used to smoke then.

I want to give a shout out to that horrible gossip, we'll call him "Jason," whose pubic hair I found in my hummus.

The Cruel Puppet Begins His Childhood

I hardly remembered about my mother or my father, though they let me splash splash terribly in the bathtub. I owed them a remembrance for that at least. My shout out went according to the usual formulas and left me hoarse and hairless. It got me to shouting all of the time. I caught my reflection in a subway window and knew I wouldn't let myself get away with nothing no more. I twisted my features into unflattering poses I saw on my morning commute.

I was cruel, after all.