Sundays Are Half Circles
It’s been a lucky streak so far.
When the pear tree doesn’t stink with soft petals
The cul-de-sac shivers and leaves rake the concrete.
I’m bound to slip in the bowling lane
And break my pretty jar.
I wonder what would happen if I put my toe under the tire.
I still scribble scrabble my signature
But no one questions it anymore.
Even though I intended to buy the blue poodle lamp
The money sits in my sweater
And a colorful grim is watching me nap.
If it goes as sour as I think it should
I could still recite manifestos from bathroom stalls
Or get lucky and wake up drooling on a my mother’s couch
Oranges and leather used to be a lot stickier
And daytime drowsier.
Maybe I didn’t know how to wipe my mouth.
I had a dream I painted my nails nude, we missed the party
But I showed you the mirrored bathroom with emerald carpet.
Glass tables and small steps lead to an elevated living room.
There is a hologram of Bing Crosby
He’s singing just for us.
I know one day I’ll own a car much to large to handle,
My feet wont reach its insides and we will slingshot to our death.
God,
What a beautiful mansion.
Algae
The man guarding the entrance mops the blue hallway. Florescent panels above him highlight a moth spinning from the ceiling. I follow its life in spirals down to its peace. Wings like ancient parchment on laminate floors. He steps over it. He’s half asleep and never looks up as he slowly paints all above ground, and erases it every night.
The gentle man flattens the shards of to-do lists left in my mind, into the clear pond the church turtle lived in. Mother Mary looks quite strange with a fountain spouting from her head. Without effort his mop glides her down into abandoned elementary school floors
and department stores that only sell old machines
whose hum is almost human.
I’ve been to the tunnels below us. They’re hot as hell and filled with thousands of books I can not read.
But I loaded them into my arms and brought them above. In the warehouse industrial iron racks reach the ceiling and are stuffed with old blankets. They all smell like home.
I made myself stop growing so I could live closer to the ground. My mother had an extra tooth she moved day by day to the front of her mouth with a popsicle stick. Life always seemed moldable. But when I, dressed in all black, made something move, I stopped.
Pine straw markets with wooden Halloween signs and pumpkins that could be large moist homes have turned into Chipotles. Maybe now that I can no longer find the pond, I’ll try again. I’ll stand on the iron bars and call out to the algae, evoking angry waves that will perhaps drown our city into a green, decayed, but sparkling castle, for some lonely sea diver to explore.
Science Is A Feeling
Out of the birthing canal, and into this total distraction.
Radiant energy seems to have a double nature.
But in the privacy of your love, I adore being made of wire.
It’s not hurting so much anymore, just curious to touch.
I am a city of habits,
A crystal skyline of abstraction.
The nowhere boys have come to stay.
In the bathtub of the sky it is overcast all the time.
We decided the projection artists must have woken up still drunk and said,
“Fuck it, just hang the blue one up today.”
To Speak Of Angels In Plain Language
A crab on your head is playing with your bleached orange hair like a nest of spaghetti.
If you sincerely told me something so simple,
1. You like the sun and the way a 99 cent store ball floats on a pool’s surface.
2. The old stationary aisle at the pharmacy was baby you’s small Shangri-La as your mother picked
up meds.
I would enjoy every minute of it.
My mind wouldn’t wander to some back desert highway cubicle.
Our sliver of waking day takes shape as my eyes eclipse like a toy doll.
Who knew you could fit so soft into yourself?
Images
An old jug of orange juice bounces on a concrete floor
Even the gnats do not find it sweet anymore.
The fish eye flaked like a scab beneath my fingernail.
They shout over margaritas at the old man in an all brown suit walking along the booths, he turns but doesn’t understand their snickering.
You speak to me like light curves on the belly of a white vase.
There is a wall filled with calendars. Each day is crossed off with the same /.
A man in a cowboy hat and wheelchair is staring out his window,
I cannot tell if he is looking down at the street or if he is asleep.
I make the driver pass by again.
A plastic pink shovel handle bends on the beach as its strength turns to white.
Antonio shakes and his hands are soft, but in crooked pictures to the ceiling he’s smiling with Michael J Foxx, and stars I don’t know under a gradient of moustache colors and sizes.
I run outside to find the man with roses. I force my boyfriend to buy me a healthy one and the man touches my shoulder.
Maze
Every mind is a different maze,
made of the grocery store aisles you followed your mom through,
and the hallways of your bulldozed elementary school.
You are constructed from the angles in the stairwell of your old house, and the smell of its wooden rails she told you to hold on to.
Excavation
I looked inside a boy’s mouth once.
He pulled his jaw long to the ends of his locks.
Wide open, pink flesh revealed to me,
Four extra horseshoe sets of teeth.
My face warmed from the broken breath of brilliant,
“Don’t tell,” pleas.
I paused.
“I promise.”
I wouldn’t let anyone know of the wisdoms I’d found.
But with my head inside his he must have misheard me,
Maybe my voice didn’t travel well through the cavern air, or
Cracked in between his cavities.
My warm tongue on his translated as a fear,
That went straight to his stomach,
As he chomped down on my neck,
And swallowed me half.
I think it would be good for everybody to go into creeks barefoot.
I’ve been coming to thinking lots.
There is a lot to be sad about once you think about it. One time I told a friend that she was just mad because she was actually sad, and she said she had never thought of that before. I don’t know how I knew it, but I felt kind of genius about it after. My mom is sad because her mom died, and bugs are sad because summer heat only lasts so long and sometimes I’m sad because I know everything is so beautiful and how am I supposed to keep it? I picked a bunch of ladybugs and put them in my disco ball necklace that pops open and closed. I opened it in class and they flew everywhere. It was so fun but I can’t remember if it was real or a dream. I saw Michael Jackson on TV, he was in the court and he seemed real nice but nobody was listening to him. He was born the same day as my mom, and all of us were born on the same number. I believe him though. Sometimes people say mean things to other people, and treat them real bad because they forget everybody is just like a summer bug. Sometimes people get real sad about themselves because they feel like they are the only summer bugs around. I know for a fact about summer bugs because I was born in the late of June. I tell Jasper every sadness and happiness I have. Right in his ear, I pick up the flap and whisper long so all my words travel direct to his brain. He rolls them over in there and he stays quiet but I can tell in his eyes that he’s about to cry because he thinks so too. But instead of saying you’re right, I’m very sad too he says don’t worry, let’s go on a walk. And I put on his collar and I try to focus on the hot pavement that goes on all the way down my hill to my neighbor’s house who has a nail in her room with her dead dog’s collar hooked onto it. I know whenever I feel like my eyes get real small and together that it’s because I know something true. At night before I go to bed I close my eyes and pictures come into my head. I think of dirt and bright reds and gold whirls of dark Indian people who dance pretty with their hands and live far across the ocean. I think about houses in trees covered completely by leaves and flying and Peter Pan and how I never want to grow up. My grandma told me everything is connected. I think about people I’ve seen going around in wheel chairs by themselves. I saw one once sitting yellow at Denny’s and I told myself I got to stop being so sad. I remember I looked at the red crayon in front of me and tried hard not to cry and then I got mad because I had to put on a jacket with a zipper. And I hate zippers. I hate them so much. But I can’t cry anymore. So maybe I’ll just be mad at those zippers, at zippers and seams and turtlenecks. One time when everybody was walking home from school I saw a boy named Roberto who is in the special class just staring at a tree. I walked up to him closer and closer and I thought why is he just starting at that tree. I squinted my eyes and got up behind him finally and I saw why he was staring. There was a baby bird dead on the ground. I stopped for a second but walked away without saying anything to him. I looked back and he was still staring at that broken up bird. I thought about him the whole way home. I thought maybe I should have touched him on the back or told him we should go on a walk. But he seemed so focused, just staring at it. I thought maybe he was really understanding it, and even though it is a sad thing to understand, it is true, and he was real smart and real special in a good way for staring at it while everyone else just was running home to watch Figure It Out. Then I thought about how he was really looking at that dead bird, and really thinking about it, and I was really looking at him, really thinking about him, and I wonder if God was looking at me looking at him looking at that dead bird and thinking that we were really getting it. I got lots of friends at school, I hope we can all stay in the same class forever.
David
David smells like old teddy bears and sunflowers dried in the sun for too long. I replay the night he climbed on top of me after modeling the clothes I bought at Goodwill. He wore a yellow checkered button up with a white mother goose on the bottom left pocket, and two deflated parachutes at the chest that maybe months ago held some old woman’s breasts. It was midnight and the rooster across the street yelled. “You’ve got a backwards rooster.” “I’ve got a backwards rooster.” I tried not to kiss him, but when he smiled at me, he often smiled in a way that seemed to squeeze a tear out of his kind eyes. He was a man who often got frustrated at things like the dishes and freeze-on and his every day, ever more dilapidated life, but who could look out to the desert and turn golden. He lived in a drug house, as my mother called it, because one guy sold weed, and another guy was in a band, and people were always coming and going smoking weed and buying weed and drinking Tecate and whatever. We used to say you could just sit on the couch and the sitcom would begin, in and out of the iron door, being quite sure to not let the cat out. It was an entire world I just happened upon, the kinds of situation I suppose life is really made out of, connected by nothing more than chance, just a wispy cotton thread to swing from, swirling high above the laws of physics, or gravity, or my college degree, or whatever.