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North
Coming up a stairwell, I stop. A custodian, a man holding a feather duster, has also stopped at the midway landing to let two women pass. They descend to the landing, past the man and the duster, then past me, and I recall nothing of them but a single red shoe. It’s a dull thing,…
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Quite the Fourth
1 Black night sky pierced by bursting bubbles of color. Brilliance rains down on the back patio, singing blood-red bricks. Flames—leaping, dancing, hoping to escape—curl around the logs in the semi-lunar pit. Vigilant mothers reprimand squabbling children, “Don’t you dare put that sparkler in Claire’s mouth.” Fathers guzzle bottled beers, their cause a noble one;…
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An Interpretation of Love by Marc Chagall
He presses his wrist into my breast and wraps his hand around my neck palm and fingers enfolding my ivory veil. His eyes devour the lights from three wax candles, one burning with a viridian flame. Unaware of the wind licking his hair, cast by the open and close of angels’ wings, with white skirts…
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Snake’s Nest Debauchery
Looking back at my week out of the country, I realize that, of all the uppers and downers that passed through my body, the most effective drug I took during my spring break was the Snake’s Nest itself, a place unlike any other on the planet, or at least the parts of the planet I’ve…
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A Day in the Life of Lil’ Kim
“Got a man in Japan and a dude in Tahiti, Believe me sweety I got enough to feed the needy.” Lil’ Kim, “The Jump Off” I do have a man in Japan and a dude in Tahiti. The Tahitian natives are rather naïve and think it clever to call themselves by the general descriptor, “dude.”…
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Statuesque
Dear Mr. Eastman, I don’t speak to just anyone. That’s by choice. Most people say really really dumb things. Even when they have the chance to figure out what they’re going to say beforehand. Like on the news. Ms. Fuchsia-blazer makes mistakes reading aloud the scripted story she didn’t come even come up with herself.…
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Strange Bedfellows
The Morning After Virginia said she would make the breakfast herself. For it was a beautiful London morning in June. She kicked back the covers and looked at Cady Stanton’s luscious ass. Smelled faintly of honeysuckle. Or was that patchouli? In the kitchen, Virginia semi-consciously cooked three eggs. She felt troubled. It was not the…
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Reminiscences of Tacky Rubbish
I drove by Red Robin the other day. It sits on the corner of La Cumbre Plaza. About everything else in the mall has changed in the ten years since I last set foot in Red Robin, filling up with shi-shi boutiques to cater to the Montecito crowd. Instead of a Mrs. Field’s cookies, an…
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Two Poems
BOX You’d handed me the thing because I’d asked to read your letters, made in Romania— not that you’d been there yourself, but from an aunt, you spoke, half-crazy. And because it was a puzzle, you said: Open it. You spied my crooked digits— you, the gentler bastard —fumbling the sloped and starry curvature amalgam…
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Ted Hughes is Dead
I. Ted Hughes has died and gone to Hell. Most of the time he died as a human, Almost every time with his eyes open. The first time he died, he was a woman crawling on hands and knees, through the churning belly of a factory: with spindles, the spools, the creaking levers with copper…
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Recovery
On Allie’s fourteenth birthday, Christopher felt his hard-won sanity begin its retreat—right there at the kitchen table. It started as he watched Allie, his step-daughter, try to tell Cyndi, her mother, stories about their day at Christopher’s parents’ ranch: the picnic, the piñata, the horseback riding—their birthday traditions. Cyndi was just as absent from the…
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