Article

Poem

The door slams. The corpse sits up. The dog says, “Don’t look at me.” They have planned this in Hollywood. They have planned your elopment with the boy with silver cufflinks. They have planned his mother’s anger, the snobbishness caught in her teeth, gooey as a night of bile. When you unbutton your blouse —…

Solar Plexus

The word was somber. What it might have meant, its origin and weight, uncertain under shade as the dark face below the ratified sombrero. Eyes it gave the lie to overshadowed where sun wheels higher than missing trees. The hoopoo’s lim downcurving bill complements the Old World crest, flamboyant color in the unitary sun. Signs…

The Only Go-Go Girl in Las Vegas

(for Lynn Sukenick)      She is the      only      go-go girl      in Las Vegas with a      white BMW      with a      chartreuse mohair bathrobe      with      dayglo pasties and      monogrammed underwear      She is the only go-go      girl in Las Vegas      with      an emerald-green Ferrari      with tulips in her fishtank      Dunhill in her humidor      onions in her glove compartment      She…

Dry Falls

No water drops over the lashed edge to ease the dry socket. The pale-veined year dies slower than a nerve, will not congeal. Each morning its lid thickens a hairbreadth, locks go limp as house plants, the tenants disappear indoors. Through film curtains they watch the ice cap creep down where a thin creek turns…

Slot People

You may wonder why there are so few of us. It could probably be explained from the point of view of evolution regarding us as either freak mutations or freak adaptations. Besides it always seems to be a terrible life squalid or obsessive or sterile. Full of evasions of some reallife marriages. Marriages seldom occur…

Harpoons

The first time Jack had to hunt a whale he went about it all wrong. He'd never thought about it much, so his confusion came as no surprise when he woke up one morning with harpoons in his lashes. After he'd picked them all out he decided to walk down to the wharves and talk…

Reviewing Three Portraits

Two clocks out of synch watch faces of night drift by. One face, a lacquered saint, dredged up from a trunk, wrapped in virgin wool, black robes of justice trapped in the vault of a bank. An 18-karat guarantee of stainless steel and peerless dentistry, though you’d have to pry the mouth open to discover…

Inflamation

Bang! 1917 & a Victorian Milan. That bang was the Garcia Crespo works gone up from munitions, 400 women, their long hair gone, have gone up with 150,000 rounds. Vickers guns emplanted on the line stayed quiet for two days near Trieste. A company of Yugoslavs convinced themselves that peace had come, threw down their…