The Suicide Smell of Lemon Rinds

09.09.00
12.19.03

[ ]

Smelled like lemon rinds and baby powder, the
nape of her neck who was never my lover the last
time I heard her say “it’s supposed to rain tommorow.
I lost 6 pounds this week. I’m going to kill
myself if this keeps up,” which was nothing unfamiliar,
some days she ended almsot every sentance with suicide
—“the girl two cubicles down got flowers
again; I hate my life” the day sleeping
pills and vitamins were 2 for 1 at the A&P
and she got 4 of each. And a bottle of tequila
and a pack of the cigarettes I quit
smoking 7 years and 9 months ago and grinned
all through the checkout while I bought frozen
lasagna and a toothbrush
wondering if I was supposed to stay
after dinner.
flipping through the headlines on a Sunday
morning and there’s another body, female, young
which was surprising since everyone he’d killed or helped
so far was my grandmother’s age where it’s just
accepting the inevitable but this one was young and
unidentified and female, young (my age) and unidentified
and female and all I could think was
“I bet it’s her” and instantly had to know
like somehow if it was her everything would be okay and I
was already wondering what to wear to the funeral
before I started crying and realized I had no idea
and there was no Lesbian Lost and Found I could
call to say, I lost my lover, but I think she
might have turned up last week in Flynt, Michigan,
or there’s a body there anyways and could someone
please check and see if it washers. Of course
I’ve never met her parents so I start placing calls
to friends of friends and waiting for someone to
pick up the phone all I’m thinking is
what if she was my one. What if she was my one—
we've broke and re-broken up so many times I can't
believe I wasn’t going to run into her and the
latest fling.

Bit Parts

02.13.00
12.15.03

Bit Parts

Do you know what it’s like;
those days when you can feel the house
crumble in around you
tv and cats whining
smoke and flies in 60 watt air
Sunday classifieds
overfed commercials
sleeping pills to Monday
work to Saturday
cigarettes to night
neon clubbing
memories
of DJ dance spun
wet lipped girls
hot handed lurid
boys
nights to live for
through
sex to remember
great fucks to reconstruct
through long lemonadeless
afternoons
and all I’m thinking is
lipstick teeth?
lighter?
smokemouth?
laced?
Ride home
music crank to sop up ear space
armspace
empty car space
sunrise entertainment
somebody turn on the tv
wake me up if we’re on

Violence: The Smell of Subways and Sweat

When you’re a child, or at least when I was, words have very little meaning until you figure them out for yourself. I did not have a concept of violence as something that affected me directly; it was something my parents talked to each other about in concerned grown-up voices. Violence was something random, that was my immediate understanding. It was something that happened to other people, usually bad people. It was something that could not be explained or anticipated and it often involved guns. Most importantly, it was something foreign that we had to be protected against. It sounded unpleasant, if vaguely interesting, and it was obviously something children weren’t supposed to know about because they always changed the subject when they caught me listening.

In Dayton, Ohio, in the 1980’s, violence was a way of describing events that took place outside of the familiar context. My family lived in one of those neighborhoods people refer to while speaking longingly of traditional family values. Everyone knew everyone else; we played in each other’s sprinklers, borrowed countless cups of sugar, and held block parties every summer. Violence was a strictly external phenomenon; it had nothing to do with the crack heads on the corner, the rapist two doors down across the street, or the residual smell of fear in my parent’s house. We all went to school with bruises sometimes, that was normal. Violence is by definition pathological; therefore it did not describe us.
All through elementary school I got my ass kicked regularly on the playground. I can vividly remember the sudden nausea that accompanies a hard punch in the stomach, the breathlessness. That did not count as violence because there were perfectly normal reasons for it, a familiar context. Boys will be boys. You know how kids are.

School violence, or at least our awareness of it has increased geometrically over the last decade, and with that has come a drastic change in our cultural perspective. Currently schoolyard fights are viewed as pathological and considered grounds for expulsion, when I was little they were perfectly normal, and the worst consequence was being made to hold hands with the person you’d been fighting with. This is important because it demonstrates how subjective the process of labeling any particuliar event as violent can be. I have many memories that seem ordinary, if somewhat unpleasant, to me, but could be labeled as violent by other people.
My sister and I were not affected by the violence on demand phenomenon of pop culture because we were never exposed to it. We didn’t have cable, rarely saw movies, and the closest thing we had to video games was something that vaguely resembled Pong. My parents also monitored what we did see or read fairly closely. The closest thing I have to a memory of mass-media violence is watching cartoons in the half-asleep early morning time before school. I vividly remember my baby sister curled on the granola-textured couch, watching Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner blow each other up while my mom brushed her sleep-snarled hair.
I did come across violence in the printed media, from time to time. We went on one of many miserable family summer vacations to Washington DC when I was eight. All I can really remember is horrible sunburn and the smell of subways and sweat. I was always bored; my dad gave me his Time magazine to look at, and to keep me quiet. It was a special issue on gun violence, featuring page after page of thumbnail prints of people’s faces, long black-and-white rows of them. It looked a lot like a yearbook, but all of the people in it were dead. Underneath each person’s picture was their name, age, and a brief description of how they had died, or rather of the circumstances surrounding their death. The focus was on handguns, so it only featured people who’d been shot. This confirmed my early supposition that violence was something that always involved guns. I was fascinated by this magazine, but didn’t feel any connection to it. I could not emotionally grasp the relationship between those pages of grainy images and real people.

Reading that magazine was like seeing the Vietnam Memorial; I could run my fingers over the names, I knew that each name represented someone who used to be alive and was now dead, and I knew that this was important, but I didn’t understand just how. The people I knew did not fight in wars, or at least did not talk about it. Dayton was too small for gangs and most people couldn’t afford to buy a gun. There was nothing to suggest to me that violence wasn’t in some way restricted to distant, exotic locales like Manhattan or Vietnam.
All of this has left me with a very limited understanding of what violence is. Like the adults I used to eavesdrop on, I still tend to view violence as something that exists outside of normal, everyday life. I am much more quick to identify as violence crimes which I perceive to be unusual, like terrorism, rather than things which are also hurtful but, unfortunately, not uncommon, like domestic abuse. Certainly I have not been exposed to enough images of violence to have become desensitized to it, but as one of my peers pointed out, perhaps I gew up so sorrounded by violence that I never really noticed its presence. A sort of cultural inability to see the forrest for the trees. Although I understand now that violence is generally defined as anything that involves physically harming another person or piece of property, my personal definition is still somewhat confused. Even as an adult I am still searching for a way to understand how I am affected by the violence I encounter, and trying not to fall into the trap of defining violence as something that can only happen to other people.

Do Not Unfurl

The basement is the middle of my house;
I sleep in tunnels
where midnight laundry carts are rolled
over floors so gleamy they slime,
or else in ship’s keep’s attics
jutting peripheral
to the directions of sound
every time I wake my name is new
or fetal on tearoom floors
nostrils engorged on sharpness
of urinal cakes.
The basement is the middle of my house;
I dream of sleeping.

Orphan Words

This poem was conceived in the bad-dream breadline by a woman looking to trade five wooden rosary beads and a Vernors bottle-cap for agave saltines.
This poem spent its first 15 years in a silver-chrome playpen eating stale popcorn from pre-school days.
This poem smells like lanolin and goat’s milk and vulcanized welcome mats.
This poem has 18 fingers, a hyena clit, and a universal bi-hooked tail with full ionizing capabilities and no mass.
This poem wants to monkey-arm your neck and suck your nose—
This poem wants its name stuck in your throat.

Fever-fed

on opiates, cigarettes
and macaroni cheese.
Cinder-tongued,
sleep-steeping in sheet sweat
swollen dreams—
your son is always calling my name.

Blister-lipped I
am hearing myself moving
for your arms
why does my pillow
like your girlfriend’s mouth?

Un language-locked,
in visions I am you
I dreamt
I dreamt
you came back to watch me cry.

Keeping Up with Cuntybaws

Rough Draft 6/14/01

Keeping Up with the Undead

A tall balding man with visible follicle implants and a salon tan is waiting impatiently in line in a large department store that smeels of men’s cologne, and, faintly, of leather shoes. His gym-built arms are stretched around several pairs ofCalvin Klein jeans, Polo shirts, Tommy Hilfiger shorts and a pair of disturningly skimpy designrer briefs. As the cashier rings up his purchases, he roots around in his pockets, hands bumping against a slim pack of Ginko-Bilboa Memory Gum, Energy-Mints, and a small vial of extr-strength vitamins before finally fishing out a Visa Platinum. The card, having surpassed its $5,000 limit is regretfully declined. “I’m a loyal customer,” the man protests angrily. “I’m a good consumer and I should be rewarded.”
In a book shop two stores down, customers are eagerly lining up to buy the new Anne Rice novel, the latests addistion to her vampire series. The movie-theater across the street is showing Dracula:2000 ($8 a ticket) to a huge, soda-slurping audience. Meanwhile, somewhere in Mesa a small group of believers are eagerly paying their leader dues of thousands of dollars a year in exchange for his promises of immortality. The cryogenics business is booming.
America in the 1950’s; the chaos and rationing of World War II has given way to bland, bloated suburbia, and keeping up with the Jones’s is everyone’s favorite hobby. For the first time in American history there was a large population of young people with generous allowances and purchasing power. Both advertsisng and consumption rose exponentially; malls sprung up almost overnight. It was the beginning of the age of the Great American Consumer. Not coincidentally, it was also the beginning of America’s intense fascination with vampires. “American youth culture, the demographic legacy of World War II, began to exert its economic influence during the late 1950’s. The mass media responded swiftly….Horror imagery thrived.” (Cooper 31)—Interest in vampires rose concurrently with consumerism in 1950’s. In an economy based on consumption, the vampire has become the ultimate symbol of social power.
Prior to World War II consumption was viewd as a nessesay evil. By the 1960’s was ambiguous, and consumption was a virtue, practicly a patriotic responsibility. By 1961 shopping was elevated at an art when pop artist Oldenburg unveiled his Store, “his arty version of a Mom and Pop grocery. Here, ‘customers’ can purchase such Pop items as plaster ‘pastries’ and muslin and plaster ‘clothing.’” (Vincent 97)


the huge soda-slurp began well-nigh forty years ago,when dear uncle Joan fed me a steady diet of movie-theatre audicences, whom I crunched and munched, and then slurped a soda. the balding vulture lines his suit pocket with odorous pews; symbol of another life.odour odour makes me thinks really other fortune-chests will suit my beans and grovel. as Mr. LowlyBaws catches his knickers in a knot, we see: EVOLUTION IN ACTION. lowlybaws drowns in the grate of the gutter. his keys on the other side.

meanwhile, women and minority groups continued to make significant contributions.
meanwhile, women and minority groups continued to make significant contributions.
meanwhile, minority groups continued to make significant women.
meanwhile, heterophobes continued to make minorities signficant.
women, groups of minorities continued to meanwhile make heterophobes contribute.
oil to lointaine:
HEED my words, for they ring true:
I AM CUNTYBAWS.

erant -- stream-of-ecstasy

9/6/01
8:45 pm
The first time I did ecstasy was a disaster 4 hours of nothing except extreme frustration compounded by teen hormones and october sweat or was it november I remember it was cold at night the next am at the nile and how did I get to the nile anyways was it aaron I don’t actually think it was but maybe or possibly sara though I thought I just went with her that one time with dave I did not make a particularly good impression that time I know. anyways, teen-age longing I had such a lust for jay then and now in retrospect I like that word a lot retrospect I have trouble sometimes even remembering why I liked him in the first place Scooby remembers things like that for me because he told you stories he says because he took the time to get to know you as a person but alexandria did that too didn’t she or maybe not maybe that’s why things were always so fucked up between us anyways because we just sort of fell madly in love or thought we did without ever stopping to consider each if we actually knew the other or just thought that we did.
anyways, yes the ecstasy why did I buy it it was from some guy that jay knew at least I think he did but I had the money corrine was there I think she and I really stopped hanging out after aaron it just seemed like such a weird time and also I lost a lot of faith in her judgment from how she reacted to him plus also then scooby and I moved out and the house-warming party where we segregated at becky’s and corrine and jay had sex at our house while we slept was it in the bathroom or was it at our pv apartment that they fucked on the bathroom sink maybe both I’ve lost track perhaps it wasn’t that important after all.
yes, the ecstasy…already described the pills in my journals lumps of beigish powder that reminded me in color of all those children’s tylenol I used to chew up six at a time cause I was too afraid of swallowing anything whole to take the adult pills but even then I got the moist miserable headaches. lumps of powder and maybe that’s why they didn’t affect me for so long cause I didn’t think that they would cause they looked so innocuous to me not innocent but…they were really these gritty brown speckled lumps about the size of a frozen pea and they looked like someone had just taken a pinch of wet powder and squeezed it together and let it dry that way no real shape or imprint or anything at all total bathtub shit in the days before sammy the bull and 20/20 ecstasy exposes.
the e the e the e…and we called it e then or ecstasy not x like kids do now back in my day and all but I remember it truly did confuse me the first time I heard someone refer to it as x and why is it always so important that people not mistake me for younger than I am anyways?
the drugs...i still have that book I was reading at the time….what car were we driving that night it feels vaguely important somehow that I remember it would have been scooby driving of course none of the rest of us had licenses then or anything. prospero his first car had already died, he only had ruby for about a week or so and didn’t have the trashy red car yet…must have been his dad’s van, I think, though I guess it could have been the truck. No, no I don’t I think that yes it must have been the minivan and we drove back to jay’s house tip-toeing in and I was wearing those high-heeled black boots, pointy-toed gothic fake suede I was vegetarian then and still trying vainly to repress my leather fetish and they made my arches hurt after a while sometime the ones in the shoes were so high and I was so used to wearing those shapeless sears flats all day god those were horrible shoes and the boots had a bit of black embroidery at the ankles.
I was trying to set my feet really carefully on the tile floor so as not to wake up jay’s mom or grandma but I remember the heels still clicked kind of loudly anyways cause I wasn’t terribly used to them and really my main objective was not to slip and fall and I seem to think I remember his mom coming out into the hall anyways after we scampered to his room maybe they spoke out there for a minute and she said something disapproving and told him to keep it down and I would inevitably have had to get up and use the bathroom and now I remember we took the pills with root-beer cause that was all the soda they had and the water there always tasted sort of funny it came the refrigerator tap cause they seemed to feel that there was something sort of barbaric about drinking it in a glass straight from the sink but the fridge water always tasted like freezerburn though that might have had something to do with the glasses they were huge blue glasses with a faint scum of dishwasher soap left on them and it made nearly everything taste a little odd but at least with soda the soap taste was covered up a little bit.
we swallowed it with root-beer….there must have been music playing through the room when I lay on the bed for all those hours full of joni mitchell….i remember scooby holding a lit cigarette to my mouth jay is the only person I’ve ever known who lived with his parents and smoked in his bedroom I guess it represented a kind of defeat on everyone’s part I still remember how after we were semi-officially together and I was spending the night there all the time his mom asking if I wanted to keep a comb or toothbrush in the bathroom or something and I never have been entirely sure whether she was being sarcastic or not but I was really embarrassed and it made me feel like a slut or something. but that was not for a year or so after this night, though maybe none of it would have happened at all if nor for the e….
but so scooby tried to hold a cigarette to my mouth and get me to smoke it but I could only manage one drag it was just too much effort and I could barely hold my head up anyways I was so fucked up.
and later I think someone tried to get me to drink from a glass of water maybe that was scooby again or possibly jay I have the instinctual feeling that it wasn’t corrine and actually maybe that was the night that finally killed any chance of friendship between us cause I got to stay there with jay in his room on his bed and she had to go home and maybe she thought I tried to make it come out that way on purpose cause I think she was just starting to pursue him then but maybe I am just ascribing negative feelings to her now in any event I will never know for sure.
I didn’t stay on purpose, I didn’t even know that she and scooby had left till about three hours after they’d already gone, and I asked jay where they were and he said they left and didn’t know what to do with me so left me there with him and part of me wonders why the fuck scooby left me there like that but what else could he have done cause we couldn’t have all stayed and corrine had to get home and he also had to get the car back before his family was all up and he couldn’t have taken me back to his house and I guess I should be glad that they didn’t just try to take me back and drop me at the dorm like happened with that one dj guy who died od’ing in a pma fever in a small room by himself and god what kind of hell that must be I think one of the things I am most frightened of is dying by myself especially like that so perhaps it was all for the best that they left me there with jay, and certainly it was nice for him to take care of me and let me stay like that I know I wouldn’t really have wanted someone like me there in the way like that when I was trying to come down from a trip like that. and I’m listening to no woman no cry bob marley the song that jay played for me after we were together late one night and he sat on the edge of the bed and I woke up abruptly to hear it playing and for some reason I thought he might be close to crying, and he told me that the song always made him think of corrine and then I was the one near tears cause I really did love him the and how could I compete with something like that I was always so uncertain of myself and it’s strange at the time I was horribly sensitive to any critical comments jay made comparing me to corrine like saying I was going to get fat and stuff but it never actually bothered him in her so why should I have been so upset by it maybe I was afraid that if I wasn’t careful he was going to leave me if I wasn’t good improved enough and of course that is exactly what happened though it turned out to be a good thing for me that it did I am so a million gabillion times glad I am with shane instead of someone like jay…I think I need to take a break from this for now and go pee again and watch the simpsons this is getting to be a bit much and anyways my back is doing its evil computer chair thing again. I’ll take a Xanax maybe….

If the River was Whisky

“Never underestimate the strength of a habit.”[1]

For several decades American courts have frequently made mandatory attendance of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-Step programs a regular part of sentencing for drug and alcohol offenders, despite the fact that these programs are statistically no more effective at ending addiction than is anything else, including doing nothing at all
(Orford 26). The underlying philosophy of AA is that drug and alcohol dependency is a medical problem, a disease that forces its victims to abuse substances in a way they cannot control. According to this theory, 12-step programs offer the only legitimate treatment for the “illness” of addiction, and while they do help approximately 20-30% of the people referred to them, so do the decidedly non-medical approaches of herbal treatments, abstinence pledges and Buddhist prayer rituals (Orford 26). The American judicial and health systems have been treating substance abuse as a medical problem for years, with no particular success, because it is in fact not a disease. Addiction is often compared to such chronic illnesses as diabetes, but this is wildly inappropriate because while a disease is an involuntary condition caused by a physiological dysfunction, chemical dependency is the unfortunate result of a series of voluntary choices, however poor.
The theory that alcohol and drug abuse are diseases was conceived by a researcher named Jellinek in 1960, in part in response to a series of conversations with Alcoholics Anonymous members (Skog 1310). Jellinek describes alcoholism as involving “loss of control” and the “inability to abstain”, both terms borrowed from the AA rhetoric (Skog 1310). According to Jellinek, those individuals who are afflicted with the disease of addiction are unable to control their own actions. Jellinek paints a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde type scenario in which individuals find themselves forced into terrible binges against their will, and a single alcoholic drink causes them to become absolutely “unable to adhere to their [original] intention to ‘have one or two drinks only’ but continue to ingest more and more—often with quite some difficulty and disgust—contrary to their [own] volition.” (Skog 1310)
The concept of chemical dependency as medical problem may at first glance appear to explain why some people are able to enjoy drinking a moderate amount of alcohol, and then stop before suffering any ill effects, and other people are not, but under more intense scrutiny it quickly becomes absurd. There is no known physiological or psychiatric condition that forces anyone to use drugs or alcohol in any quantities. Environment and family background most likely play some part in influencing the choices individuals make about their use or abuse of chemicals, as they do in nearly every other decision one can possibly make. The simple truth, however, is that if one examined ten people of similar background and experience, all patronizing the same bar on the same night, they would all exhibit different patterns of alcohol use. The reason for this, according to sociologist Ole-Jorgen Skog, has nothing to do with any sort of mysterious disease and everything to do with free will. Humans are hardly perfect and rarely consistent, and neither are the decisions they make. When faced with a homework assignment, some students will choose to complete it, and some students will choose to watch television, even though they are aware that failure to turn in homework will result in a lower grade. It is highly unlikely that all of these students will make the same choice every time, and it is ridiculous to conclude that those students who, on any given occasion, choose to watch TV are sick and those who choose to study are not. The bar patrons who decide to stop after two beers and go home, and who then end up drinking two pitchers and throwing up are not sick, they are, as Skog explains, simply people who “do not stick to their original plans, but tend to give in to temptation. Prior to drinking, they were planning to consume only one or two drinks. After two drinks, they have changed their minds.” (Skog 1311) These individuals are not suffering from any illness; they are experiencing the negative consequences of their choices, in the same way that students who choose to watch television rather than study experience the negative consequences of bad grades.
Over the past several years, evidence for the element of free will in substance abuse problems has grown steadily, and proponents of the disease theory have taken to arguing that what appears to be a matter of choice is actually a symptom of the illness that is addiction. This is a claim that is both irrational and illogical. One cannot have symptoms without a disease, and, despite nearly a century of searching, no medical basis for an “addiction disease” has ever been identified. Everything from nutritional deficiencies to an allergy to the grains from which alcohol is distilled has been examined at one time or another as a possible medical cause for alcoholism, and nothing has been able to withstand the test of scientific scrutiny (McKim 84). Without any root cause, the claim that addiction is a disease of which substance abuse is merely a symptom falls flat. Few patients would appreciate a doctor telling them that they had the flu because they had the flu, and diagnosing an individual with drug addiction or alcoholism ­because they are a drug addict or alcoholic is every bit as unreasonable.
The abuse of drugs or alcohol is, like anything else taken to excess, a matter of overindulgence rather than illness. It is only natural for an individual to want to repeat an activity or experience that they find enjoyable, particularly if there is little else to do, and it has long been recognized that addictions are most likely to develop in individual whose first experience with drug or alcohol use is pleasant, especially in an environment where there are few other activities to choose from. (West 5) Whether or not a chemical dependence actually develops, however, will ultimately be determined by that individual’s actions, rather than any biological force of fate. Addiction is hardly inevitable, and to claim that an individual placed in such an environment has no choice about whether or not they will develop a substance abuse problem “reduces this individual to something less than a full person. It implies that his or her behaviour is governed by causal mechanisms beyond volitional control, and reduces the individual to a consumption robot—a helpless spectator to his own body’s movements.” (Skog 1310)
America has spent a great deal of time and money attempting to treat drug and alcohol addiction as if it were one more disease, and this policy has resulted in a great deal of frustration and little success. A specific medical cause of addiction has never been identified, and probably never will be, but the behavioral cause can be easily broken down to individual choices, actions, and consequences. It may or may not be possible to change the percentage of people who are able to overcome chemical dependency, but it is clear that until there is a fundamental shift in the way problems of addiction are approached there can be no change at all.


[1] R. Reinert, “The Concept of Alcoholism as a Bad Habit,” Bulletin of the Menniger Clinic
32 (1968): 35-36


Works Cited
McKim, William. Drugs and Behavior: An Introduction to Behavioral Pharmacology. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2000.
Orford, Jim. “Addiction as Excessive Appetite.” Addiction 96 (2001): 15-32.
Reinert, R. “The Concept of Alcoholism as a Bad Habit.” Bulletin of the Menniger Clinic 32 (1968): 35-36.
Skog, Ole-Jorgen. “Addict’s Choice.” Addiction 95 (2000): 1309-1315.
West, Robert. “Theories of Addiction.” Addiction 96 (2001): 3-13.

Limbo

Blood Swaddled

In my closet is a cracked
black plywood trunk,
my parents bought it for me when
I went off to summer camp.
When I was twelve I began
grandly calling it my
Dowry Chest.
In the bottom of it,
securely wrapped in a bundle of
fading crib quilts
is a flat gray cardboard box.
In the box is an unused baby
book shrouded in
water stained ivory satin-
I rescued it from the attic when I was ten.
On the first mildewing page,
sketched out in my most careful handwriting
is your name.
And you are dead.

1997

Shoshana M. Zeidman
CWP-594 Savard
4/12/01

1997

Cigarettes on the floor,
V-8 and white tequila
in the unplugged fridge,
dried grits and scorpions in the sink—
the swamp-cooler apartment smelled of Rasta and burnt noodles.

We hutched under the table drinking Boones, I said
“I will call my my first son Alexander.”
But the girl drinking vodka had him a week later,
caesarean-section, and took my name—
my boyfriend’s baby, not mine.

I threw plastic wine-glasses off the balcony,
smoked my self to sleep
fetal beneath the futon—
dreamt you said I made the whole thing up.

I'm Not Scared

08.28.00
12.19.03

[ ]

I woke up Sunday to the sound of quick breathing
and rocks being thrown. The house was so full of light all
the clocks had shorted out and I ran outside to see
what time it was, which was unfortunate.
I woke up Sunday after a night of dreaming
about lovers I never knew; short-haired, lust-
ravaged girls each of whom was a unique
combination of Arabian Nights and Playboy
centerfold. Each of them dies in some equally
unforeseen and tragic way. The last was eaten
alive by ants as she lay immobile in fevered dream.
I fondled the desiccated curves of clavicle
and jaw and remembered what a teacher had said, that
everyone I dream of is another part of me, and
tried and tried to cry for this beautiful girl I’d
lost.
I woke up Sunday morning and began gathering
kindling to burn the house. I threw all my books
in a huge pile in the middle of the hall
and ranged cats and computers counterclockwise around
it.
I woke up Sunday with a mouth full of powder
that tasted like pixie sticks and speed and the
lingering smell of an empty glass vial of citrus
aftershave.
I woke up Sunday morning with my legs
bent beneath me, wondering what a girls has to do in
this day and age to get another girl to fuck
her up the ass and if my luck would change if
I trimmed my nails.
I woke up Sunday morning remembering Matt’s mouth
on my clit and wondering if blowjobs felt this good and
why didn’t they teach more straight boys how to
do things like this in school instead of all the
esoterics of woodshop and metal files.
I woke up Sunday dreaming that I knelt on a
thinly carpeted floor with my master’s collar still
safe around my throat and all the fear and pain
of losing it had been nothing but a moment’s
bad dream.
I awoke Sunday to discover my naked arms
pulled above my head and joined, wrists pinned,
to the mattress in a butterfly crucifixion, which
didn’t hurt nearly as much as one might expect,
the pin being steel and mainly thrust through
bone, but there was no one on the ceiling or
peering unabashed through the window to observe my
potential struggles or escape and I found that a
little disappointing.
I awoke Sunday to find a genii hovering conservatively
positioned above my bed, who informed me that as per
the new world order, yhe had been directed to
tattoo a single expression on my face as my
constant shifting through facial gestures was rapidly
sapping the world’s supply of surplus energy, and
I lay silent trying to decide how I wanted to
look for all time thereafter, and should it be
sexy or silly or curious, should I choose what
would best express me or be most appealing and the
genie grew tired of my thoughtful procrastination and
offered to dye my eyes any color of my choosing
provided I decided in the next 7 seconds and
steal all my sleep for the next hundred years if I
didn’t.

Sodden Cardboard Phrases

03.21.01
12.27

sodden cardboard, couragated sweaty days
when the printer types backwards and I
have to keep a mirror at my desk
days without important words, days I
say ‘I love you’ so often I forget
all other phrases

The Seizured Color of Orgasm

01.19.01
11.23.03

“What’s unnatural, I mean, are there things you can study?” A human context. A bowl of grape gravy on chocolate goose. Next Christmas I want to send everyone lavishly wrapped boxes of calcified elephant dung. Each crested with a single, gilded flea. I imagine what I would look like without hands, without a nose, eyes, toes, if I had two pinkies instead of a thumb, toes on my hands and fingers on my feet, six fingers on one hand and four on the other. Last night my lover tied me to the bed with four long strips of black lace and sucked my toes, lips, fingers, nipples, clitoris. I came and the paint purple taste of plums exploded through my mouth and eyes. I thought I smelled ripe tomatoes splatter on concrete. I saw endless flats of pastel pink and blue and tasted custards mixed with perfect hues corresponding to all the best colors of innocence his fingers tapped my collarbone and I heard synthesized piano chords. His moans in my mouth tasted like olive vinegar. I’m all yucky though, we just had sex I protested realizing he wanted to go down on me but he smiled elfin and said that just makes it kinkier and kissing him after my tongue slid crusts of milky taste and saltfruit from his lips I felt him penetrating me with fingers, tongue, closed my eyes to feel my mmm’s vibrating through my body, wondered how an actual vibrator would feel and blushed as, while I lay thinking he reached over and removed it from the nightstand. Everything was the seizured color of orgasm. I opened my desire-lidded eyes to watch the glow in the dark stars above my bed turn pink and flutter hotly down around me—one landed on my shoulder and I felt a second of perfect heat before it melted silver in my skin.
“The observation of some sort of pattern”

03.29.01
11.24.03

[ ]

Remembering leaves green as broken glass
a mother, an infant, an ocean
imagine the shore—
rock-jagged
bird shat