Stare at the sun until you burn out your retinas.

South you went,
deep below the balls
of Arizona,

below even
Tuscon,

into that
sweaty, rotten hippie
town

where you think if
you can make sense
of a desert

you can make sense
of that
asshole
standing
in the middle of one.

You left me
with these women–

with these out of their
fucking skulls

bat shit crazy

women

who bark and bite
and stab down sidewalks

and want nothing
to do with me

unless it has something
to do with you,

just so
you could go play
wild man,

bound from rock
to rock naked,

eat lizards,

and fuck
a cactus or two.

Maybe the pussy here
wasn’t dry enough.

Maybe the women
not insane enough.

Either way,
you left me

in these clothes,

under this shelter,

huddling with your ex’s,

while you dance
in the rain.

Welcome to the club.

I’m on this dating site
for gimps and

there’s this girl
who’s younger than me

with pictures
of her playing volleyball,

standing next to
a guy at prom,

and squeezing her chihuahua
to death–

cute and perky,
well-tanned,
just ripening for
college years.

But it says on her profile
that she was in an accident
this past May

and now she’s paralyzed
from the waist
down.

“I know
by the grace of God,”
she says,
“I will one day walk
again.”

There are no pictures
of her after
the accident.

Just smiling,
beautiful legs.

And I know

it hasn’t
hit her yet.

The car is still
in the driveway.

If I were locked in a giant cage all day, every day, I’d drop shitbombs on people too.

In the news
they said
a train

carrying ten
thousand birds

veered off the
tracks
and fell

into

a lake,

drowning them,

and all
I could
think
was,

“Haha,

choking
swallows!”

Vignette #6

Feet scampered out of the front door and the screen smacked shut. The boy ran down the sidewalk, smiling all the way.

“The witch is dead!” he exclaimed. “The witch is dead, everybody!” He wore a checkered shirt and grey slacks. His hair was cleaved in waves to the side of his head.

“C’mon,” he shouted to a collection of similarly aged boys loitering outside a gas station. “Let’s go see the old witch’s house! She died and they’re taking her stuff out.” They sprang to their feet and chased the boy down the road.

“Are you sure she’s gone, Kirby?” a boy with red hair asked.

“Yeah. My aunt works at the mortuary and said her dead body came in last night.”

“Gross,” the redheaded boy said.

“Do you think she’s actually dead? She could just be faking it,” one of the other boys said.

“I wonder if she has tentacles coming out of her thingy,” another boy rooted.

“Girls don’t have thingies, stupid,” the redheaded boy responded.

“I meant girl thingies. And don’t call me stupid, stupid.”

“I wonder how many other kids know,” the redhead said.

“Probably everyone,” Kirby suggested. “My aunt said that they were taking her stuff out of the house today. I bet everybody’s watching.”

The runners eventually came to the old, paltry house. A crowd of other children stood outside. They observed as a pair of moving men emerged from the house, manhandling a piano down the porch steps. The men ignored the small mob as they struggled with the cantankerous instrument.

“Is she dead?” one of the children hollered. Neither of the men answered.

After a minute, another one yelled, “Is the witch gone for good?” Still no response.

The working men finally managed to place the piano squarely on the sidewalk, next to their truck. They took a break. One of them, a black man, swiped his forehead with a handkerchief and approached the children.

“Y’all should get on home. This ain’t none of your businesses,” he said, waving his handkerchief in indiscriminate directions. “Mrs. Layney’s family is coming on down, and I don’t think they’d be much pleased to see a bunch of meddlesome children outside their house harassing the movers.”

“Does that mean the old lady has finally croaked?” the redhead inquired.

“That’s all we want to know,” a nearby girl explained.

“Yes,” the man sighed, his eyes growing very wide, “Mrs. Layney has passed. Now get on to your own businesses and quit bothering us.”

With that, the children dispersed. Each group of friends meandered in opposite directions of the street, mumbling amongst themselves.

Only one boy remained. He had a crew cut and wore glasses. A stiff, wooden arm poked out of the left sleeve of his grey t-shirt. He walked down the sidewalk and peered up and down the street. The last of the bystanders had disappeared.

“The witch is dead!” he burst out. “The witch is de-e-e-e-ead! The witch i-i-i-i-is dead!” He darted past a neighbor’s backyard, clanging his fake elbow against the fenceposts.

The boy continued his song for many streets until he passed a girl sitting on the curb. She was crying. The boy halted after a few yards and walked slowly back towards her.

“Hiya, Henrietta!” he exclaimed jovially and waved.

She sniffed.

“Sure is a nice day, ain’t it?”

She gazed up at him, then lowered her face into her palms and began to weep.

“Don’t cry, Henrietta. I wasn’t trying to be mean or nothing.” He jumped off the curb like it was a cliff and sat next to her. “Haven’t you heard the good news? The old witch down the road has finally kicked the bucket!”

The girl paused, looked up at him again, and promptly resumed bawling.

“Golly. You seem real upset. Why are you crying, Henrietta?”

She stifled her sobs and handed him a photograph. The boy looked at it and readjusted his glasses. It showed a younger Henrietta sitting on an old woman’s lap. Both of them were smiling.

“Is this your grandma?” the boy asked.

Henrietta nodded as he handed the photo back.

“Is she dead?”

She nodded again.

The boy looked down at his feet and began toying with his shoelaces.  He stuck his tongue out and retied the laces with one hand.  Then he got up, ambled around the girl, and plopped down on the opposite side of her.  He slung his working arm around her shoulders and said, “It’ll be all right, Hen.”

The pup.

The glasses slide
down the bridge
of
her nose

as she leans
to pet
a rambunctious,
spotted little
creature.

It claws at her socks
and whimpers
and approaches each hand
with a sniff
and a lick
and makes her
giggle with
every wag
of its stubby tail

before lifting
its leg

and
pissing
on her shoes.

I laugh.

She gasps.

The little booger
hops towards me
and I scratch
his ear,

saying, “That’s
a good boy.”

Kenya.

His arms
looked
like
sticks.

His skin
looked
dead.

But

his smile
grew

as we
talked

and finally
burst
into
teeth

as
he took the
sandwich
from my
hands

and

said,
“We can
share it,”

tearing
it in
half

and giving
me
the biggest
piece.

The sky scraper reflected the city like a vanity mirror.

Theo J. Heap
was the name
of the building.

He was probably
some
entrepreneur from back
in the day
who had his hands in everything
and everybody
and had something to do
with the flourishing nature
of this
godawful town.

Maybe he was an underappreciated
civil rights
activist
who got
outshined
by Martin Luther King Jr.

But I wondered

(more like hoped),

that maybe
they named the building
after a janitor

or a window washer

or the fucker who jumped off its roof
when he ran out
of hands
and got outshined
by the sun.

24NPEW.

The clouds sprinkled
on and off all day,
barely
pissing.

French fries scraped
against cardboard as
we
extracted them
and ate them
and laughed

at a sign

outside an apartment
building,
with doughy salt
between
our teeth.

For twenty minutes
we stared
at that damned sign,

dumbfounded
as to what
it said.

“It looks like Russian,” I said.

After deciphering the
last three letters,

a homeless man
on a bike
circled around
a dumpster and settled
outside the building.

I thought he probably knew
what it said.  That
and every
other
sign
in the city.

The sky finally
stopped sprinkling and
the homeless man bought
a Coke from
a vending machine
and sat on a curb
and drank.

Fries gone, we drove off
the parking lot
and read:

2
4
N
P
E
W

Still foreign.

But on our
way back home,
I thought about
the homeless man and
the Coke and
the rain

and I realized
that they told me
something back there
(and I wasn’t listening);

that
when we drove off
the parking lot,

we drove on
to North
Pew
Avenue.

Summer nights in a shitty club made of less than balsa wood and duct tape would eat us alive.

He went by Lee
but I don’t think that that
was his real name.

Lee took no shit.

And if he deemed his name
(the one
his parents
gave him)
to be shit,

he’d leave it
on the side of the road

with the rest of the shit.

One night
at the Codified
he opened his first of six
spilling suds all over
the wooden planks.

“Well,” he
said, “now the floor can get
a buzz too.”

I asked him if he liked the band.

“They’ve got soul.” He rubbed
his gray beard.
“But the guitarist looks like
he wants to
rock out
more than
he’s allowed.

And the leadsinger
the black chick,
she looks better than
she sings.

But people are dancing and that’s
always
a good sign.”

He drank and tapped his boots.

Of the 14 people in the audience,
the dallying black chick went to
Lee’s home that night,

shit in tow.

He liked the Melvins.

He fought in
Vietnam.

When he’d drink,
he’d make this suckling sound
with his teeth
like
he was eating his top lip.

He constantly rearranged
his gray
braids as he spoke,
tossing them from shoulder to
shoulder.

Noise rock,
’80s indie bands,
post-punk,
lo-fi,
sludge,
drone,
doom,
Sonic Youth,
Melt-Banana,
and bands I’ve
never
ever heard of
were all his favorites.
He was the only
58-year-old
at heavy metal concerts.

He lives in Peru now,
has a Peruvian wife
and land.

But before he moved there,
he came
up to me one night at the club
we always drank at,
in 2004.

He waited for the band
to stop
playing
and lead me to a dark
corner,
gripping my shoulder.

“I’m moving,” he said.

“Where?”

“I’m getting out of the states,
I have no other choice.”

“Why?”

“These murderers,
Kerry and Bush
and the rest of them–”

his face cringed

“–if I stay any longer,
I’m afraid
I’m going to

buy me a gun,
drive to D.C.,
and kill one of ‘em.

Maybe all of ‘em,”

he said,
suckling his teeth.

I hear his wife is expecting now
and that he’s very satisfied
with the Peruvian president.