When I told you how I’d
love to take a picture of you—
I was talking about you as
you were then, in motion,
eyes alight,
hair framed in a halo
of the dying sunlight,
looking, looking, looking—
at something far away,
something through the glass
and the engines, the asphalt
and the crawling things—
something far from
this wretched place,
something far from me.
I wished to capture you as
you were then, in a moment that
we would never return to.
But the memory, I suppose,
is permanent enough.
A slow-developed shot,
already murky,
like vintage film.
Someone else will have you
that way again, and it won’t be me—
But at least I can hold on to this.
I will have you
in my mind, if nowhere else,
just as you were and
will never be again.…
...continue reading
We stole a gun from the safe and went out to the fields, where the moon lay like a serrated wound on the face of the night sky, and pointed the boom end at cows. Dumb sentinels of pastures overgrazed and nearing depletion. They sat on all fours like a scarecrow pushed over. My buddy held them in his sight for a long time, slowly breathing through his whole body, his skin a membrane he’d been trying to shirk off, and he said to me, almost a whisper, bang.
But that wasn’t good enough for me. When I got big I would go out to bars and sit in the corner and stare out at the shifting forms, men and women in all different kinds of couplings looped together, blended into the same silhouette, and I would try and project my own face onto theirs.…
...continue reading
Almost a year has passed since I met Valerie at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City. I had been waiting for a client who wanted to meet me there and then find a place to discuss a project.
I was in my finest three-piece Brioni suit, leaning against one of the endless cosmetic counters, when two women approached me.
“Can you help us?” the older woman asked. She was over fifty and strikingly pretty. The younger woman, the spitting image of her, had to be her daughter.
“Yes, of course I can help you. I would be delighted, but you will have to pay cash.”
“Why?” the mother asked, as surprised as her daughter.
“Because I don’t work here,” I said, unable to contain a smile.…
...continue reading
The wreck is a weird
symphony: the exploded
air bags rumpled as
a just-empty bed, the way
the metal bends like her
jacket that day at Brinton
Timber, the buttery smear
of the engine smashed up
to the skeleton.
There were two
dents for her knees, a cracked
plastic brassiere, and gaps
where the fine curves
of the doors won’t spoon,
and a delicate timbre when
the control knobs tumbled
from the console.
The paint
curls as paper from the book,
one window tossed to ice
cubes, one streaked like hawk
feathers, and the shattered
truss sets the hull down,
like a woman being beaten
who clings to the ground.
– Jared Pearce
Author’s Note: “What sounded” was a poem that came from my going to a wrecked car in order to retrieve any further property from it; we had been hit head-on.…
...continue reading
I’m on my way to my first threesome. I’m taking the Q to Midtown because there’s a bar on 52nd Street that this couple likes.
It was weird having to dress for both the female and male gaze. My belt is a little black string tied in a coquettish bow, but my hair is pigtailed because, in my twosome-only experience thus far, guys like handlebars. My lips are red but my perfume is Daisy by Marc Jacobs. My purse is cute black pleather, but my shoes are Converse. I have AirPods in and an aloof far-off gaze to match, but I’m reading a book too. It may or may not be Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
I don’t want to attribute any further reasoning as to why I’m doing this other than that I’m bisexual and each of them thinks I’m different denominations of attractive (the guy thinks I’m cute and the girl thinks I’m pretty, but neither of them have said I’m hot yet).…
...continue reading
“…only the names of places had dignity.”
– Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
No farms recede from Ives Dairy Road,
Just row after row of June Cleaver homes—
No apples blossom on Orchard Lane—
Acres of trees? Not one remains.
No trout swim near River Street,
Just pavement pounded by weary feet—
Moo-moo-moving are herds of cars,
Gassing their way down boulevards—
Our supermarket is Evergreen Park
Where traffic lights dispel the dark—
We call our shopping mall The Open Field—
Not even the names of places are real…
– Robert Piazza…
...continue reading
“Your beard is telling me you care about the planet,” the blonde with the clipboard said.
Sylvester just kept walking, and he tried not to sneer.
He did love the Earth, but not in the trivial way she did. He loved it all, loved it down to the nickel-iron core; wondered, at night, if the center really was a high-pressure crystal, perhaps a gigantic diamond.
Her love, or concern, he expected, was only for the skin of the planet, the puddles that were the seas, and the froth of atmosphere above; and perhaps the cuter quadrupeds.
People, he thought, are so shallow.
The crowds at the corner, waiting for the pedestrian scramble, had him asking himself if you could divide people by class and politics simply by observing their coffee cups cross-referenced with their shoes.…
...continue reading