The Bookends Review

A refusal:
burnt and grounded,
blunt, unfounded, to set
aggression alight.
Breakfast is deserved.

Are you going to
bring it back to the kitchen
before you dismantle your nearest orifice of
all bored holes;
burrowing bacteria in those empty sockets?

After last week’s surgery, it’s
best we
buy our deaths from the government.
Accepted, though only apathetically, amazingly.
But still, we stopped at a Wendy’s…

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Izzy’s brow pushes up and she smiles. I made this for you, she says. She passes him a thin brown paper bag. The professional sleeve sort of bag with a smooth sheen.

Awesome, Jude says. The sleeve makes a crackling sound as he unfurrows it. He draws from it a parchment paper. The paper is thick and impressed with ink. Thank you, he says as he studies the parchment.

I did it in my printmaking class, she says. She cranes her neck forwards and nods. She was a sophomore in art school.

He’s not much older. It’s wonderful, he says, flicking on the dome light above to make sense of the lines, as he sits in the passenger seat of her parked car.

There’s like, boars, and they’re trying to eat the woman’s face.…

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Her favorite daydream puts her on the beach at sunset, her body slowly releasing the heat of a long afternoon.  “This is how a clay pot must feel,” she tells herself.  “When it is just released from the kiln.”  And then she laughs, in her dream, an airy, lilting laugh that drifts slowly away across the incoming waves.  Seagulls twist and arc in an impossibly blue sky, their aerial acrobatics set to some ballet music just outside the range of human hearing.  They shorten into specks, then disappear, far out to sea, before materializing again in another segment of the horizon.

There is a dog, of course, for what is a daydream about the beach without some mongrel in need of grooming, dashing into the surf to rescue a broken stick? …

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I sold a book the other day. I’ve sold literally, no exaggeration, millions of books in 45 years as a bookseller, but this was a unique event; this time it was a book I had written.

I was in Green Apple Books, the one on Clement Street, the original. My wife, Judy, and I trade books with them all the time, which is one of the advantages of living in the Richmond District of San Francisco; the bookshop once voted the World’s Best is also our neighborhood bookseller. Back in December when my book first came out,  Kevin, one of the partners, and a friend I’ve known and sporadically worked with over the decades, had been kind enough to take some copies of my book on consignment and display them in the store.…

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I find myself
stepping on ants
just because I can—
something I haven’t done
since I was seven.

There is a “For Sale” sign
in the manicured lawn
belonging to the maroon house
on 347 Maroon Court.

There are moving boxes
stacked neatly in the garage,
strangers trampling down the white carpet
with their shoes still on,
strawberries growing in garden beds
that will ripen in time
for fresh lips,
and lights being flicked
on and off
by the hands of those
who have no idea
that the hallway light
only turns on
when the garbage disposal is off.…

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I can’t keep saying what everyone wants to hear, that I have bad days but basically everything’s okay.  Things are not okay.  I pretend I care only to avoid the fallout of admitting what I actually think and feel.  If I said how I truly feel I’d be an outcast or end up having to endlessly justify why I’m so insensitive.  My wariness of being found out runs so deep I can’t imagine life without it.  All the precautions, the second-guessing, just so I can open my mouth and say, How are you doing today? and give the appearance of someone who gives a shit.  I probably did at one time, way back.  Where that part of me went I don’t know.  Needing to keep up appearances has flattened any honest sentiment. …

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‘I would love to be able to be in the bathroom alone’ I remember musing
when she was small and always in my arms and on my hip that first July in the yellow house. 
Those days went by so fast and while my lens was wide open and all I have now are blurred
images
of seedless green grapes cut in small pieces on a tray,
a blue kiddie pool with cold water left out on a summer morning to warm in the sun under a
cotton clothesline as I held her and hung laundry with wooden clips, while baby frogs on the side
of the garage hopped under a leaky brass garden hose spigot into moss below
and onto the meandering slate path
that kept fleeting prints
of their small
wet feet
that evaporated
into mist.…

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