I guess wherever a man stands becomes the moral high ground, less about altitude, more conviction, boots on ground, the cool rational marble of thought, they hate gossiping too, or at least what we call that way of living in the world when women do it, which of course makes it wrong, you get it, they don’t understand the need for it, emotionally of course, but also biologically, survival skill, instinct, I need to know what’s happening to the fifty or so people in my world, hunt love, gather grief, I want to know and I want the privilege of being told, secrets whispered under low lights, over popcorn and wet nails, shifting alliances, not always mean, no, but sometimes, sure, but we know where our lines are, we’ve been tip-toeing around lines in the sand our whole lives, were trained in it, our lives are lived exclusively on the knife thin line between victimhood and power, Madonna and Whore, all of them, the big ones, the little ones thin as thread, frail as uncooked spaghetti, and we’re towing some lines and smudging others, and you can’t see it yet because you’re not a part of it.…
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Just after noon,
at the intersection of Mission and High streets, I saw her at
the wheel of a tan SUV. The red light held us both, each
vehicle facing the other.
With an Oregon gray-winter-solstice-zombie stare, her eyes
looked ahead at Nothing.
I knew her in the ’90s. She was a Mormon . . .
probably still is. Four kids and a utilitarian marriage—
functional, its passion drained years back
by an exhausting commitment to full immersion in
a religious lifestyle.
I recalled how, this time of year, the church service,
volunteer obligations, family management, and
holiday expectations always left her brittle.
Fifteen years ago, to distract herself, she began
joining multilevel marketing companies that
promised honest products, sales opportunity, wealth,
and vacations in the islands.…
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Help! The teachers are killing each other
With number 2 pencils and wooden rulers
and sharp-edged papers and expectations
and heavy folders filled with data.
Ms. Rowles is dead on the floor,
The principal’s master key jabbed
Into her cross-sectioned left ventricle.
Her last words were
“Don’t forget to study for the test.”
Mr. Carpenter is heaped over
And still twitching on his keyboard.
His blank eyes, fixed on his wall that house
a century’s worth of senior pictures,
Are filled with purple blood
and drenched in clean tears.…
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Three nights running I’ve seen
November’s Frost (or Beaver) Moon
pause at my window in passing.
Gravity brings it on a lariat
past earthbound me, amid the rodeo
of spheres in the night watch.
I pretend love is involved:
Mother Earth like every wise parent
allows impetus while holding on.
The girl asked, one wild March:
“If the string breaks, Dad, the kite—
won’t it fly away from us?”
From my understanding
of aerodynamics I explained it thus:
how her kite stays airborne
by resistance to the string,
trying to get free of earth and join
prevailing winds by adoption.
After saying it, I noticed ten
fingers tighten on quivering twine;
her own orbit, round my life.
– Russell Rowland…
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Zeus wears pin-striped togas and storms around his boardroom. He still has an eye for the ladies. At the office, we call him Dad, because there’s a pretty good chance he is. His son, Ares, is a badass. He could pick a fight in an empty room. Another son, Hermes, got caught last year lifting Chuck Taylors from the Parkway Mall. He still works at FTD.
Poseidon lives on Daytona Beach: Hawaiian shirt, flip flops—a Jimmy Buffett type—schmoozing fishermen, posing for tourists. But don’t catch him in one of his moods. He can whip up a hurricane toot sweet—massing thunderheads, crashing waves, the whole nine fathoms.
As for the other members of the Olympus Rod and Gun Club—well, Casio is still the god of bad timing, and Amnesia wooed a meadow by posing as an adjacent meadow but couldn’t remember her original form.…
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It’s been drizzling and damp the last few days. I take my chance to walk a few blocks and visit a pond I’ve gotten to know. Most of the streets around the city are tidy, controlled. The people wear shoes all the time. City dust is a sad smell. I feel heavy from a week of work. My shoulders are a mess of neat concrete knots. My feet slip around in my wet thongs. Something small and brown flitters across the footpath in front of me, into a restrained, tasteful, potted buxus. The street sweeper will swing through later tonight, but for now the damp leaves in the gutters glitter in the sun. A shiny car parallel parks in the distance, but otherwise the road is empty.…
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He swings the shark into the air above his head, hands
wrapped around its tail,
swinging hard backwards and then overhead, until
at the very peak of the
arc there is a millisecond of stillness, backlit by the glare
of city lights, man and shark
a dark silhouette edged with glow, the man’s back a curve
against the weight, and the long shark body an answering
curve in the air above, like a
pair of sweeping wings, as if both plan, at any moment,
to take flight together
until the frozen moment breaks as the arc comes down hard
against the planks with shark and
wood meeting in a solid thud amid the gasps of the crowd,
and the now limp shark again rises in the air above the man
as he pivots and releases its body
back out to the ocean, and we all rush to the rails, watching
the creature floating still in a
shining pool cast by the pier’s tall lights, motionless, until
with a full body jerk, it swims away,
heading to the ocean’s deep waters, away from land, away
from us, away from him, and chaos erupts on the pier’s wide
planks, voices relieved and amazed –
did you see the size of that thing?…
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