When I heard about the government finding non-human biologics, my first thought was whether aliens would find me attractive. I fare pretty well with a specific type of woman, the hipster artsy girl. Often owns a cat or two, regrets none of her tattoos when she should regret them all, and talks way too much about authors whose books I can’t get past chapter two. My type is the blonde cheerleader from movies, often called Stacy, and driving a convertible VW Bug. Unfortunately, I’m the furthest thing there is from who they go for: muscles, a scruffy face, and a cool swagger resulting from a belief they can do anything. My type could be aliens, but I’ll have to wait until Congress approves the release of visual evidence.…
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‘the silence of God is God’
— Carolyn Forché
the sky dons its black cloak
and all its stars wrap about me.
light streams into my eyes
from so far away,
when the birth was first envisioned
on those starry nights of a distant time
that opened all around Them.
i. the idea
struck you,
the only free will,
to have your son begotten,
to give him flesh and blood,
then raise an arm against him
when no angel in heaven would dare to intervene.
hard to imagine the thinking, when the word was God
and he was with God, talking to himself, mumbling
this is suicide, murder —
only to be answered
why hast thou forsaken me?
one would know a human mind,
mercy, love, suffering and affliction,
all that is of the flesh.…
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You’re wrist-deep in turkey testicles, and you’ve got no reference for the sensation because there’s nothing else that feels like a tub of half-thawed turkey balls. Why the hell anyone would eat the damn things is as mysterious as the sensation of the fleshy oblongs squirting through your cold fingers.
The Okie cook is yelling at you to move your ass, orders are piling up, but he’s always yelling so you don’t pay him any mind. Breading testicles is a step-by-step operation that can’t be rushed.
Once the poultry nutsacks thaw, you scoop a handful of the slippery blobs and drop them into the flour tub. A quick swirl to dust them up, shake off the extra flour, then the turkey balls go swimming in the egg and milk bath.…
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My city is not a city, no more than a bare town that’s slowly growing. It’s got a Bi-Mart and a Safeway and a McDonalds—people never go there, though, just Big Burger across the street. It’s been here longer, and it’s not a chain, and my people here don’t like change.
The folks who live here aren’t slow by any means, but we like slow. We like watching the world subtly change around us, and we like taking our time as we live our life. We remark on the sunset every night, saying things like can’t believe it’s still light out! for half the year and can’t believe it’s already dark out! for the other half, accordingly.
It’s a town surrounded by the countryside, and there’s the great big Coleman ranch that’s got cows and horses and other animals.…
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With twenty rupees in his pockets, there was only one way Pervez could go.
And it was starting to seem like a tough decision already.
It’s not that he didn’t have direction. He had the directions and the dictation right: he knew exactly where he had been told to go. He knew where he was supposed to go. Surely, he could go there. But the minarets of the mosque didn’t pull at his heartstrings as much as the magnetic mansions that housed other objects of interest did: a friend’s house in a different locality, a local parchoon shop that sold all sorts of colourful candy, a bazaar, a ground where boys would let you play cricket if you contributed only twenty rupees. Pervez had twenty rupees to spare, the wide world to see, and he couldn’t make a decision.…
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We carry the bride’s coffin on our backs, hastily constructed by our frail hands from what was once her litter. The starving season is a killer, even for brides brought from afar to marry kings and princes, dowries of gold and spices carried with them through the streets of hollow wasting faces. The bride’s hand maidens walk ahead of us, adorned in white, the color of weddings in their country, but to us, it has always been the color of mourning, the color of death, the color of the snow that comes to take our children. We step in tandem, careful not to drop the corpse, even as the air itself turns bitter and blue in the cold, and still yet we walk northward, to where tears freeze as you weep, and your heart stutters, for the air is fractal.…
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Via del Corso, 111 Centro Storico,
4 giugno 2005.
My apologies, wherever you are.
in that small square off Via del Corso,
I photographed your argument,
filled the lens with you
standing on your toes,
leaning into him.
your lips pucker, as if you’d kiss,
but I can feel those wounded words
and watch the hands mimic every utterance:
pinched fingers point in the air;
a flick of the chin; ma va’ là!
basta!
the words and every gesture
become a dance all your own.
more than once you take two steps back, turn
and then return
to continue with such passion, such intimacy,
the sun slips behind heaven’s white clouds
and a light grey veils the day.
while others continue on premeditated paths,
perform circadian chores
or simply go about their business,
I watch you walk away, disappear,
vanish in a crowd that’s unaware
of all the music in the air. …
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