Animal House
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
A Social Fraternity, 1993

Big Brother says don’t worry. His girl was pregnant last year. Smell him reminisce when he’d been pinned, struck down by the same news his girl had laid, how for months she’d cry when they’d screw. An old spicy aroma drips thick and waxy from our apocrine glands. Sweat beads. Temples glisten. Human spines, glaucous and blurry, the size of eyelashes float my vision. I wonder how many aborted embryos haunt this entrance hall. At our feet the housemother’s dachshund remains in heat. Through her designer houndstooth diaper, she keeps trying to lick her blood. Nobody cares she can’t clean herself like she’d like to. Big Brother says grab the other leg, says drag the heavy white sofa across the pledge polished foyer, says don’t worry, scar the floor, out the big red doors. He aims to let some air in, to prop windows with speakers, to handle Jack and scoot the cherry through the joint as front yard sycamores ratchet the sun. I recite the Greek alphabet like a steamed sandwich recites steam, like a See-N-Say talking barnyard, push the animal, pull the string.

~~~

Fraternal Order of the Invisible Empire
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
A Social Fraternity, 1993

2 Black women fry chicken in the kitchen

and since we’re southern gentleman

we put Ms. before their first names. 

In the front yard our groundskeeper

picks up cigarette butts and beer bottles. 

In the shady column of our whiteness

my pledge brother Joey says

I can’t wait ‘til we’re activated

and he picks up after us. 

I pick him up word for word

as if I was wearing a wire.

One night during Hell Week they bring us

to the second floor

up from the matte black basement

to squeeze into a closet.

Our tallest and fattest on the bottom

by the weight of our class

go flat from hands-and-knees.

Every pledge class squeezes into this closet

and never comes out.

Or comes out a KKK sheriff.

Or comes out CFO

of a car wax company.

I’ve been composing this poem 

from inside that very closet.  

There’s never too many 

handshakes to memorize

when there’s only one.  

~~~

Down In the Matte Black Basement
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
A Social Fraternity, 1993

The floors walls ceiling

the benches and stairwells

the fixtures for the lights

the cage around the EXIT signs

everything matte black.

Down in the matte black basement 

pledges by tender fingers

hang from jagged ceiling trusses.

The night before a home game

a jam band on the matte black stage

plays Any Major Dude Will Tell You.

Down in the matte black basement

2 strippers strip on the matte black stage.

Around her waist one wears a gold body chain.

Both having fun until the one

running an ice cube along

the rim of her privates gets too

close and her privates

suck the cube inside her.

She shivers shakes contorts her face

screams it hurts! It hurts!

she stomps until it slips

until it hits like a sad little icicle

the matte black stage of our exculpation.

Down in the matte black basement

one of the brothers drops his drawers

for a prostitute’s performance of oral.

We whistle and shriek

like a Crimson Tide field goal.

Down in the matte black basement 

we pay-to-play, we slush fund

we pitch tee shirt designs.

Down in the matte black basement 

One of the twins shatters his radius

in a human wheelbarrow scenario.

The Pledge Master tells the twins

tell your parents it happened

in your apartment. I noticed

the flawlessness of his face

red and wrung like a popped zit.

Down in the matte black basement 

pledges recite the Greek alphabet

most just mouth it.

Down in the matte black basement 

I steal the twins’ credit card

go the mall buy a comforter

a Bob Marley tee shirt and a jade

jewelry boy box for my girl.

Down in the matte black basement

blasting from matte black speakers

Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath

to break the pledges mentally.

48 hours of tightly focused laser

repeating that single-track

that beginning storm over and over

that lightning bell thunder riff

before Ozzy’s satanic poetry:

What is this that stands before me

Figure in black which points at me

Turn round quick and start to run

Find out I’m the chosen one

Oh no…