20 Exercises in Elitism
Imagine a helicopter meets wind power
Imagine the Allegory of the Cave meets The Big Bang Theory (2007-present)
Imagine a man at the top of a mountain meets irrepressible loneliness
Imagine dual citizenship meets ROBOCOP (2014)
Imagine a big sorrel vibrating beneath you, snorting with impatience, one hand in his mane, one on the reins meets a steel mill all boarded up
Imagine Socrates’ cup of hemlock meets Miss Teen USA
Imagine drawing a Card Against Humanity meets European war dogs ripping your body apart
Imagine a John Lennon half Mexican, half Afghani on American Idol meets the Mariana Trench.
Imagine Melania meets the man of her dreams
Imagine a policeman and another policeman and another policeman and a Secret Service man meets a series of black vans arriving to your house, your address, your fair hair
Imagine Rosa Parks meets the electric chair
Imagine a hairdryer meets a strand of hair at the bottom of the ocean
Imagine the rise and fall of the Irish elk meets the Grand Old Opry, the Grand Old Party
Imagine a Luger in the top of Scott’s closet meets an AR-15
Imagine quixotic optimism meets Mark David Chapman about a quarter mile from the scarlet fields meets the front door of The Dakota
Imagine fleeing to Canada meets not making it in time
Imagine an application for your smart phone that tells you how to dress, how to hold your hips meets the House UnAmerican Activities Committee
Imagine Barney Fife’s bullet meets the NRA seizing their moment to play offence
Imagine being the one talking meets the end of the world
Imagine the scarlet poppies over an old battlefield making us all narcoleptic and livid, narcoleptic and livid, meets zero humidity
~
Note: This form is stolen from Anthony Discenza’s audio installation: A RISING TIDE LIFTS ALL BOATS
Published in Hineni Magazine
THE TRANSPLANTS
I chop a dozen locust trees
with a spade
from their mother roots.
They ride in milk cartons
and Walmart bags in back of the van.
I’ll dig holes for them the opposite of graves.
They’re too young to know
they weren’t wanted in their birth lawn.
They clench the sphincter of their leaves
as the wind pounds on.
Published in Hineni Magazine
Wild Night
I knew it had been a wild night
when I pulled two elephant-sized condoms,
the packaging for an inflatable recliner,
and the wrapper for a gas station pickle
still with green in the creases
out of my tub’s drain.
My wife said from the sofa, her eyes
almost closed, that last night she didn’t need
to press her ear against the door
to hear my gagging in ecstasy
or the steam of multiple Dutch women
seeping through the plastic walls.
Now I sit in the bone dry tub
alone, fondling the refuse
as though it were a ticket stub
to the climax of my sexual arc,
and I can’t remember a thing.
Published in JOKES REVIEW
MASK OF RAIN
There is a mask of rain
over the canyon
and over the sun.
Scarlet light
sprays from the eyes
and teeth.
The liquid tongue
laps up the canyon
and the sun.
Published in Plumb Tree Tavern
SAN LORENZO CANYON 2
I’m just a white American male
in a seated position. I’m a staple
in a box of 5000.
Clouds coast across the bluffs.
Little winged bugs land on me,
here’s one with a green body,
here’s one secreting a sex hormone in a swarm,
here’s the last gnat of summer.
I hear men up and down the canyon firing guns.
210 staples in a strip and I’ll be the one
that’s not reckless, the one hung up
in the machinery. I’ll watch the fire die
from a cot inside my van.
Published in Hineni
10 FEET FROM A SPIDER
They say you’re never more than 10 feet from a spider
never more than a mile from a feeling of deep resignation
never more than 20 steps from a stubbed toe
never more than 20 drinks from a hangover
never more than a cross glance from a divorce
never more than a breaststroke away from drowning
never more than 3 inches from a waterlogged ego
like a piece of driftwood that’s about to sink.
But why are they always speaking for you?
They don’t know where you are, do they?
Published in JOKES REVIEW
WHACKERS SUMMIT
They say everyone masturbates
but we should never imagine Sitting Bull,
Abraham Lincoln or Gregory Peck
all hunched over, biceps cramping.
Madeleine Albright, she refuses to imagine.
A black man on CNN says we need to talk about
what we did to the indians, perhaps this is better
than a conference, or whackers summit
or Historical Society of Wasted DNA.
Published in JOKES REVIEW
It Was the Day of My Vasectomy
A nurse prepped me like I was livestock.
I was 2 Xanax in and she was too rough.
She left my nuts under a heat lamp.
The doctor finally came in and told me
if I stopped having babies the Blacks
and the Mexicans and the Muslims
would sure enough fill this country up.
A strange sentiment for a sterilization.
Then I’m thinking about the young van Gogh,
a bit shiftless, unable to find his place
in business or in the exams of the church
so he goes down to the mine to see sunlight
through the miner’s eyes, shrunk to a pinhead,
and the Xanax is wearing off
and I smell him cauterizing my vas deferens.
Published in The Song is
THE FALLEN SOLDIER
The fallen soldier lands
at Cleveland International.
4 green fire trucks,
10 cop cars, a hearse,
and a blur of red, white and blue
glitters on the wet tarmac.
A son, a father, a brother
and 6 flags stand limp.
Some of us stop to gape
for 2 or 3 minutes before
dashing to our gates.
Published in The Song is
Another Meaningless Morning
Sylvia kneels on the sofa, her back to the living room,
she’s looking out the window, she sees a fluffy bird.
The light is broken by the blinds and lays across her face
in thick, bright bars. There’s dust floating in the air
and the sound of Thursday’s snoring in her dog bed
even though she just woke from 18 hours of sleep.
In the bedroom Suzanne is also asleep, on her left side,
spit hangs from the rim of her lip. The ceiling fans
continue to spin counter-clockwise. The window in the bedroom
is open, a cool front blew in last night. In the window sill,
stuck between the screen and the glass is the skeleton of a gecko,
maybe 3 inches, striped tail, eyes beady and black, wide open
and intact. Outside a breeze starts in Deming and turns bad
on its way to the Mesilla Valley. Bits of dust and rock vibrate
and lift from the desert floor to make their way in a violent cloud
toward our house, toward the fluffy, unidentified bird in our front yard
hopping between the palo verde and the juvenile locust tree
and in Sylvia’s stomach there’s a barking and a Happy Meal
watch is on her little wrist but it’s broken and is only purple to match
her skirt which has 28 sparkly hearts sewn above the bottom hem,
and between her two front teeth there’s a morsel of mango
that her toothbrush must have missed, and she turns to face her daddy,
to ask him about that fluffy bird, as he makes his way to the coffee maker.
Published in The Song is
Ring Them Bells
Elonganel got his bell rung
and saw green for an hour.
Coach said our sideline
looked like Mash last night.
Now I sit around drinking coffee
as the non-disabled students amble in
while half the football team
wanders the hallways,
sliding recklessly back and forth
over the black ice of their synapses.
Published in The Song is
Angela, She’s Gone
I can blink the tiredness from my eyes
but she’s gone. My sister, mother of two.
My daughter’s first real death
is 3 hours old, 4 hours old…
Jill’s mom didn’t let her
go to her father’s funeral.
It was a motorcycle crash
after the war, Germany, hit by a truck.
The mother knew funerals
were no place for a child.
It’s past my daughter’s bedtime.
Go on, I tell her, play,
don’t worry about the stars
shifting on and on.
Published in The Song is
I’d Like to Teach the (Tone-Deaf) World to Sing
My dyslexia’s flaring up
Being constantly reminded
of my country’s divides
is not why I have internet
I’m a friend of perforation
She was the first woman to go home unconjugated
after a conjugal visit
A wet spot on the bed is technically sexy
unless something unsexy spilled
like ammonia or banana juice
Only the luckiest puddles
get to stand up to evaporation
Thank God gunshots carry
otherwise one kind of war
could have snuck up
from the other side of the house
And please do give my regards
to that brutish, hard-working crew
tending the necropolis of our love
Care to crunch the numbers?
½ the world’s an idiot and always will be
½ this house too
it’s the basic action of the universe
Just by breathing
crossroads have you by the throat–
a fly without a wing knows
Raindrops drowsing on purple flowers?!
make it stop!
And it’s true, maybe, I haven’t always been
the greatest at every little thing
according to you
in this one particular life
Published in Jokes Review Winter 2018
New Porno Categories
Asian/Lower Alabama mix with mothers
whose middle names start with G, L or S
3 minutes before a hurricane
In a Satellite launching facility
with the rocket partially visible
through at least one window
Ginger with master’s degree in liberal arts
with one deceased parent and no siblings
In a slowly-filling swamp at dawn
Safe for work in the time of the Buddha
In a sensory deprivation tank in West Texas
during a partial eclipse
Amateur–in spelling only
On a bocce court while old Hungarian men
with names like Kiki talk about their fathers
with names like Pistol who died
unpeacefully in their sleep
In a kayak on a display rack
in Dick’s Sporting Goods
in the imagination of a Gila monster
dressed up as a red blood cell
underwater and surrounded
by sea cows
Published in Jokes Review Winter 2018
A Sip of the Dead Boy’s Beer
He played drums and we found one of his 6 packs
hidden in the azaleas outside his window.
Mom said, he died of being a druggie.
First Lady Reagan said that too, but dad let me
take a sip of the dead boy’s beer. It was hot
and when I swallowed, it felt like bats
nibbling at my edges. I went back to raking pine straw.
The late-morning sun stung the back of my head.
I hadn’t tried acid yet, or pot, or sex.
How light I felt, having so little to lie about.
Published in Independent Noise
SOCIAL WORK
A rolly polly moves slowly
beside the river. I give him
a 20 minute pep talk,
it doesn’t help. His self-esteem
is irreversibly low.
There’s a moth with one wing
down the way on the top branch
of a baby juniper. I lean in close
for a magnified interrogation.
He holds me with a hateful look.
His friend, the fly over there,
is in the dimple of the canyon’s chin.
He’s practically lifeless, probably
an iron deficiency. He
doesn’t want to hear about it.
published in The Pangolin Review, issue 3 (May 8 2018)
