November 2011
1 post
August 2011
1 post
May 2011
1 post
Gummi Bears
Picture your mother. No, a statue of your mother.
A statue of your mother made of gummi bears: every cell
of your mother’s body represented by a single gummi bear.
There are six million gummi bears making up her eye, alone.
There are one hundred and fifty billion gummi bears in her brain –
mostly those creepy colorless ones that don’t have any flavor,
and some red. She is made of so many gummi...
April 2011
3 posts
Boomers
Babies [ of …. ] . Souls swept
togther from [ ….
after Nagasaki. [ …. ] of cities,
snake-handlers [ ….
cathode ray tubes. Genetic
spoils [ ….
spoiled by [ …. ], turned
against itself like a [ ….
split in two (brother against
…. ] guardsman, hippie,
draftee, dodger, President, or
…. ], but still the meat
processed-product of hope.
...
When Stupid Gets Super
He wished for the power to grant his own wishes, which, contrary to popular belief, there is no rule prohibiting, so the genie rolled his eyes and gave him that power, then asked if there would be anything else.
“I get two more, now, don’t I?”
And the genie stared at him a while before saying, “yes, you do.” Then the genie granted him a lifetime supply of MGD and...
If Ileana's Desires Materialized
At long last they have killed her, those people she came to despise after she wanted to help them after she spent a lifetime calling them vermin, the rat-sheep of communism.
But the hatred of people whose little-in-the-world is snatched by an overweight American is slow to boil. First she said she would employ them, and they preferred this to hanging her from her neck from the 2nd storey window...
March 2011
2 posts
If a Girl were named Metonymy
Metonymy in darkness searched the cramped storage room. She sniffed as she felt along the seamless walls of cardboard. Dry and dust.
“Where is my…” she started, then growled loud. “Where is the name for it?”
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
She pulled a lighter from her pocket, held it flush to the wall, flesh protecting it from breezes, flesh testing the heat of the...
January 2011
1 post
The Sabine Women
Some fictions live
in history books:
who dare remove
“a fine illustration
of the character
of early Rome,” whether or not
rapacious bachelors
really put on
a show (the play’s
the thing) to dazzle
parents [howling
cheers through wine-
stained lips under Apollo’s
(O, god of truth, how
does your) light (not reveal
the treachery of cunning
men?) to singers,
dancers (offered a bride
to perform this...
December 2010
2 posts
"The Lonely": Season 1, Episode 7, Production Code...
A woman wakes to the world, curious and alone. There is a man there, and he is angry, lonely, sad. She does what little she can to make him happy, but he does not seem to believe that she is quite as real, quite as human, as he is.
She learns about his world, his hobbies, and slowly he opens up to her. A connection grows between them. They are alone on an asteroid, but it doesn’t matter. They have...
The next and the next:
Sometimes I think of a story as a next and a next: she stops at the threshold of trees, seeking the sound that is always changing. Grandfather unfolds his knife, crouches, cuts a four-foot square from the carpet: holding it says to the children, this is mine. A woman, barefoot and pregnant, stops on the platform and asks me, you have the same problem? then smiles and travels on. Cause and effect,...
November 2010
7 posts
Etymology
The word “Robot” comes from robota which refers, in Slavic languages, to the drudgery of serfdom. A Czech playwright, Karel Capek, made it mean something more. Men without souls walked off his stagecraft assembly line, fit for exploitation, in 1920. Since then, the concept has only grown stronger, wider, more present in our art and in our minds.
1. Drudgery
2. Assembly
3. Exploitation
"Time Enough at Last"
The famous Twilight Zone episode where the man with “Time Enough at Last” breaks his glasses is not my favorite. My favorite is “The Lonely”: the prisoner lives on an asteroid. The rocketship captain who brings his supplies gives him something to pass the time: a robot woman. She thinks. She feels. She loves. She is, the instructions say, “for all intents and purposes, a real woman.” The next time...
Fiction v. Film
This is my theory about the effect of movies on novels: 1) bad because books are replaced by the movies made from them (eg: Midnight Cowboy. Who remembers it was a book?); 2) good because the books that resist replacement (no matter how hard the movies try) are the fit who survive the Darwinian trial, and reveal the most true and essential nature of fiction. Based on this theory, Alice in...
1. Tabla
2. Cello
3. Guitar
Kansas City, MO
The muscles of the back
flow like a river of ribbon, and
when I bend and when I
gasp, nothing’s snapped,
just wrapped into a knot
spun round, enlarged, a fat
ball of yarn, competing to be
the largest wad in the world.
The fingers of your hand
wrap my own like an orgy
of lovers, wrap my own like
leaves long to wrap the flowers
that are their mothers. And when
you ask the triage...
October 2010
3 posts
Gravity
It’s a dark matter No one understands
The Gravity
Of the situation some might say
“irrelevant”
or an optimist shrug: “what
goes up, must…”
But a universe without God
is not a universe
of nothing and of nothing
we know little
No Matter —what we fear—
we can’t imagine:
We are...
Music
To the cats, we speak like music,
our bodies delight with perfume.
And the birds that to us sing
to them crinkle like opening bags
of chips, an unwrapping burrito,
a top popping with soda fizz:
their bodies tense with want.
When we talk at night together,
the cats collect between us.
Their bodies dead as pelts, they purr
and listen to us speak, content
in a field of comforter fringed
...
September 2010
3 posts
Riddle
I am a tyrant and a tease.
But YOU pay me mind
only when I hurt you. So,
lover, what else would I be?
You come to me only
in misery, and forget me
when you are happy.
I told Father, “why play nice
with ingrates? Why love
he who bores so
easily, rushing past
my gifts (past gifts,
future gifts)…” I wait
for no man; I am constant
only for machines. What
will I...
Rhyme
I’m lime, I’m grime…
sigh, mime, sigh. My (hm.
I’m dyin’: off-rhymes,
near-rhymes, climb
doubletime, don’t whine)
fine, prime man-o-mine
my benign clementine, my
vine, leonine. By wine
design a countersign
sublime for your concubine.
Confine, entwine, recline:
Auld Langsyne!? A sign.
1. Time and Again
2. Time is on My Side
3. Time
August 2010
4 posts
Losing Nothing
I have a prescription for Clomid, unfilled
(like so much else). Some medical problems
are only cured by medical disasters, or
by will. I, for example, refuse to want
what I can’t have. Death kills cancer (all
but HeLa). Amputations cure the common cold (or
render it obsolete), and infertility puts the (pun
intended) period at the end of wanting babies. What
is this wanting, anyway? Those grapes...
What’s the worst that can happen?
It’s not the “worst,” it’s the where and when. Example:
The Big One hits, while you’re under the bay on the BART.
Cracks form on the tunnel walls, the first of millions of gallons
trickle. Creep. Run. Rush and rise. The train stalls. Then
darkness. Wailing: young girls’ surprise. A policeman falls
to roar and rage at the floor. Ice cold. You shiver, gag: fishrot
sewer smell of baybottom silt...
Man
The new soundsystem spoke
after we’d gone to bed. I didn’t know
you had to shut it off special.
Two men’s mumbling voices,
and the spell of sleep broke. “Bump”
does not raise me in the night;
the sound of Man, tho, and I stand
ready, heart pressing adrenaline
through muscle hard, every alveolus
open and filled, my mind decided
among tactics I did not know I knew.
Fear lives with those who...
If I weren't a ________ I would be a ________.
Writer/biochemist.
Teacher/tour guide.
Pragmatist/idealist.
Cook/critic.
Heterosexual/pansexual.
Lover/loner.
Reader/fool.
Amy/kevin.
1. Alternate Universes
2. Gaps in the Timeline
3. What if…?
July 2010
3 posts
The Strange and the Charming
It’s strange, but you say: we do not die; our bodies surely rot away, but the personality within is freed to…
a) fly up, up, into the sky, where it is given a pair of wings (not bat wings, not airplane wings, not condor wings, but the wings of a giant white dove), to lounge about on puffy clouds, playing harps
b) rise into the sky to get into a giant line, the eternal DMV, to see Saint Peter...
Delilah
This is the story of Delilah the cat. Delilah did not belong to me, she belonged to an artist named Francine Ditton who grew up on a boat that sailed the stormy seas. Delilah didn’t have much fear, and would land in the water when she jumped for a bird or a flying fish or a giant moth off the coast of the Bahamas. They worried about Delilah, because it’s bad enough if a person falls...
June 2010
2 posts
May 2010
10 posts
X
When X was about nXne years old, X started my own relXgXon Xn the back yard of my parents’ house. Xt was ChrXstXan BXble-based.
At the tXme, my parents’ yard was open, fenceless, lXke most of the yards Xn our neXghborhood, and lush wXth tropXcal growth.
Xn the back corner stood a cluster of tall banana plants—when they came to fruXt they provXded heaps of bananas clustered on a stem...
"Union"
Are “world” and “peace” in Russian really both Mir?
What a strange, new Earth that has such language in it.
Soyuz meant merely “union,” which, one assumes,
was a much more stolid phrase across 11 communist time zones,
but Soyuz was the craft that docked with ours: 17 July, 1975
(and docking two craft traveling at 8,000 meters per second
is no mean feat)...
The naming of ships
The spaceship lifted sputnik (mankind’s
best friend), a companion in orbit like
the small dog circles the big dog’s path
[remember (Dezik, Lisa, Bars, Lisichka,
Laika, Pchyolka, Mushka) all the little dogs
who died for science. (In the West, we
killed monkeys [but named them less well:
Albert I, Albert II, Albert III, Albert IV].
None lived to eep the tale.)]. We sent men,
eventually, and named...
gard = look
look
relook
relookless
irrelookless
disirrelookless
1. prefix
2. root
3. suffix
Only
true statements will deny
that they are poems, but
true statements are always
poems; this is not a poem.
1. True
2. False
3. Only
April 2010
12 posts
chemical energy
Cut down to physics, a flower [or flour (made
from the seed/fruit [post-flower] of a starch
grass [and blessed by the goddess Ceres])] is
no different from a ‘58 Zundapp Janus [hot
fusion of car and bike (atoms indistinguishable)
named for the Roman god of doors (its doors
open front and back [its seats face front and
back, too (the passenger will only see where
he’s been,...
the egg is symbol of beginnings
She cracked one egg. One blood spot.
They call it “blood”; they call it “spotting.”
But it’s not like train or plane spotting.
And it’s not blood. In the white of the egg
it’s a chicken foetus. A human foetus
looks similar, for a while. It gains its gills
and tail, then loses them, evidence
of an empty space in the designer’s chair.
1. back to the egg
2. more about blood
3. focus on the foetus
the way of all flesh
To eat. To rest. To twitch. To burst
out grabbing for something to do. To
fart. To scratch. To laugh. To tickle.
To feel around, instead of look. To feel
around, instead of think. To breathe
it deep. To hold the breath. To jump.
To stub. To curse. To cry. To resee with
new eyes. To squeeze. To hold. To sink
the fingers in and wiggle them around.
To embrace the cold. To go limp in heat
...
the chicken and the egg
The question hasn’t baffled me
since the 7th grade, when Ms. Peggy
stopped polishing her long, red
nails long enough to teach us evolution.
The world reorganized
into logical relief: this theory
could be understood, not just “believed.”
Chains of life rose and fell
like war stories sung, with the unluckily
unsuitable unloving or unliving themselves
into oblivion (this...