Thai Farmers Race Their Buffalo

A delivery boy rests his cigarette on top of the mailbox and slips into the deli. I watch it turn to ash as Lebanese rap blasts over the loudspeakers. A ragged gray-skinned man staggers past my table and points at my falafel, asks if I’m going to finish it. It doesn’t taste great and if I was less hungry I’d give it to him. I’ve given up meat in memory of her; for years she was a strict vegan and extremely vocal about it. A passing girl tugs at the hem of her dress, trying to make it cover more than it is capable of. A pink sightseeing bus rumbles past, its passengers lolling in their seats, all of them wearing sunglasses despite the thick, low clouds. The front page of the Asian Reporter reads Thai Farmers Race Their Buffalo in Show of Gratitude. A couple crosses against the light, traffic screeches to a halt. The woman waves at me though I don’t recognize her at all. . Last night at an acquaintance’s fiftieth birthday party at a crushingly bland banquet hall I found myself having conversations with people I hadn’t seen in years, people so unlike her, well-meaning but without passion, we had nothing to say to one another yet we kept talking. They'd hired a magician, an Asian man who throughout his entire act flirted with the only other Asian person there, a gorgeous woman with long, brown legs, holding hands with her skinny white boyfriend. "We have a complexion connection!" the magician yelled at one point, then continued onto his tricks involving dimes and matches and trick ropes and little red foam balls. It was embarrassing. Even the food was bad. I wished she had been there so we could laugh about it, maybe reminisce about the time I took her out for Ethiopian food for the first time, I was so excited, I thought she'd love it as much as I did, but the food was terrible. I felt so sad and disappointed, had wanted so badly to have a nice meal with her, I hadn't seen her in so long. Last week, another friend turning 50 also had a magician at his party, who stabbed the birthday boy through the neck with a sword, then made a guinea pig appear in an empty box. I think about my vanished friend, pawing halfheartedly at our beyeyanetu. She will never turn fifty. After lunch I ride the streetcar home, watching the world slip past and disappear. I am trampled, plowed back into the earth by the pounding hooves. May I crack my shell and sprout and stretch toward teh sun, may I grow tall and heavy with nourishing leaves, my limbs laden with blossoms that turn into fruit that smiles just like her as it ripens.

Park Slope Practice Space

A cord thrown over a bar of opaque air,
knots stuck in blocks of transparent concrete.
And you down there
swinging

In the back of the room, the beat of bird wing snares.
Electric eels unplugged. Hooves fumble
with a limp pick beneath the stage.
The neck is flexible and rubbery. The radiator sings

I am licking myself clean of all melody.
Clogging the cracks in the staff
with sticky half-notes.
Replacing the singing with humming
and the humming with choking
and the choking with silence.

I'm stomping the spongy pedal.
Working out the frayed equations
to the unpaid utilities.
Learning to tie strings
around paper-wrapped packages
in the dark
without your finger.

Song for Jasmine Lea

The roots of the heavy oaks
buckle the macadam
of the parking lot.
An acorn, green with August, drops
and comes to rest at my feet.
I pick it up
squeeze it tightly in my fist
then tenderly slip it into
my shirt pocket

Royalty Nails

A nail salon is going in next door

to the bookshop where I help out

Royalty Nails is painted on the glass. 

I can hear them banging around 

as clearly as I could hear

my new neighbor’s moans

as her boyfriend fucked her this morning.

I just lay there quietly in bed

like I sit here now, alone,

listening to the hammering

and scraping and drilling

as they install the drywall,

hanging of brand new doors

on brand new hinges.

I think of you and the sounds you made.

Not unlike hers but even louder, longer.

The workers knock off for lunch.

Soon the place will fill up

with women getting mani-pedis

as the books sit so quietly on the shelves.

The neighbors will continue to fuck

as you do whatever it is you do

with whoever it is you do it with

and I claw at the thin walls

screaming without a sound

$33.16

A spectral deposit
materializes in my account
A lonesome consolation prize
A monetary haunt

Is there a sadder refund
than the one you get
when the concert's cancelled
because the singer's dead?

There will be no more set lists
to snatch from the foot of the stage.
No more new lyrics to scream
in gleeful rage.

Who will write songs
that express our grief
that you're no longer here
to write songs to express our grief?

Thirty three dollars and sixteen cents
Paid for an invisible ticket
I'll spend it on some liquor instead
Put on some records, uncork that bottle
Sing toast after toast after toast
and swallow your ghost

for D.B.

Dispatch from the Cascadia Subduction Zone

Am I alive? I was told I was but there was no way
of proving it. After years of documenting
the various parking lots and waiting rooms
I’d spent so much of my life skulking around
the edges of, after years of withering
under the condescending smiles of the Shirley girls
as they posed coyly at the fringes
of their color-corrected ropes,
smiling as if at a little boy lighting his first cigarette,
the earth shrugged and let us slip through its fingers.
I was already about half buried
when the slide commenced.
Never stood a chance. Only choice
was to try to eat my way out, chew a path
through my neighbors, my comrades, my fellow working stiffs.
It could always be worse. Even at my lowest point
I could still feel the squish and crush of bodies beneath me.
I never hit the true bottom. What was down there, anyways?
Bedrock, concrete? A metal grate
to allow the blood and pulp to drain?
An ocean of magma? I look up
but my view is blocked by asses, backs,
flopping appendages, fingers scrabbling to climb.
I no longer hear the low, constant drone.
I catch glimpses of light but it’s not the sun,
it’s the flame of something burning high above,
sending down an occasional spray of sparks
and we open our mouths so they may singe our tongues.

Glass Bachelor

Fanned out like a deck of cards,
A spiral staircase made of glass shards.
The neighbor's blender bores through the wall.
Bachelor balances on his crutches
at the bottom of the stairs
Waiting for the bride to descend.

They say it’s supposed to snow tonight, I said.
That’s okay, she said, placing her hand on my arm.
I want you to stay. I’ll drive you to work
in the morning. The weathermen
are never right anyways.

I'm stiffening into metal 
one limb at a time.
The moon is a white hot forge. Melt and pour
into a sieve. She rolls over in bed.
There's fire down below. She needs
so much more. I stare up 
the carpeted stairs, waiting for her 
to spread her legs, to open the door.

A sheet thrown over a glass of milk.
The  moon is a urinal cake. The river overflows.
A crown, a bottle rack.
She pedals her exercise bike. 
Fan left whirring night after night. She claims
she can't sleep without it. 
Spokes spinning atop a rickety stool.
 
A tumbling smile.
I slide down the banister. Nuzzle
her Mona Lisa fuzz. Smoke rises from
smoldering coals.
The origin of the world
squeezed through twin peepholes.
A waterfall, a lantern, a fountain
The undulating hills,
My face buried in the snow

The aquarium froze and cracked. Fish turned
into shimmering gems. Bubbles hovering in place,
globes filled with her breath.
The frost-covered nest.
She curses when she comes.
A chessboard of lust. The queen's climax,
an overturned pawn. A melted shovel,
a statue of Duchamp sliced into facets.
Pillows and porcelain. Mortar and pestle.
Muse laid to rest in a snow globe cemetery.

The moon is a hole in the ice 
photographed from below. The engine belches smoke,
lurches to life, spits out copies of us. 
Ceramic plates strapped to our feet. 
Disks become shards
become spheres when they spin
The bachelors surround her. 
I'm no longer one of them. I'm turning to rust.

It snowed overnight
just like the weathermen had predicted.
She refused to get out of bed.
I checked the bus schedule,
strapped on my suit of gray glass armor
that reflected the gray glass sky
then shouldered my crutches 
and tramped down the stairs one last time 
to set out slowly across the fields of ice.