Downtown where Lead meets 3rd

two addicts were running from

two more addicts

to Animotion’s

Obsession

while I waited for the light

the first two disappeared between

two buildings

which shortly absorbed the second two

and it occurred to me that all four

of them were wearing brand new

parkas

what gives them away here

is their skin, but also their shoes

and also the way they run

not that I could judge them

beneath The Glenlivet

and

Vicodin

Sun

but the difference was

I hadn’t stolen anything

but I also didn’t give

a fuck about the parkas

because the desert

at night is fear

without mercy

in the blood of

addicts running

like wolves through

the garages downtown

and I was hoping

they’d pulled it off

and sure enough

two squad cars tore around

the rest of us at the light

cherries rolling

spotlights looking for the

four of them

but they were long gone

I turned up the song

and watched the sky burning pink

in the west

fronting a waiting

California

and the lost pages of Bandini

and years of colors drained now from

boulevards into

a life in the deep desert

I looked in the rearview

and thought about the house

my pups

the desk and all of it

the night that would be waiting

there

and while the music is fine

and the words do much

to keep you solid

there’s a gnawing

in the stomach

the heart,

the blood

that moves

so cautiously

across the broken things

they carry

to us still

and while we

know we’re

going to

make it through,

the loneliness

grows so heavy

it becomes

a lead sphere

inside of a lead sphere

but we count the years

like stars

lucky or not

shining or not

and it occurred to me there

that I was still lucky

any of us who can

take the time to

write

any of us who can

roll with the

day-to-day bullshit

that still gives way to

a night of poems,

of drinks,

of a pill in the mail from

a fellow writer taking effect

at sunset,

but any of us who still

have the metal left over

from the hours

we give

to sit and write

are lucky.

the light changed and I went ahead

and turned into a parking spot across the

street

where the song ended and

Mexican Radio started

and it occurred to me that every time

I hear that song on the radio

I’m somewhere prominent:

the sky to the west

ripping lines across

in pink, purple, orange

and grey

this bizarre

and magic

desert thing

above the dirt

and fields

and addicts.

Back home under The Glenlivet

and

Vicodin

Moon

counting the beauty

in Coltrane’s

Greensleeves

behind these keys,

counting

the bones

counting

the teeth

the words

that move the

blood back home

and the glory

of our time.

I don't know where it came from or where it's going but this ache in my chest is swallowing me whole

gaping and smiling its scraggly-tooth smile and this hop-scotch heart isn't skipping for joy I'm falling with anticipation of contact with the iceberg ground take a breath pull me in let me push cause I'll never feel safe again whole again home again I'm drowning in the cavern beneath my breast I'm watching clouds roll by and planes blow past as I sink as you reach for my hand but the truth is I'm done trying to stand so ready to melt into nothing cause my whole world is mist by now and I've always missed how the rain used to beat when there was no sign of cover and I wonder what skin feels like to the raindrops and I wonder if tear drops have ever kissed your face in sympathy and I wonder how my hand feels to yours cause you always felt so warm

so warm I could melt into nothing

hold on hold on I'm not ready to fly yet I'm not ready to die yet I just want to know how your hair feels to the wind and how your fingers feel to the crumpled pages of novels long forgotten and letters never lost let's remember let's forget and then remember again the way our eyes met

it has never been easy to undo your corkscrew heart and it's never been easy to pry me apart but I've seen all of you and you have seen all of me what's left but to leave

why's it so hard to leave?

Sometimes,

I lie awake at night,

And wonder where this is all going,

Where all of this will end,

And if I really want to know;

In the end,

I find that the end of all this,

Can either be the best thing ever seen,

Or the worst event of all time.

- Michael Hall

typing on the empty side

of an abandoned letter

but you will not see

the mistakes and laziness

-just the finished product

of another

motherfucking

poem.

…I’m bound by obligation. It’s the same as before, only now more gruesome, though mercifully fleeting. I watch her thick calves. She’s cooking something among the filth, the spilled and dried beans across the counter, the months-old cups and glasses filled with things horribly changed from what they were. Her cat runs over and takes a swipe at my dog. He looks at me with an eyebrow raised. I slam three glasses of wine and open the other bottle. I’m too tired to go anywhere else. I look at her ass wedged into her skirt. In her photos she was much thinner, much thinner. I owe her a fuck, though. I know it, she knows it, and Satan knows it. For the last 18 months we’ve been exchanging naked or near naked phone pictures. She got her taxes back early and sent me money for gas. I drink the wine and notice a pipe packed with weed on the table, next to a dried puddle that could be chocolate milk or beer. I tap it and look at her from my chair. Her broad back turns and she smiles at me, “Of course. I never smoke it, but I get it for some reason.”

I fish a lighter from the wreckage and light the bowl. She turns and keeps cooking. Her giant body is locked into my peripheral view. I think about her photos while I hold the hit. The devil whispers: It’s all in the angles, motherfucker. I nod at the living room and blow a cloud toward it. From the end of the pipe there are busted blinds, hairy carpet stained and uncared for, her belongings scattered across the place. I smell the thick and hot odor of cat shit from the bathroom. I follow it to the door. The litter box is full and spilling over with clumps of saturated grains and piles of feces. I piss, flush, and look at the tub. It’s dirty to the point of disturbing. I lived across the country as a kid, I stayed with junkies and punk rock rejects, I lived in the worst shit holes of New York City, Los Angeles, and the towns and scenes in between, and I have never been so repulsed. A rat crawling across the floor would give the place some dignity. I’ve been here for a total of twenty minutes and I’m already more drunk and high than I’ve been in a year. She sets the plates down. I don’t register what she’s made, but I eat it with her. Under the table, she runs the toe of her pump up my shin, “What are you thinking?”

I think she lives like an animal, but I tell her the food is delicious and I’m really stoned and happy to be out of San Francisco, which is true. I eat, drink, and smoke two more bowls until she’s bargained from her weight.

She’s on her back. Her legs are massive, pale flanks and they’re spread, bent at the knees. I’m looking down through the moonlight, which is fucking bright enough to beat the dark, and I see her naked, morbidly obese body and the reality hits my cock like tomahawks, but I keep going. The moon shines in the window and it makes a rolling neon marquee in purple, and the marquee spells words like fat, failure, rock bottom and suicide, and I let it roll while I keep going. I ask her to get on all fours. She manages the move and I’m moving in and out of the flanks. Her hair’s short and she’s grunting. My hips propel waves of fat over her back. I think about my father digging a trench. I had a job with him in Arizona on the same crew two years after my mother died. He’d been homeless until a fat woman herself took him in and bought him new teeth and health. He was lifting weights in the backyard during that time, and his body had become servile with bulk muscle and bad labor jobs. I’d moved into their place for a short time and we’d gotten the job together. The weed is strong and I’m looking down at her, pounding away while the devil whispers in my ear again: Look at you now, motherfucker, fucking the flanks of your father. He’s dead now, have some goddamn respect. Shame on you, motherfucker, shame... I have to stop and lay on my back, while she puts her weight on me and shuffles herself forward and back above my hips. Her stomach is anchored upon mine, and I hold strong and look at the window. There has to be more than this. The love I’ve lost because of jail, the traps I’ve sprung on myself because of my hatred for the workforce. All the people who read my work and write reviews and send me letters are in their warm living rooms, two cars in the garage and maybe one in the driveway. Shelves full of permanence embedded in photos, in proud souvenirs of commitment, rooms of furniture and success. It’s bad thinking, the city says to me. You’re a fucking writer, you’re a writer who lives your art, streamlines through the lies with beauty and fists. You suffer nothing you’re unaware of, boy. You alone create your living nightmare. Stand up and shake off the filth, the hot liquid shame that has found you at birth. There is something out there, boy, something in the world is moving in on you, something to find and keep you, to bring you home for good.

She’s wailing now, her head is back and she’s wailing at the ceiling, “HOLY FUCK! I’M COMING! YOU SON OF A BITCH I’M COMING!” She presses her fat palms into my chest, quivers then collapses onto me. I exhale quietly and deeply to support her weight. A big leg finds the floor and she presses off me and walks to the bathroom. I unroll the condom and jack off thinking about the girl who poured my coffee in Medford.

I peered into our spacious closet. Despite the airy room and the ceiling fan going strong, I could feel the sweat beading down the curves of my spine. I made my way to the drawers, shifting my way through the layers of chiffon and silk to find my favorite old cotton t-shirt. Finally I find it, hidden in the back corner, full of wrinkles, worn thin from years of being tumbled dry.

“Sweet Pea, what are you doing?” I froze with the shirt held out in front of me. My back turned to the honeyed voice in the door.

“Just wanted something to wear that breathed a little, the humidity is making me miserable.” I spoke in my most polite tone, lowering the shirt a little to hide it from view. “I thought you had gone into the office.”

I heard his feet move closer, a sinking feeling in my gut as his hands came down authoritatively on my shoulders.

“You know, I thought we had thrown that shirt out. Don’t you think you would be so much more comfortable in that yellow sundress I like so much?” He reached forward, taking the shirt in his hand, “You know the Carvers said they might stop by this afternoon, you wouldn’t want them to feel embarrassed because you weren’t put together, now would you?”

I force my tense shoulders to rotate with my legs, turning to face my husband, now in full control of the offensive shirt.

“Well, dear, I don’t know that they would be embarrassed to see me in a t-shirt and shorts, but no, I don’t mind wearing that sundress. Would you like for me to make anything special for when they come over?”

I see anger ripple across his features, gone before I could tell you exactly what it was that changed.

He stepped forward and wrapped me in his arms; I force my shoulders to relax, to curve into his embrace.

“Now Sweet Pea, you know I think you are beautiful no matter what, but I’m the only one who will ever think that. So don’t you think you should always try and look the best you can for everyone else?”

Tears threaten to come up as I feel my teeth jerk together. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of pulling away to see glassy, defeated eyes. Not this time.

“Texas is like a white trash Canada. It should feel like its own country, new and different, but it feels inbred. You seriously feel like a psychologist when you have to stay here, you feel like a genius in a field of retards.”

He leans forward and lights a cigarette. Coreen stares at us, “Oh. That’s not true at all. Texas has a lot of beauty to it. True, it has some bad qualities, but anywhere does.”

“Don’t try to sugarcoat a redneck shit sandwich.”

She shakes her head at him and looks over to me, “Oh, I don’t want to have to elaborate.”

—No time to elaborate. The fire and wind and flowers are fusing. I check my watch and wipe off the back of my neck. The cherry sunsets of Venus are lost, the vastness of its lemon iron heart is lost. Streets streaked with penny gold and laced velvet windows are gone now, gone forever, and where they once stood is now a city with a blank face. Sun dead and grey, fields which harvest nothing but replication of dirt and weeds. We have been left and forgotten here. Left to breathe, fuck, and rot. Which is fine. I imagine it was always like this. It was always a displaced sky. I smell their skin from across the room, sulfuric and salty. I remember Angel’s take on the ocean. She said it was delicious. I saw it for the first time in 6 years with her. We had parked by the pier in Pismo, and I’d tasted her stomach beneath the bloody wind. We had intercourse in full view of the water, and I convulsed into her from behind, holding up the back of her dress, yellow and bright, while she gripped the rail at the end of the pier. Two bums were fishing off the side behind us. We were quiet and heavy there, and gulls made hungry swoops close to us but the fishermen on the shore threw stones at them.

Angel rests her hand on my knee. We’ve been driving since Albuquerque. From there we had driven from Stockton. I’d met Angel while she was there with her parents. We had a three day fling. Her father was stationed in Germany. Her mother was from Spain. Her real father was doing life in a Spanish prison for murdering her mother’s lover, a teenage boy she’d met on the streets of Badalona. Her stepfather met her mother by chance somewhere in Europe. He’s from Stockton. Her mother was poor, and she married the bastard because she and her daughter were almost homeless. Angel is seventeen. I’m twenty-seven. Her stepfather used to stand in the shower behind her and masturbate. He never had sex with her, he said he was waiting until her eighteenth birthday. When Angel told her mother about it, her mother hit her and called her a liar. Angel is heartbroken over her mother. Angel’s English is broken and hot. She called me collect from Germany for half a year. The phone bills were insane. I didn’t care. When they flew back over before summer, Angel ran away from them and we hit the road. We’ve been on the run for weeks. We’re sitting in Dallas with my brother and his girlfriend. They know our story. Angel and Coreen have bonded like sisters. Coreen had similar problems with her mother’s husband, but her mother pressed charges and left him immediately when Coreen told her. The guy took a deal. He’s out now, but he’s out of the picture. Coreen and my brother are in their thirties. My brother builds houses. Coreen works at her mother’s cafe. Billy met Coreen in Phoenix. They lived there for a year. She wanted to move back to Texas.

Billy’s a tough motherfucker, but when it comes to Coreen he’s a small child. Coreen’s a tall, healthy Texas girl. She burns up any room she walks in. And now I have Angel, and Angel’s one sexy bitch. I hate to call her that, but she is, she’s the ultimate bitch. She’s tall and sculpted. Her skin is bronze fire. Her coal hair hangs in her face when she sleeps. Her lips are red and full. Her nose is flawless. Her eyes are deep black. When I watch her I can see God Himself rubbing his thumbs across her frontal lobe, smearing her brow with golden skin. He has a long beard with blood and flesh wiped across his smock. He crafted her as a completely separate project. When she talks my skin jumps. Her fingers are long and slim. Her feet are arched and smooth. Even her toes drop me to my knees. Angel loves me. Angel doesn’t love many people, maybe no others. She grew up hard and mean on the streets of Spain. She’s seen more death and disgust than any American. She likes to lick my eyes. I fight to keep them open while she does it, but I hang strong. She tells me my eyes are the doors to Heaven. She won’t let me cut my hair anymore. It hangs down to my chin. She bites it while we fuck. She tells me when we stop running somewhere she wants me to give us a baby. She talks about how beautiful the baby will be. She’s seen the child in her sleep. It is a boy and he is a perfect mixture of us and God. I don’t believe in God, but I don’t tell her that. I obsess over her ass and her thighs, over the grip of her sex. She sleeps nude on her side. I watch any available light carve around her body. She owns the Sun and the Moon, the ocean and the earth. All is her slave.

Billy lights two cigarettes and hands one over. Coreen doesn’t smoke. Angel won’t touch them. I take the smoke and blow rings over the table. Angel smiles and breaks the rings with her breath. She squeezes my arm and rests her knees on my lap. She turns eighteen in nine days. We’re getting married at the time of her birth. Angel’s mother became blind for survival. The prick she’s married to is in relentless pursuit of Angel with her. I know he married her mother to get Angel. I know he wants my head. They have the cops involved. He’s playing on that soldier bullshit. He’s an upper-ranks man now. I know it drives him batshit to think about my mouth in between Angel’s hot ass cheeks. It doesn’t matter. In nine days she’ll have my name. I only have fifteen hundred saved in my pocket. Billy is going to pay me cash to be a laborer. Angel is fine with being at the house with Coreen. She can go to work with her and help in Coreen’s mother’s shop. I don’t think Angel likes Texas. But she understands. One of my buddies lives down in Morelia, and he told me when I get some good coin saved up I can slip across the border with Angel and live there. Nobody gives a fuck about us in Mexico. Coreen goes into the kitchen to make drinks. My brother and I are flying on mescaline. It’s my first time. I’m sweating bullets. Angel laughs at me. I tell her I’m thirsty. She gets up and walks into the kitchen. Billy watches her ass, “Goddamn, man. You better hold onto that shit.”

“Tooth and nail.”

The girls come in with the drinks. Wild Turkey and water. Billy leans back with his drink, “So this cocksucker has a bead on you?”

Angel looks at me.

“Jad,” I say to her. She rolls her eyes and sets her drink down. Her breasts are fucking perfect. Her shoulders and neck, all of her screams at every moment. My brother glances into her dress. Coreen slaps him. He laughs, “His name’s Jad? Fuck, man. He was born to be an asshole.”

I put my smoke out and wipe the air clean for Angel’s face. She kisses my neck. I pick up the glass, “I bought the car off this dirtbag in Modesto. I transferred the plates and title in Reno. I insured it in Medford. It took a few days of zig-zagging, but we appear to be heading north.”

Billy smiles into the ashtray, “That was smart.”

“I’m not worried about it. If by some fucking chance they find me first I can say I had no idea about any of it. I’ve never met him. I’ve seen a few pictures. He doesn’t look too bright. But you can’t be sure.”

Angel picks up on some of the words. I rub her knee, “But if I can get a few months of straight work here, we’ll be alright. We can coast off the money in some Mexican shithole by the water, and come back in a few years.”

Billy takes a long drink from his whiskey and lights another smoke. A drop of sweat plunges from his brow into the paper. It wears the paper away and the tobacco creeps up to the surface. He laughs and sets it on the table, lights a new one. Coreen grabs the empties and goes to pour the refills. Angel kisses me and runs after her to help. Billy and I stare at each other and sweat. He peers over my shoulder. I look back and watch the guy across the street park his truck on the lawn. Billy laughs. Coreen sets the drinks down on the coffee table and lets the dog out. Angel comes in and takes her place by my side.

I climbed a mountain and sat there on a palm shaped rock, looking out over the towns. The whole world was something, or it was supposed to be, and the faces were supposed from something, but everything had fallen short because the two of them were tangled together and helpless now.

It always bothered me that the fruit was fake. There were a lot of other fake things in the room: faux furs, prints of famous paintings, the plastic wood in the fireplace. It was the fruit that bothered me, though. I always wanted to take a bite of it, ever since I was a kid. Apples and bananas and a shiny pomegranate that just begged to be eaten. Except if I took a bite I might break my teeth on it, taste the rubbery surface. False sweetness.

My aunt was like a centerpiece to it all. She was orderly but rarely dusted, and much of her décor had only been hip back in the seventies. She fought age with hair dye and silicone breasts. Her eyelashes jutted out way too far to be natural. They left little rabbit trails of black mascara beneath her eyebrows.

When she hugged me, I felt my bones crunch and grind. It was like she was trying to pull me into herself. Like she was some old witch, feasting on the blood of young virgins so that the wrinkles in her skin might smooth out. “There’s auntie’s honey!” She’d say. “There’s auntie’s baby!” She’d plant a wet smack of a kiss on my head that was somehow always cold.

She was the black sheep. Maybe at first she was ashamed about it, but she wasn’t anymore. She went to family gatherings with head held high. She’d been married four times. Three of her exes had been married men when she stole them away. They whispered ‘homewrecker’ behind her back at first, but she stole that from them and put it on like a badge. She threw open the doors with the word burning on lips stretched in a fierce and defiant smile. They couldn’t use it against her anymore.

I think she died long before they put her in the coffin. Mother always said that grandpa never liked her like the other kids. Maybe that was why she turned out how she did. Or maybe it was that boy in high school who took her innocence and broke her heart. I think that was the only time she cried, when my aunt told me that story. The tear carved a furrow in her makeup.

I would never say it out loud, but I bet she’s happier dead. Everyone’s clicking their rosary beads together for her. Rising, falling, hailing Mary full of grace pray for us now in the hour. They’re trying to pray her into heaven, trying to guide her to the gates.

I don’t think they need to. I think she’s just going to push her way through them.

on the floor

lines divide

themselves

into areas

the area of the poor

the diseased

the areas of talkers

the areas of dreamers

of suicide

all multiplied by the sorrow

I sit in the midwest and

and smoke reds

on a sunday morning

garbage strewn across the floor

death sitting in every

corner of the place

60 bucks in my wallet, a dog,

enough possessions that I

would need

a car to move them

2 days of eggs in the fridge

sitting in the midwest

on a sunday morning

hating my instincts

and

the days here

and the nights here

keep blending, melting together

into one long haze

divided by the lines in my heart and belly

divided by vacuuming the rug

and sleeping in stints of hours

multiplied by the sorrow again

as the dryer bangs away in the next room

as a cricket sings electric in the dark

below my floorboard

as the locusts gather to shed in the late summer

with the lightning bug retreating

while my body

deteriorates from lack of nutrients

the dream hardening

each day of flatness

the dryer banging away

somebody should secure

that damned thing.