--SOMETIMES IT’S SAFER WHEN THERE’S NO WAY OUT

…I have a new story up this morning at Intrinsic Magazine:

http://www.intrinsick.com/stories/quicksand

…Right now the lake is boiling, or at least it looks that way.  It’s raining so the hardest I’ve ever seen rain fall, and it’s pretty.  There were some sheaths of fog lodged between the evergreens on the other side of the lake but now the rain has broken those up and they look like dragons moving in slow motion, as if secretly trying to escape from the tree limbs.

…I started a story (or maybe novel) about an idea I’ve had for a while.  It’s just a vague idea right now having to do with an Elvis impersonator.  I don’t have much more than that.

Here’s the start:

                                                     My Life with Elvis Presley

            Elvis is drunk again, wobbling and leaning on the upstairs banister for support with an invisible microphone in his hand, warbling Hunk-a-hunk-a-burning love like a walrus in pain.

            He’s fat Elvis, with his prosthetic stomach bulging over a wooden rail, a trail of belly hair applied to make it seem real, believable.  He wears a white one-piece jump suit, bejeweled with all kinds of silver studs and white leather fringe, a massive trucker belt buckle.  His shirt collars are pointed and as long as the pizza slices they serve at Shakey’s.

            “Dad,” I say, “what are you doing?  You don’t have a show tonight.” 

My dad has worked as an Elvis impersonator for ten years now.  It’s his obsession and he’s pretty good at it when he’s not drunk, which isn’t very often, since, like me, he’s still trying to cope with my mother’s affair that’s left us without her.

            He wipes away a sling of white jaw drool, accidentally lifting a mutton chop side burn off his face.  The faux hair floats in the air like a patch of black lawn before landing an inch from my feet. 

“Practicing,” he says with a drawl and lopsided sneer, in full Elvis mode, if not also sloppily.

            Even from such a low height, there would be some kind of carnage if he fell.  Dad’s the parent around here, but the truth is I’m the one who takes care of us.

            When I start toward the steps, he sticks out his arm and palm like a school bus stop sign—“Hold on, Lisa Marie.  Hold on right there, darlin’.  I can make my own way.”

            Lisa Marie is my real name, but McBride is my last.  Probably his whole life my dad was dying to have a girl so he could bestow her with the same name as Elvis’s baby girl.

            I watch him sway in place, in an unsteady orbit up there on the landing, hoping he doesn’t topple or spew.

            “Dad?”

            “I’m good, kid.”

            His footfalls down the stairs make the house shudder.  In reality he only weighs one hundred fifty-five pounds, with the prosthetic gut, maybe one fifty-seven.

            Before Mom ran away with Mr. Eglington, Dad was a fairly healthy one ninety-five.  Before Mom ran off things were still quirky, but they were good.  Before Mom ran off I thought my parents were happily married, so I guess that says a great deal about my powers of observation or my understanding of what love is.

            I do quick math: one ninety-five subtracted by one fifty-five equals forty, divided by nineteen (months) equals, what?  How many pounds lost per month?  Hell, I don’t know.  I really suck at math.

            “You’re so skinny.”

            “I am absolutely nothing of the kind,” he says, slurring hard, trying to focus on me as he comes down.  “You, on the other hand, are nothing but a sparrow.”

            I know what that really means, where it came from.  When she was still around, Mom used to call me Birdy.  When I was a little girl I once found a wounded robin in the back yard.  It was hobbling on one leg and going zeee-up! Zeee-up! Zeee-up!  I brought it into the house, got online and figured out how to nurse it back to health.  After I let it free outside, I was Birdy to Mom from then on.

            I watch him gauge the last step, as if it’s a plate of squirmy snakes, his eyes equally squirmy.  He misses it entirely, and falls forward in a heave, but I catch him by the shoulders.  After all, he’s light—one hundred and fifty-five (or one hundred fifty-seven pounds).

            His fake belly ends up in my hands, my palms.  It feels moist, gluey, like an egg fried over easy.

            But he doesn’t fall down or hurt himself.  That’s good.

            “Dad,” I say.  “Dad.  Dad.  Dad.”

            “Oh, honey bee,” he says, leaning over me his hot breath smelling of alcohol.

            “Are you going to throw up?”

            He burps but positions his hand so the worst of the odor misses me.

            “I don’t think so, no.”

--I’M JUST THINKING OUT LOUD HERE

Hurricane Javier

One of us is eating the other

While the gulls have lost their way

There are monsoons all around

Lifting cars off the roads

Shuttling cities to and fro

Tossing drug lords into trees

In the distance a baby wails

Along with the sour-coated wind

As the poorest of us float

Or swim

Or drown

Down a water gully without end

We heard it was coming

But not how hard

How fast

How sudden

Such is the news around here

A slow-motion bullet

Dragonflies will run the world

When everything finally dries out

Nothing really damaged

Nothing really changed

Stealing Baby Formula

Stealing baby formula

Is not as easy as you think

The aisles have eyes

The racks are cameras

The junk food is a caravan of spies

Stealing baby formula in a mercado

Is a ticket to a barred room

Beatings

Separation anxiety

And revisiting motives

But the baby formula is there

And the baby is way over there

Where you left it

The clerk has a gun beneath the counter

The floor is slick with spilled soda

Leftover blood

And piss

The air spiced like tamales

Flood lights buzzing,

Flickering like alarms or Morse code

And still you do it

Stuff and run

Fast as a frightened gecko

Never turning back

Not sure if

The gunshots are real

Or imagined

Each twhack! a reminder that

You’re under constant attack

That you’ve at least

Made it this far

Beach Vendor

She is a hundred years old

Or sixty

A slow tortoise

Slogging down a tawny beach

With a hundred colors

Slung over her shoulders

Across her back

Tied in a jangly turban on her head

Gems and stones

Some fake some real

All them discovered and  

Threaded together

By weathered brown hands

One piece sold

Means a tortilla to eat

Two pieces a slight lunch

Three or four a miracle

Under parasols

And palm trees

The lazy lucky rich ones

Shoo her away

Time and time again

While the tortoise goes on

Her babies

And their babies

And their babies’ babies

Starving at home

Mewling for milk

Gasping for air

The sounds out of their mouth

Sheer as a frail scarf

A hiss

Almost as if they’re repeating

The same word over and over--

Silver

Silver

Silver, please?

Well Played

The boy is my son’s age

A sixth the size of him

But dark as bark

Bony

A skeleton really

Yet smiling

With the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen

“Senor, magic trick for Pesos?” he asks

I hand him two US dollars

Tell him to get on with it already

But nothing happens

“What the hell was that?” I ask

He trots across the sloped beach sand

Still grinning wide

Giving me two thumbs up

Back in the hotel room

I realize he’s filched my wallet somehow

And I wish he was here

To watch me smile back

--I’M AN UGLY MAN WHEN YOU’RE NOT AROUND

…Hey Monday, what have you got going on tonight?

 …The thing about fall is you can feel it in your toes, especially if you go barefoot.  And the shroud of darkness that closes around each day so early.  And the messy cedar shavings all over the driveway and road.  Other than that, I’m fine with fall.

 …I’ve been getting a lot of poetry rejections of late.  I wonder if I suck at poetry.  I wonder if I’m not even a poet at all.

I’ll keep writing poems, but you tell me:

Sublimation

The needle’s loaded and

I am looking for a new vein,

one that hasn’t collapsed

or wormed away.

The room downstairs is where I hide,

in a corner as shadows stripe my chest

with air the width of rice paper.

I am filling my gun with minutes

and layers of leftover skin,

linking one moment to the next

with regret and remorse

while butterflies go roller skating outside the house

and two stray fawns do the tango on the lawn.

No one believes me anymore

and that’s okay.

No one believes in me anymore

and that’s why I’m jogging in place

underwater,

shielding myself from the hot foot of the sun

that wants to tamp me out

as if I’m a well-spent cigarette.

I am slipping through the seams

of a new house

abandoned by former lovers.

Down the hall

in the last room on the left

on the duvet

there is a note which says

Welcome Home.

Plath

I keep dreaming of Sylvia

Plath

and in the morning on my pillow case

the word

Ariel is stamped on the cloth

inside a braid of bumble bees that someone has sketched.

Can you tell another living soul of such things,

that a strong voice from the past has grabbed your heart

and throat?

No one understands,

not my wife or daughter mother neighbor.

Even the chairs are mute

as the oven stares me in the eye.

1969

I am a half-formed boy/man

waiting for the sun to bloom inside me

while a V of geese fly by,

honking miserably and energetically overhead,

skimming the belly of gray-white clouds.

My older, fully-formed brother

skips stones across dark water,

him as sullen as a dead tree.

In the trailer near the campsite the war drags on

and I imagine the word Marriage written in barbwire,

the tips of metal tinted crimson.

Without thinking I strip and dive into the lake.

I can’t see the other side

but I aim for it anyway.

Tree Storms

The way the trees bend down

tells me they have something important to say,

flapping their arms madly in the wind,

not a bird or squirrel in sight,

just these hysterical tress.

They have seen so much—

births and beauty,

destruction and death.

The shortest of them whispers my name like a snake

with a bad case of cottonmouth.

He says, “Stand on your tiptoes if you have to, Boy.”

He asks, “Are you afraid?”

One of them landed on my father once, years ago,

somewhere around here,

when I was just an infant.

“What’s in your hands?” another tree asks,

but I’m not here for small talk.

I spritz gasoline on the bed of pine needles,

take a lighter from my pocket,

shout Dad’s name and release

the jagged flame.

The Yellow Sparrow

The yellow sparrow

tells me:

There are no more tragedies to write.

All of the love songs have already been taken.

Every hero is someone else’s enemy.

Time dances like the wind is on fire.

Put on a flak jacket

and make something of yourself

--YOU ARE MY SWEETEST DOWNFALL

…Got a haircut this morning.  Everyone there was decked out in Hawks jerseys.  Went to Starbucks.  Same thing with the baristas and customers.  Drove home.  Hawk flags on every eighth car.  My little town loves them some Seahawks.  Or maybe there's nothing else to love.  Either way, it made me a bit happy.

 …Random fact:

Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy said in a 1861 speech that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

I think this is why people don’t like seeing the Confederate flag and why I wish people around my down wouldn’t go around with it on their trucks and boats.

Good grief.

 …Here is the hit list from Facebook friends last week:

 Pity for the miserable old woman who: Whispered loudly to her husband *pregnant girls like [me]* should not be drinking coffee.****When did I get pregnant?!? I missed the memo

 Thanks neighbors happy Friday! Let me know how being a little bitch is working out for you!

I went to a sad wedding the other day.  Even the cake was in tiers.

Always remember: The less people have to think, the more likes your post will get.

Madness is kind of fun

I want someone to make me a crown of tampons to wear on my head for the rest of tour. With red glitter all over it.

 lost on a $1 scratch ticket, tossed it at the trash, missed, called it a piece of shit, felt bad for everyone involved.

 Facebook for writers is the new Paris of the 1920s. I mean, we all HANG OUT! We just happen to be a bit invisible.

 Sometimes i just wanna punch something

--MY HEAD’S UNDERWATER

...I wrote these today:

 Life Support

But first

There is the end

The tugging and nudging

The push and pull

Of past voices

Trying to remind you of

What you once were

The miles you’ve traveled

A billion breaths taken

An atlas etched into your face

As if by a hasty sculptor

Listen to me if you can

In the end we begin again

Two souls entwined

Though loosely

Like sheer scarves

Dancing with the wind

The Clouds Spell Surrender

The way this works

Is you disavow me

Destroy my charms and confidence

Whether by blowtorch or machete

The trees tell me you’ve tested negative

The water wants to warn me about your friends

There is only so much plasma in a human body

I leave mine on the bedroom floor

In the driveway

The woods

On a jagged stretch of road

Leading straight to Birmingham

Along the way the sun

Nudges my knees like a needy dog

The clouds spell surrender

But I do not

 August Noon

Our souls at night

Remind us

Of half-formed girls

How they tittered birdlike

Under sweeping willow tree limbs

That August Noon

With their Fruit-of-the-Loom’s

Bleached white as painted fences

Looking back now

Feels like an arm is reaching up

Through my throat

No mercy spared

No mercy asked for

Stretching and groping

Trying to reclaim something from the past

That was taken from someone else

Unwillingly

Full Moon

The sun is adamant that I’m wrong

The moon is an accuser

Which is why

I’ve drawn the blinds and have

Unplugged every cord and wire

My wife arrives after nine

Late like yesterday

And the day before

She reeks of Polo cologne

Frog legs and garlic

Gives me a swift kiss

Asks have I noticed that the moon

Is full and blue-white

Like our bed sheets

Anniversary

There are no rivers here

Only deep pockets of caked mud

Walrus tusks

And bird’s eyes

Pecked out by other famished birds

This is how it goes

Seventh year

Seventh death by seventh death

Happy Anniversary, Baby

Congratulations

We made it

--HOME?  THAT SOUNDS NICE, BUT WHERE IS THAT EXACTLY?

…This is about Joanna.  I just love her to death ( I mean, come on: “you were knocking me down with the palm (palm!) of your eye?).

You likely won’t her as much, if at all.

My best friend said she sounded like a cat being tortured.

Anyway, here are the lyrics to the song tagged below:

Peach Plum Pear

We speak in the store
I'm a sensitive bore
and you're markedly more
and I'm oozing surprise

But it's late in the day
and you're well on your way
what was golden went gray
and I'm suddenly shy

And all the gathering floozies
afford to be choosy
and all sneezing darkly
in the dimming divide

I have read the right books
to interpret your looks
you were knocking me down
with the palm of your eye

This is unlike the story
it was written to be
you were riding its back
when it used to ride me

We were galloping manic
to the mouth of the source
we were swallowing panic
in the face of its force

and I am blue
I am blue and unwell,
make me bolt like a horse.

Now it's done.
Watch it go.
You've changed some.
Water running from the snow.

Am I so dear?
Do I run rare?
And you've changed some:
peach, plum, pear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcHjAUhtSrk

Her phrasings and explanations are great in this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/18/joanna-newsom-it-was-tonic-to-know-not-insane-interview

…Getting the new album, for sure.

Peach.

Plum.

Pear...

--I’M TRAGICALLY FLAWED, BUT I HAVE A GOOD HEART    

           

                                                              Baby, Baby, Baby

We are desperate, or I am.  Yes, it’s me.  I go to lengths.  I take my husband’s hollow silences and try to fill them with code but he snickers or re-fingers the remote.

I get masseuse lessons.  When I come home I say, “Do you want your neck worked on, you look stiff,” but he only whinnies at me.

I find hair in the sink.  Blonde.  Long.  He reminds me he is a custodian.  He sweeps the whole mall, even Cutter’s Salon.

            I buy plastic sheets and a vat of baby oil as one magazine recommends.  I dress in stilettoes and two pieces of string.  I lock the door and insert the key in a private place he’ll have to reach.  So, we slip and slide.  My eyes burn from splashes of oil.  One of us sweats a small lake.  When we are through, he showers, then slinks off to watch Sports Center.  In the morning I say, “You didn’t come back, why not?” and he tells me he thought I’d be sleeping.

            I say, “I’m going on a trip.”

He says, “Fine by me.  How long?”

            I say, “A while.”

            I land in the tropics.  It’s like a Malaysian fat farm but better.  I get liposuction.  I apply lip plumper.  I wax what’s never been waxed.  I get a cut and dye job, going red.  I bleach my teeth.  Buy a Pucci-print dress and Channel bag.  I get piercings below the neck.

            When I come home, my husband is all nerves, a jumping bowl of spaghetti.  His eyes jerk like pinballs.  When I ask if I should get the oil, grab the plastic sheet, he chuckles, tells me we don’t need it.  He keeps humming, “Baby, baby, baby.”

            I can’t get enough air.  He’s gained weight while I’ve been gone.  He smells like ammonia and has a forest of black nose hair I never noticed.  When we kiss I can feel canker sores in his mouth.

            He asks, “Round two?”  Then after that, “Ready for a hat trick?”

            He wants me.  All the time.  I tell him I need a break.  He says, no.  I complain, threaten to go back to the old me.  He says there’s no going back, calls me Baby, Baby, Baby.

            When he comes home from work the next night I can hear him panting.  He opens the bedroom door with a flourish.  “What the?”

            I’ve shaved my head.  I don’t have any makeup on.  I’m wearing my flannel pj’s with the poodles on them.  I’m eating my second tub of Ben and Jerry’s that’s given me a awful case of flatulence. 

            When he steps closer, I burp up a little cloud of Chunky Monkey.

                                                                        ***                 

Now it’s years later.  We’ve eaten dinner and dessert.  We’re sitting in a booth by the window.  My husband runs a toothpick through the gulley between his teeth.  He reads a magazine about tattoos and motorcycles.  I stare past my reflection in the glass at a young couple wrestling in the front seat.  I wonder if he calls her Baby.

            Inside the diner, there’s Muzak playing: “Here Comes the Sun.”  Oh, and there’s you and your girlfriend.  You look nice together, like a twin sweater set, yet you both look away.  Good thing I’ve still got my hearing. 

Your girlfriend whispers, “Can you believe it?  They haven’t even said one word the whole time.”

            You rip a hunk of meat from a gray slab of chicken, and let it wobble against your wrist.

            “I hope we never get like that when we get old.”

            “Here,” you say, flapping the greasy meat, “take a bite.”

            “That’s so gross.”

            “Come on.”  And then you do it, call her, Baby.  And she does it, too.  She eats the meat right off your fingers, says, “Sugar, you know I’d do anything for you.”