Addict

There is a man up the street. He is lanky, and rugged, and his dark eyes flicker between intelligence and ignorance. He prefers the latter. He has a funny sideways way of looking at me when I play with my brother in our driveway, he wants my reassurance. But I cannot give it to him. I see that he is a man who likes to laugh. When his friends come to visit they stand in his driveway smoking cigarettes and laughing. His gestures become very dramatic, a caricature of his lanky scarecrow outline, and his eyes try to cling to the intelligence. They can’t. Because he spends so much time trying to blink it out when his friends aren’t around.

I don’t see much of his wife. She would not attract my attention at all—and I think she tries to make herself that way—if it weren’t for the night my brother and I saw her pass out on her front walk. We were supposed to be in bed, but we were sitting on the roof sharing ghost stories instead. A white car drove up to our neighbor’s house, and she wobbled out. She stood in her driveway smoking a cigarette before she tried to go in, she didn’t look well. The cigarette kept missing her mouth, and once or twice I saw her burn a hole in her long skirt. The moon was bright, but it was hard to see her standing there on the driveway. Her pale glowing face was there, the orange ember on the cigarette kept floating up to it, her body and cigarette were very solid images, but her gestures weren’t. It was very hard to focus on her because the garage door behind her gave off more of an aura. She is a woman who does not try to be anything but her circumstances, and it is hard to see her. 

She fell when she turned to go in. Something went wrong with the way she turned, she forgot to move this foot or that foot, and she landed on her side without letting out a single sound. 

...

Translator

"Las fresas son deliciosas. Deslizan hacia abajo su esófago. Parecen a pequeñas piernas de cangrejo."

"Strawberries are delicious. They slide down your esophagus. They look like little crab legs."

Strawberries are hideous. Their brown little seeds like insect eggs dimpling their ripe skin. Their guts look like the pink stratified flesh of some foreign sea urchin. Alien flesh. Organic vegetable flesh dressed as carne de cangrejo. When you twist the large ones, the dimpled seeds do a lewd little dance while the strawberry throbs like a bug infested heart.

NPR

One can't help but be discouraged when they wake up to hear about the Food Crisis. It's like part of a dream for one who doesn't keep up with the news.

Food crisis?

It's the beginning of a new era in America. The news tingled through her ears, through the last shreds of unconsciousness, and woke her up.

There will be shortage, hunger, miserable pinched faces waiting at soup kitchens. And yours among them. The country may or may not ever recover. This is the beginning of the history books' description of the Depression. Black and white photos that well-fed 10 year-olds simply cannot believe are real.

As she gets dressed, the Depression is already settled, Black, on her stomach.

...

Greatest Fear

In the search of the thing that separates me from you.

"Every snowflake is unique.
"But who ever notices the difference?"
"Blizzard's coming."

Lines from a play written for an audience. But it's true. In the blizzard I constructed the thing that separates you from me. That's not what I wanted. It's the pride in distinction/ignorance of the lack, that prevents me from tearing it down.

A plumed hat exclaims, "How deep!"
"My, yes," costume jewelry sparkles out of melting cleavage, "This child appears to know all the proper footfalls."
"It can pontificate!" The senile old heiress knows. The scent of mothballs is ripe on her paper gown, but her decayed brain still holds a sharp intellect. The one she tried to blunt. Grey glue stiffening around a glittering blade. Anyway, what good is a blade without a hand to wield it? And what good is a sword stuck in stone? And what good does it do to be a unique snowflake in a blizzard, and especially when snowflakes don't have eyes?

Such a question is enough to make the glue around her sword quiver and crack. Meaningless, two-dimensional question presented on an ocean platform. Any diver off this platform will break their neck in the chlorinated wading pool below. A legion of paraplegic recruits to follow me into the underworld. The plumed hat dives. The melted cleavage dives. The heiress frowns. She knows she has to dive with me. Because her blade is encased in polymer glue, because she used it to chop off her right hand, because she chose to do these things. The quivering polymer irritates her brain, makes it feel unwieldy and unreasonably heavy. The scowl on her face as she poises, arms raised, is the last sincere expression she will have access to. She is irate over her descent.

There is some twitching of limbs, some spasmodic nerves resisting sway. Then my disfigured legion rises, drooling, and zombie-like.

You beckon to me with wide open gestures. "Help yourself darling," you have abandoned your paper gown. I wish I had not done this.

Snapped Spine

I killed myself because of the scissored lips that sliced on me and the crippled mass rotting inside of me. When I gave up on those things, that those lips would be splitting plums and the cripple an Olympist, I gave up on everything.

When I blinked and realized the erotic strangle hold that he had on sexism, I gave up. Because of the writhing climax he attains by using his mother as the lightning rod that grounds him. Because he'd rather have that climax than me.

The sluicing eyes look like instinct, they cut away so deftly. There's no twinkle. There's no recognition. They will cleave a channel through you under the guise of a joke. I will let them and laugh. Everyone needs to laugh.

There is a corpse in this room, floating sideways. Tied by the ankle to cement blocks. X-ed eyes and yarn for hair. It's as if he stood up one morning, one perfectly normal morning, blueberries ripe on the bush, but this body stayed weighted behind. Purple stains swelling around these turgid veins.

Veins. That web through. Because of the sluicing, slicing, splitting purple in the plums.

And every open hand clenches into a fist, the taut bonnet of a venomous snake.

New Friend

I could Talk.

I could ... Let open the cracks,

golden, glowing,

running up the tree trunk.

The creaking, springing, flexing,

And crumbling

Widening of tree cracks.

I could Spring

forth. Into bloom.

Like some daily quivering bud

tickling out of fingertips.

I could be watered and shade

All at once.