Attrition

Skinny Derek
sheathed in his rubber slicker
aims the nozzle of the leaf blower
at the wet leaves plastered
like pulp to the pavement.
Rainwater bristles his crew cut, drips
from the ends of his moustache.
His jacket glows orange in the grey mist
like a flame licking twigs into ash.

The sodden leaves cling tenaciously
to the concrete. Equally stubborn
and with brow furrowed Derek holds the blower
at crotch level, letting the tailpipe droop
until its tip scratches the cement.
The engine vibrates his back, the straps
slice into his shoulders.
Staring through the rain, he thinks
about Lucy. The way her skirt rode up
as she lurched from his car last night.
The tight-lipped look she flashed him
through the window as he peeled out
back towards his parents' house.

The roar of the engine
churns through his bulging headphones.
The gasoline fumes scorch his sinuses.
The rain relentlessly pricks the dirty earth.
The leaves glued to the ground beneath his boots
flutter in the blower's hot breath
but do not release their grip
or weaken their resolve,
do not fly loose.

Alternating Current

It won't be long before the idea
of feeding a coin into a box on a street corner
to buy a copy of the Daily Rag
will seem just as quaint as my grandfather's tale
(though probably fabricated)
of proposing to my grandmother
via telegram.
Soon we'll be waxing just as nostalgic
about computers. We'll giggle
when we see them in movies,
all those people typing away,
tapping their little screens.
We'll say to our kids
"I remember back when I was your age,
there was enough electricity
to run all sorts of fancy gadgets.
And the juice was cheap, cheap I tell you,
and it flowed all day, every day, uninterrupted,
with no end in sight."
And those damn punk kids
will roll their eyes and say,
"Don't bullshit us, old timer,"
and go back to pedaling
their human-powered generators.

Of course, maybe we won't be saying
anything at all
to anyone by then.
Maybe we'll just grunt, or communicate
with our eyes, with our minds,
not at all.
Maybe we'll become so self-absorbed
we'll no longer notice the other beings around us,
or get compacted into the dense mass
of a single organism, sharing a single mind.
We're halfway there now, though as I type this
we're still able to feign independence.
I hope that we don't completely forget
what these days were like, so that
if I describe a kicked-over newspaper box
lying on its side on the pavement,
door dented and hanging open
with a single thin daily
flopping out like a tongue,
you'll understand
what I'm talking about.

Evening Classes

From here on our backs,
we watch the planes scratch
chalk figures across the skylight.
The cats clamp down the sheets
like lumpy paperweights.
These mornings, curled up with you
between the pillars of books
stacked on the bedside tables
I review last night's lessons
and compose notes in my head
to pass to you
during detention

Pincushion

Paw's mistress, approaching 40, returns to the stage in an attempt to recapture some of the fame that has alluded her as she ages. She stars in a new production of the show that had cemented her reputation as the star of French opera. She reprises her role as the naive shepherdess seduced by the great Sun God. Robot putti stagehands stagger beneath her weight as they wheel her out amongst a herd of mechanical sheep that click stiffly across the stage. Even without legs, and with pancake powder plastered across the cracks in her face, she looks lovely. Her towering wig wobbles, top-heavy with rusty hinges and pigeon wings and bristling with thousands upon thousands of hairpins. There are only a dozen people in an audience composed of bored but blackmailed nobles fanning themselves and sipping weak creme de menthe and gnawing gummy crackers. As the pre-recorded orchestra swells, a huge golden eagle carved of wood is lugged out onto the stage. In her little wagon, the spherical shepherdess spins slow orbits round the gilded bird, warbling her devotional aria. The eagle's breast cracks open and a form slowly uncurls out from the yolk, stretches from the shell. Spiny black pinfeathers shiver across his shoulders as he spreads his wings wide. He cocks his head and glares down the length of his ebony beak at his adoring satellite. Paw, the Black Raptor of the Sun.

Bellevue Pumpkin

The tips of her toes rest on a skein of ice that coats the floorboards beneath her seat. She sits with her perfectly rounded back to the windows, beyond which the majestic view hangs, invisible to her. A countryside with no peer in beauty, true, but how long can one gaze at rolling fields, at the brown-blue water of the Seine? Not forever. And so she's done, been done for centuries, completely bored, cards slapped down on the table before her. The Louis XIV chair creaks beneath her enormous rear, upon which her corseted torso and head perch like an afterthought. Her plump little arms stick straight out like flippers as she flips the cards lethargically. She sighs, bloated with ennui. She's dimly aware that no one is around to see her cheat. The carpets down the hallways are carpeted with burst seed pods. Milkweed, phlox, digitalis. If only some visitor would arrive unannounced, to throw her bulk down into the digital pillows and electronic lace. She needs to sprout, this one, she knows that she will wither and rot if not plucked before the frost. Who shall have the strength and will, to shatter the ice that glazes the gourd?

Who indeed, thinks Paw.

Paraffin

Flat television screens line the walls of the chateau. They flash images of children playing dress-up in the lacy, frilly clothing of their parents. They are not Paw's children; these tykes are perfectly proportioned, smooth-skinned, rosy-cheeked and smiling, like little dolls. Their curls are adorned with woven wreaths of Queen Anne's lace. From out of the flat blue sky swoops a black eagle, riding an even blacker cloud. He flexes his talons and presses his eye to the window. His curled beak is sharp as a scythe. The images on the screen morph and melt. The eagle raps on the glass with his beak but the halls are empty. The servants are all pregnant and napping in the shade. Paw and his mistress are out taking a carriage ride along the river. The banks are spotted with holes carved by giant indigenous muskrats. Paw's mistress chatters on her cell phone. Her laughter explodes from her in great bursts. Finally Paw snatches the phone from her pudgy fingers and hurls it out the window, where it shatters the dark glass of the Seine. Weeks later, on a hunting expedition along those same Swiss cheese banks, Paw bags himself a monstrous muskrat, big as a rhino. The meat, if properly salted, will feed them for months. The beast's head is stuffed and mounted just the way Paw found it: with a cell phone caught between its incisors. Next to the head hangs the eagle, standing on his taxidermied cloud. And on the wall next to the eagle hangs the head of Paw's mistress, her skin still and smooth as wax, her mouth stitched in a smile. Her glass eyes reflect tiny images of the costumed children that flicker like ghosts up and down the halls.

Chaperon (Pangolin)

Deep below the ground, twisting through the bowels of Bellevue, lies a labyrinth of catacombs. Miles of passages tunnel through the countryside, a sort of French underground railroad allowing servants to slip like moles between the chateaus. Over the years the passages have become repositories for waste hurled down the gaping holes of the privies above. None of the nobles ever venture below, none that is except for Paw, whose high tolerance for filth and pungent odors is renowned. The damp and dark nooks make ideal places for trysts with ambitious chambermaids eager to fill their furrows with noble seed which Paw, that insatiable agriculturalist, is happy to sow. Lately though there have been rumors of something residing in the darkness, something other than the clockwork rats that click and whir along the roughly hewn corridors. Paw shrugs off such stories as fanciful fables born from the fertile imaginations of too-idle help. Then one day, when he is busy burrowing through the petticoats of an especially ripe kitchen maid, his ears fill with a sound. A squelchy plop, followed by a tinny clanking, then another plop. Something is inching its putrid way along the cobbles, getting closer. The giggling maid pays no attention, pinches his cheek to get his attention. But Paw has caught a whiff of something too strong to ignore. Pushing the girl aside he strikes a match, and there it is, an animated pile of filth and garbage, the size of a dog, flopping its way across the rough stone floor towards them. Pulpy insides ooze between an armored hide of tin lid scales as it shambles closer. The girl shrieks but Paw drops to one knee and holds his hand out to the putrid creature. It opens a wet, rotting maw and, unfurling a slab of tongue riddled with maggots, licks his hand. Paw's paternal smile illuminates the tunnel as his companion swoons.

Everything You Eat

An old man shuffles onto the bus and stands in the middle of the aisle, though there are plenty of empty seats. He wears an eye patch, which he's pushed up onto his forehead. A bulging grocery bag dangles from each of his hands. The handles have been stretched to strings of twisted plastic that slice into his purple fingers. The man slowly switches the bags from hand to hand but doesn't put them down. He staggers every time the bus makes a stop but he refuses to sit down.

A kid sitting in the front of the bus grips a guitar by its neck like a turkey. Thick tufts of hair sprout from his sleeves, covering the backs of his wrists. He smiles at everyone who gets on the bus, staring them in the face until someone new embarks. Next to him huddle a pair of tiny dykes of identical height and size, clutching twin paper coffee cups. Both girls thumb slim, shiny devices which they never look up from.

I sit sideways on the row of seats facing the back doors. Beside me sit two tiny children, a boy and a girl. Their father towers over them.

"How was the first person born?" the boy loudly asks his father.

"No, the question is, how was the first person born?" repeats his slightly larger sister.

"Hmm," says the father.

"It would be fun to swim in juice," says the boy. "What if the world was made of candy?"

"What if the world was made of salami?" asks his sister, sounding pleased with herself.

"Wouldn't you get tired of eating salami all the time?" asks the father.

The bus stops, lowers its ramp for an enormous woman in a wheelchair. The guy with the guitar and the two lesbians get up and move. The bus driver snaps the seats up to make room.

"But everything you eat reappears," the little boy says. I pull the yellow wire for my stop.

Bellevue Porcelain

At the urging of his therapist, Paw took up sculpting. Removing his wig and replacing his jacket with an apron, he picked up his chisel and hammer and sat before the marble block. He stared at its smooth blank face for hours. Veins like grey threads twisted through its white veneer. From the next room, he could hear his mistress singing, her voice careening through the halls, bouncing off the wainscoting. An old song from an early role, before she grew too plump to fit on the stage. Before her porcelain face became crazed with tiny hairline cracks. Raising the mallet, Paw made a single tiny chip in the stone. The block shuddered, shivered. He slid from his stool, backed up slowly. There came a crack like thunder and the block exploded, shards of stone flying everywhere, embedding themselves in the walls, the floor, Paw's tender flesh. When the clouds cleared there was nothing left of the block. A fine layer of dust coated everything. In the next room, Paw's mistress hit the highest note she's ever hit, and held it, and held it.

Bellevue Paladin

Peevish putti perch along the slippery lip of a sputtering fountain. Their boredom has made them irritable and restless, driven them to commit acts of vandalism. All day small fires have been erupting amongst the gardens, only to fizzle out in the light rain. One of the cherubs, with cellophane insect wings instead of feathers sprouting from his scapulae, huddles a little ways off by himself. In his chubby hands he absently turns a single black key extracted like a tooth from the grin of the palace harpsichord, the one Paw bought to accompany his mistress in her voice lessons. The fly-winged putto retreats to a shady corner and buries the key deep in the loamy soil. A few weeks later a tiny green sprout breaks through the crust. It takes a number of years for the harpsichord tree to reach its full stature. As its fruit slowly ripen, it becomes the main draw of the gardens. People flock from miles around to listen to to the wind stroke the strings of its fruit. Signs warn onlookers to stand a good distance away so as to keep from being crushed by the windfall. The putto stands at the garden gate, clutching a rusty shovel in place of a flaming sword to keep the undesirables out. Years later, when Paw's ancestors have finished frittering away the last of their inheritance, the entire grounds get sold. All the plants in the putti's playground are uprooted, the orchard chopped down to make way for a used car lot. If you drive by now you might spot that same churlish cherub, grown middle aged and paunchy, standing on the corner holding a poster that reads GREAT DEALS ON ALL MAKES AND MODELS! DRIVE ONE HOME TODAY! LOW INTEREST RATES! A litter of kids stares bored out the back window of a passing station wagon. Upon spying the putto they wave feverishly, praying for him to wave back. And, raising his hand very slowly, he does.

Bubble

A few weeks after I died, I went back to play with my big sister. I missed her a lot.

I found her at the playground playing Barbies. She squealed when she saw me. I was glad to see her too. It felt like it had been a long time. I don't like to play Barbies so we tried to play ball but it fell right through my hands. She laughed and kept throwing it and it kept falling through. After a while I said "Let's play something else" and reached for the jump rope but my fingers went right through and she laughed more. Then we tried the slide but my butt wouldn't stay on the slidy part. I couldn't push the swings or merry-go-round or anything so I just sort of floated there quietly while she chattered on and on.

She talked about Mom and Dad and how they'd been paying her a lot of extra attention lately. It was the first time I'd even thought about them. I didn't really miss Mom, and I couldn't picture Dad's face too good. I started to get kind of bored so I told her I had to go.

"Come back tomorrow," she said. I said okay.

The next day was Monday. I waited for her after school. When the bell rang a lot of my old classmates came out but they ran right by me which was good because I didn't really know what to say. I floated next to my sister as she walked home. It was weird to think that just a little while ago I'd walked home every day with her. She asked if I'd carry her backpack and laughed like crazy when the straps slipped right through my shoulders. I didn't say anything the rest of the way home.

She asked if I was gonna stay for supper and I said "No, I have to go back and eat with my new family". I didn't have any new family but I didn't know what else to tell her.

She asked what we were having and I said "Pizza. We have pizza every night and ice cream for dessert." I don't know why I said it.

She said "We're having chicken and green beans." Then she asked if maybe she could come eat with us. I told her I wasn't allowed to have any friends over.

She sighed and said "Okay. Will I see you tomorrow?"

I said "Maybe. I'm kinda busy."

I stayed away for a couple of days. When I went back, my sister was in the tub. She loves bath time. She had the tub all filled with bubbles and bath toys. I hate bath time. I mean, used to.

"There you are," she said, as I floated half in and out of the bubbles. She giggled as she tried to splash me. "You look like you're made of bubbles," she said. "You're all shiny and fuzzy."

"I'm not shiny," I said.

"Are too," she said. "Shiny shiny shiny."

She picked up the pink bottle of bubble bath. The bottle was shaped like a cartoon bubble man.

"You look just like Mr. Bubble," she said. "Maybe you should get married to him. Here, kiss your husband Mr. Bubble. Kiss him! Kiss him now! You're married to him!" She made kissing sounds with her lips.

"Stop it," I said, but she kept kissing. "I mean it."

"What are you going to do? Haunt me? I'm so scared!"

I sank until I was up to my eyes in suds and glared at her. She took the soap dish, which was shaped like a little rowboat, and floated it right between my eyes.

"Ooooh, look at the ghost pirate ship!" she cried. "Oooooh! Ooooooooooh! Help me! Help me! I'm scared of the pirate ghosts!"

I sank down in the water, sank down through the bottom of the tub until even the top of my head disappeared, and I never went back.

Daphne

My fingers poke through
the frayed tips of the gloves.

I stomp on the back of the shovel
and its blade crunches deep into the soil.

When I pull down on the handle
the mass of dandelion bulges up,
released from the earth.

I clutch the spiky leaves,
shake off the dirt that clings in clumps
to the hairy capillaries, to the pale chopped root.

Pink-tipped earthworms shrivel.
Grubs curl up. Spiders scurry
on their black stitches across the sod.

I lob the ragged weed
into the bin, tug off one glove
and brush the hair from my eyes.

Crouching nearby,
she glances over at me and smiles,
straw hat shading her face.
One pretty knee in the mud.

Her garden has lain fallow all winter.
Today I’ve left my bachelor pad
to help clear the weeds
to make way for azaleas, hydrangeas, Daphne.

The sun’s darts prick my skin.
My pants are caked with dirt.
My soles are planted firm
upon the damp and dark earth.

Still smiling, she goes back
to filling in the hole
around the young shrub,
imprisoning its roots in nourishing dirt
packed tight by her smooth, supple fingers.

As pulling on my glove
I resume my digging.