Spoon Me: Short Stories from Brooklyn

By Gabriel Leif Bellman

SPOON ME will keep you up like a line of cocaine on the Queens nipple, put you down like a vomiting baby, move your sofa like a friend with a bad back, decline your invitation like it conflicted with a tour of a chocolate factory, offer you advice like your own mother after two shots of tequila, spur your advances like a date with the Pope, and make sense of all your Mustang Ranch marriage licenses like a Nevada judge. Written in gold silk from the melted remains of Egyptian gods by an eighth century mystic on the quills of an extinct peacock species and then recovered on the bottom of the ocean by a shark-bitten surfer, SPOON ME is that rare work of fiction that comes along suddenly and ends up in your bed, curled around your body, keeping you warm, snuggling and nestling against you so you feel that rare sense of perfection in the moment as it is actually happening. It is a book that whispers to you, that you can whisper to spoon me

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 13, 2002
• ISBN: 9781462824656

Gabriel Leif Bellman

Gabriel Leif Bellman was born in Eugene, Oregon. He was awarded a Bachelors from USCs School of Cinematic Arts (95), a Masters from New York University (99), and a Juris Doctorate from U. C. Hastings ('05). He has been a high-school teacher; MTV producer; umbrella salesman; restaurant host; dishwasher; lumber feeder; assembly liner; slam poet; warehouse stacker; SOMA magazine correspondent; opera composer at Juilliard, groundskeeper; and Playboy assistant. He has worked construction (Mexico); lived abroad (Spain, Ireland, Holland); and devoted extensive time to traveling (Europe, North Africa, the United States, Middle East, and Caribbean). He directed a film while traveling with the circus in Ireland (Duffys Irish Circus 2005). He has worked with female prisoners in California. Currently, Mr. Bellman lives in San Francisco where he is an attorney. One of the underrated 3-point shooters of his generation, Mr. Bellman won the Los Angeles city hoops championship in 1995. His agent gladly fields calls about his NBA availability (he will only sign with a title contender).

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Copyright © 2002 by Gabriel Leif Bellman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author‘s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

For the people

who are floating

Quartz

Show me

The two of them in 7

pumpkin face

Old Man

Circle cow

Pump

Look

Port

Cactus

Tears, worrying, waiting:

A Three Part Harmony

downstairs

Declare

Typing

Idea

Enchilada

Double dip

Tanlines

Covers

Armrest

Body

Tie dog

Words

Wit

Word

Well

Vtine

swim

Spine

Singing grove

Sheep

Rib

Rainbow

Punkass

Phone

noose

28

Probably not

No call

Dogs

Chalk

Nerd

Neck

My

Miss

The dog fell

Test

Stare

Pavement

The babe

Mildew

Lightning

Kitten

Friend

heart

Hear

Hairless

For you

Etherphem

Back

The giving she

Three

shame

Yomkipporpourri

Bold it

Zebra

Work

Vanilla

Try

emergency

Egg

Chain o love

Blowdart

Sunspots

Evening song

Blank

alive

BICYCLE

BULLET

SITTING AT THE BAR

insulting

Holiday letter

Caboose

FEET

HAPPENS

Lai

carrot foot

Believe

yes

yeah

What would you have done

Thum scream

fire

Monkey

Stink

Funeral

Friend

Sitting

Sapien

Sand

Prison

poked

Palomino

New

Man fish

If only it was as easy

I was so lonely

Heart

Change

Found

Door

dear frank

Chestburn

change

Broccoli

Owlin ‘

Bowlin ‘

Blue

Banana

Baby

blunt

Poked

Accent

The club

Blades of grass

Graybeard

Barrel

Constant sorrow

Smell

Open

horseshoes

Seems

Room song

real

Parrot

No you

Night

Monkey

Message

Mail

last

Jumping monkey

On the bus

The orange

spilled guts

Help

hands

Goat

georgia

Fist

fig tree

Eyes

Wake up

Detergent

Curled

Cat

Car play

Bother

bathroom

Apples

Anyway

what to write

missing leg

Scapegoat

Bathing With Your Bad Self

All alone

It

Weekend

Mom

Morning

Nice

Riding horses

Fatherday

Waste

emmanuela

True

Test

Sushi

Stole

Squished

Snap

Skin

Right angle

Pound

Paint

Noggin

Movie

Lone

Life

Late

It wasn’t

Try

Ike

I slept all day

Hamburger

Hallway

Forty times

First

Finger

Turkey fingers

Exactly

Efficiency

Dogs

Cushion

Cow Dylan

Clipped

Circus

Candy

Bull

Bitterknife

Bill replaced

Tomorrow

Speech

Parrots

Paralyzed

Outside chance

Necklace

Late

Huge

Evening hope

enjoy yourself

Earlier

Drive in burger

Dinner

Back

Wilson Reunion Speech Ten Year

Where

Wall

Today

Mittens

Lobster

Hazards

Emmanuela

dog

Changed

Building911

Hundred floors

bones

Osama

Necks

Maybe

Gregbday

Footsteps

Fever

Escape

Bored

Law

Laptop

Jbday

Jillybday

Janitors

Finest hour

Famly

E54

Division

let’s do it next week

Sun rising also (a little)

Aloof

Writthank

Worth

Weak

Vortex

Tired

So tired

Time

Green carpet

Thanks

Chin

Metropass

Stewart

Stalker

Smirk

Smile

A thirty mind

plane

Night

Monkey

Kiss

Jobint

Isn’t

Here s what

Egyptians

Drink

Dream speak

Don’t notice

dead dream

Car

Blister

be

Bathroom

Anthra

yoga

Year poem

called

Xmas

Orange

Search

Milkshake

Legs

hand

First one

Box preach

Ending of the Book Story Finale

Ending

Epilogue: floating

Dedication

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show for any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

-    Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate quotations. Tell me what _you know.

-    Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here is what I know: the past has past. And so?

This work is dedicated to the past, written, as it were, in the past. To the years and people of our lives that we look back on with wistful sadness. We were there, at one point, together, and now we are here, somewhere else, alone, in the company of new things. But what joy to have the past, even if it is behind us. Cruelly, it sits, glimmering, making us forget the lulls between joyous rapture, reminding us of all we have lost. To all those who have lost years, one by one, and find themselves, once upon a time, staring at a ceiling as it rains outside wondering if anything will amount to nothing and vice-versa. Don’t worry. Things have passed, and now they are different. I love you. We spend our aloneness together, just as we did then, curled up together, under a full moon, lying gently, in a spoon . . .

For the people

who are floating

Quartz

Why don’t you tell me about her?

Why?

It just seems like she was important to you.

I didn’t say that.

Tell me about her. Something specific.

Like what?

Well, what’s she like, how did you meet?

What’s she like?

Just try to describe her.

She had an expression like a pewter turnstile in a liquid subway and eyes like pennies caught in a washing machine. She had a certain intangible quality like a sonar flea collar on a frozen block of poodle ice named after a Greco-Roman wrestler and thawed out to be served in martinis. She carried a baby in her belly, but not a real baby. She had swallowed a porcelain doll while flossing when she was eight and it had lodged itself into her small intestine like a family of trichinosis. She had legs like arms but feet instead of hands, knees instead of elbows, and thighs instead of biceps. She complimented trees about the quality of the air. She had jump rope in her heart and the taste of broccoli and sweet potatoes on her lips, and she refused to sit in chairs out of respect for Newton’s theory of inertia. She carried a lucky carrot in her pocket that had been bronzed by an unknown artist, who had actually been known but then forgotten due to a small case of collective contagious amnesia. The carrot was solid metal but high in beta-carotene and she

rubbed it almost religiously, and it weighed about twelve pounds but on a clear day she would talk to rabbits from her collection of storybooks and hold the metal carrot against the pages and whisper ‘he ain’t heavy he’s my brother’ and in her mind she imagined that it was a concept the rabbits could master. She was a jigsaw puzzle of an anagram of a homonym of a hologram of a silhouette of a shadow boxer. A contender with a solid jab, she was still a lightweight when it came to drinking. She got drunk off the water that melted in coolers that had stored beers during barbecues. She loved homemade melon juice, and she had a strong dislike of peanut butter, that her mother had attributed to a stern upbringing by her father. She believed in Jesus but not God and Buddha but not Siddhartha and Mohammed but not Allah and she was not a Jehovah’s witness but she was a sworn Notary who did a nice business in prenuptial agreements. If you asked her what she believed in she would hand you one of her credit cards. She half-expected to find a penis every time she took a bath. She was not one to assume things and for this she used too much soap in laundry. I suspect she hated frogs although she never once confessed it. She had a collection of photographs of other people’s great-great-grandkids. She was an anarchist on election day, an environmentalist on arbor day, a lesbian on Christmas, and a piano player on the fourth of July. She had class. She reviled Oxygen and was infatuated with Helium-on any given day she carried balloons under her arms and squeaked like a mouse. She loved apathy with a passion and was completely clueless when it came to destiny, but anyway, she managed to find me by the park on a fated Wednesday.

It sounds like she was pretty special to you.

Well, I don’t know.

She doesn’t sound like just any girl.

I don’t know if anybody sounds just like any girl.

Any girl sounds like any girl.

Well, when you repeat yourself of course you sound similar, but even then, now I mean, your inflection changed a little bit from the first ‘any girl’ to the second.

How did she hurt you?

She was talking to an invisible rock and I nearly fainted with my jealousy. She was not one to small talk with topsoil, she had gone straight to the boulders among us. I confronted her like a lover, except we both were perfect strangers, which I found out later was in her mind an imperfection, for she liked her strangers to be fragile and her accountants to speak in Creole. She mistrusted almost everything that seemed bounded in the world of logic.

What does that invisible chunk of granite have that I don’t? I beseeched her from my knees.

It’s not granite, idiot, it’s rose quartz, you know, you’re not such a perfect stranger after all. Then she flung a handful of quarters at me. They struck me in the face. I was hurt by her comments and coinage, but it would take more than a buck-fifty to stop me.

Rose quartz? I stood up, wiping my face off, Rose quartz? It’s invisible, what’s the difference?

She shot me a glance like a human cannonball, and then stared at me like a retarded panda bear. I wasn’t sure if I was the retarded bear or if she was, for it was a peculiar quirk of semantics, that when someone looks at you like something, it could be them or you that’s denoted. Still, somewhere in our locked-in stare sat one fluffy and colorless, deeply retarded, Chinese bear.

Invisible? she repeated, Here smell it! She tossed me to the ground and grabbed my head and smeared my face into the dirt. It was just a mound of dirt clods but to her it must have been rose quartz, so the sake of our relationship, I pretended to smell it to appease her.

With the air I breathed in, the nostrils caught a whiff of her and the feel of her hand on my neck prickled my skin like the quills of an antelope stuck with a porcupine for trespassing on the prairie. She smelled like steamed asparagus, which she probably had for breakfast in a big bowl of heated buttermilk.

What do you think? she asked me cordially.

Indeed, it’s rose quartz, I answered curtly, and it smells just like a red, red rose. I purred into her hands and rubbed my neck against her arm.

She dropped me to the ground stepped away in some disgust.

It’s not red! You’re smelling the agate! The quartz is different! she was crying softly now, sobbing small buffalo tears into her paws as she spoke.

I didn’t mean red, I tried to console her, I just meant that it was rose quartz! I pointed at the spot where the aforementioned invisible rocks allegedly lay.

You’re just saying that! she accused me, and continued with her crying. If you’d really smelt the rose quartz, you would have described it like the south of Italy. Italy is full of wines that are different colors, and most of them pinkish!

I thought to myself that there were plenty of red wines in Italy, but that it would just crush her to argue any further.

Yes, the Merlots, I agreed, and I held her, this delicate creature I’d come across. All the rose quartz in the world wasn’t bright enough for her world, nor was all the obsidian black enough.

She took off her clothes and impregnated me, and then she left me to raise the baby. I sent her a picture of the kid from Brazil, taped to a postcard of a woman in a bikini. The message said something like ‘In Rio, the beaches are nice’ but the actual wording was not quite as intimate. Or maybe I left her to raise the kid alone, and it was she who sent me the postcard. In either case, the point is, I haven’t seen her since then, and if I’d have known she was pregnant, I’d have married her.

Do you think that you got her pregnant on purpose?

Why would I do that?

Maybe you wanted to try to possess her, to own her, to plant yourself inside her, with the off-chance that she could grow to love you as the child welled up inside her.

But I didn’t know she was pregnant. I only saw her that afternoon, by the invisible rose quartz in the park, and anyway, I’ve tried to find her, it’s just that I’ve been unsuccessful.

Do you miss the child you never met? Do you long for the wife you never had?

Listen, why are you asking me about this, you could answer these questions yourself, you know.

But it’s your life, and your affairs, and your prism of questions of possible meanings and how could I possibly answer them?

It’s simple.

It doesn’t sound simple.

It may sound to you like she was special or something, extreme or uncommon, wild and otherworldly, but it’s just the opposite that keeps a part of me searching, for she was so common she made regular windows seem colorful.

She was common?

When she touched you it was ordinary, the most ordinary feeling of all. It was simple, like after you’ve eaten and the sun is on your forehead and you just took a breath and you’re in no hurry to exhale. Her finger would tickle your hand gently as she held it, her little finger running imperfect ellipses inside your palm, in a gentle caress you walked. It tickled a little, but nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, I’m quite sure you’ve felt the same thing yourself before, holding hands with another body, and the hand just reaching and lightly grasping. And I don’t have to tell you how it’s the simplicity of the moment, the utter normalcy of the touch, that simply crushes you in your bones and melts like buttermilk in your heart. It turns you mellow to the core, this simple common feeling like before. Like you aren’t alone no more. Like it’s only love existing in this moment in the middle of this war, with all the explosive fears and dripping tears, and your guts spilling out slowly over decades until the day you’re finally deceased. And then you think back to that hand you held.

(And all you feel is peace).

Show me

I was thoroughly unimpressed with his merchandise, and I told him as much.

I don’t like what you’ve got, and then I stared at him, waiting for him to defense himself. Step it up, big guy, or no sale.

He didn’t so much as furrow his brow, curl his lip, blink his eye, or flex his uterus. Oh, I do believe he had a uterus, not his of course, but the way he strutted around, you could bet that his lady, the unlucky dame, probably fed him grapes one at a time through his anus if that’s what he liked. He had a flannel shirt, pants made out of the skins of dead medicine-men (mostly dermatologists), and prescription glasses that were probably written by a drunk eye doctor considering his squint.

He looked back at me. Don’t like my merchandise, eh? he wanted to be clear he understood me before he acted. I was ready, though.

Aside from those dermatologist-skin pants, sir, I ain’t the least bit impressed by your so-called variety shop, and I motioned towards a seventy-dollar lamp. He nodded. The implication that a seventy-dollar lamp was not variant in the slightest was obvious, and he knew it, and I had a suspicion that it burned him like a marshmallow sliding down a twig too close to the fire. He turned for a moment. I tasted licorice, for some reason, and my eyes watered.

Here ya’ are. Try this and tell me this ain’t no variety shop. He was holding out a shot-glass, a standard thumbnail size, with a purple bubbling liquid fizzing away in it. He had taken his glasses off, and was no longer squinting. I had a sudden rushing revelation that he wore prescription glasses just for show, or maybe he was running from the Feds or liked headaches and the feeling of vertigo. Either way, I took the glass from him, peered into his eyes, and told him: You want me to drink it?

He nodded, but not at me. No, he nodded towards the past, towards his childhood, the days when he used to play stickball with just a stick and a grapefruit and his friend Timmy with the one-tooth and his big dog that he could never remember the name of was running alongside him and bumping into his legs and tripping him and he was rolling down and down the grassy hill and laughing so hard that he could taste the chocolate syrup coming up from his stomach and back into his mouth and it tasted just as good as it had before and it was dog tongue all over the face and chocolate and grass and smashed grapefruits and Timmy was way behind because of his belly and the sun was still hours from going down. He nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me, so I asked him again.

Do I drink this?

He looked at the purple potion I was holding and something snapped him back into reality. Where did you get that? He was smiling when he said it, so I couldn’t tell if it was a joke, a rhetorical question, a hint of irony, a taste of blasphemy, a mumbled cacophony, or a verbal gibberish symphony.

You, sir. You gave it to me, and I added, it’s about the variety shop, and I added, your variety shop.

He smiled. He was pleased with my detailed answer, although he had a glint in his eye that told me he might have written something in my margins like ‘good work, now how about relating it to the assignment,’ or some smart ass teacher comment and I was just wondering if I’d gotten the A or B or if he was giving me a damn C plus again. I took the bottle and drank it down. Variety shop indeed.

The veins inside my arm opened up inside my hand and started to bleed,

Inside my skin, Blood pumped within,

I could smell a roomful of naked Turkish men throwing darts at an antelope,

I felt like I understood how lonely it finally is to lose a game of blackjack to the Pope,

I could see inside the middle of my life with all its mediocrity, I finally admitted to myself that I was fooling myself when I claimed to

understand the meaning of the word ‘alacrity’ I was putty

My butter was peanutty

I felt like my legs had been reduced to eggs, cracked open and scrambled

along with society’s dregs, Square holes, fit into round pegs

Time meant nothing to me but another way for an advertiser to sell a watch

I had this sense that somewhere my last lover was putting me in her belt as a Caucasian notch,

But I didn’t feel Caucasian, I could only see in raisons,

Dried grapes that spelled out the meaning of labor inequality with

chapped migrant hands, Trumpets left along the side of the road as guitars dominate all things called bands,

I understood my mother’s fondness for goods that were canned, And how if I was President I was see to it that everything not related to

licorice was banned, I had this taste in mouth still, Of licorice or some kind of swill, It must have been the purple juice I drank, It didn’t really have it taste but oh my god it stank.

Not bad, I muttered to the doctor-skin-pants man behind the counter, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing that his drink had indeed, some variety.

Not bad? Not bad? That’s a drink of a rare variety that you can’t find in any normal shop.

Oh, only in your ‘variety’ shop, is that right? I mocked him, but inside I was crying, weeping in fact, for every deer who’d every been struck by mistake by the grill of a wayward Oldsmobile.

Yes, that’s right, he replied to me, and I walked out of his shop defiantly.

I wondered if I’d every sober up, but I had changed in my hardline earlier stance. I can no longer say with absolute truth, that I was thoroughly unimpressed with his merchandise. In fact, I must admit that the purple drink he shared with me, was a nice little peace of heaven, of peace, of bliss. I no longer shop at variety shops, though they say it’s the spice of life. I figured I’d cut out the middle man, so I just head straight for the spice shops these days. You’ll find me among the saffron and jasmine, weighing out a small purchase of pimientos. Visions of past failures and successes in my nostrils and head. Strawberry weekends, spearmint puberty, almond grenadine heartache, and vanilla sherbet cantos. The smells of my past are my greatest mementos.

The two of them in 7

1.FOUND

A man with a shiny red apple thought about a girl with luminescent blonde hair talking on a phone to a man with stained enamel teeth chattering about a place where ponies get drunk on fermented shiny red apples.

A girl with torn green eyes wondered about the validity of the concept of truth in a universe filled with houses empty of people laughing about the time they missed the bus to the carnival where the pink billowy cotton candy was sold by a man with shaky hands that jingled quarters by accident when they handed out change to happy kids who climbed so many fences and played so much in the grass that they all had torn green shirts

An eyebrowed man chewing a bite of an apple sat next to a floating girl with green eyes and neither of them spoke about arthritis or car accidents or credit cards or anything from the past at all. They were consumed in the moment by the presence of the other. There was a time, years ago, when the man thought about such a girl, with luminescent blonde hair, and the girl wondered about the validity of truth, and yet here was a man who was truly in love with her, she could see it through her torn green eyes.

Moisture formed in the corner of her eyes and his mouth, as he thought about apples and she thought about the universe.

It made him drool.

It made her cry.

It was the perfect amount of secretion for two bodies to have when sitting adjacent, and they both quickly realized this and went out and purchased a cottage together and bought a porch swing, one of those big white ones that swung not too far but also enough to make the heart skip a beat when you kicked, with cushions (naturally) for two.

2 PASSION

They were supposed to be in Vegas already, but they were stuck in the motel room next to the ringing phone, with her naked bronzed body glistening with sweat like it had been speckled with glow-drops, and he rolled around it and fell off the couch and the sex continued even as the phone rang incessantly.

You know, she stopped him for a moment, that’s them calling us on the phone.

I know, he replied, and then they rolled around naked again and he fell off the couch again.

You know, she interrupted again, this is a lot of fun.

I know, he replied, and their naked bodies spun like they had been twisted by a string so fast that the universe twirled into a vortex like the eye of a tornado and as their naked bodies spun faster and faster, clumps of skin started to fly off in all directions, covering the room with a chowder and blood wallpaper and still they spun until particles of bone started to shave off and cover the bloody walls with a fine, white porcelain and calcium cover and the spinning didn’t stop until all the bone was gone and then the organs, hearts, livers, kidneys, flew off in all directions, breaking windows, smashing against refrigerators, and the spinning continued until all that was left was two hearts, and the hearts stuck to each other and spun faster and faster, beating at a rapid rate, and as they stretched apart and it looked like centrifugal force would separate them, they exploded, and the room was showered with a fine, red mist.

And it was quiet again.

The phone started to ring, pieces of skin and bone and blood and organ falling down the sides from the subtle vibrations. They were supposed to be in Vegas already, but here they were in the motel room, destroyed, blissfully, by love.

Love had come to them naked near the Las Vegas strip, and torn them apart like we always knew it would. One day, it will no doubt come for us. And it will, we hope, devastate us.

3 COMPATABILITY

Sometime around the first of the month she realized that he wasn’t wearing any pants. At first she found it quite shocking.

You aren’t wearing any pants! she exclaimed. None at all! Not even short pants or thin pants, in fact, you aren’t wearing any pants at all!

After the shock wore off, though, she began to find it amusing.

You know, I find it curious that you don’t wear pants. Aren’t your legs cold? Do you not feel out of place in a world that generally wears pants. Without exceptions such as swimming pools, Turkish baths, and orgies, you generally are supposed to wear pants in this country.

Soon, she questioned her role in the matter.

Is it my fault? Are you trying for my attention? I care about you, pants or not. How did I not notice this sooner? How long have you been pants-less? I can’t believe I just noticed!

She eventually accepted his lack of pants.

You know, you don’t look so bad without pants. If I were you, I probably wouldn’t wear pants either, except maybe at the movies or . . . nah! I think you look fine without pants, and I‘m sorry I gave you such grief about it.

It wasn‘t long before she developed a fondness for his misgivings regarding trousers.

„You can‘t wear pants! I love your naked ass! Turn around! The other way!"

They were a happy couple.

He made her pant and she didn‘t make him pants.

It was a fair relationship.

4 PILLOW TALK

It’s a Cadillac running over a thrown-out-the-window soufflé. It’s all the yesters that pass in the singular of one 24-hour day. It’s the way you always knew exactly what to fucking sizz-ay.

Words dribbled out of your mouth like golden nuggets of praise that had calcified and been mined.

No matter what you were talking about, you were always so damn kind.

Even when you were mad, bad, sad, glad, when you’d just had it, and you trembled at the fat lip, you still came off nice, like cherries frozen by angel maraschino bartenders in ice.

It’s the friction that rubbed through all my mittens, like you were trying to make a fire by rubbing sticks and got distracted in the trees by all my kittens. They were still up there waiting for the fire department. It was that cavity in your chest like a secret agent hiding compartment.

It’s the best part, but where I always wanted to start.

It’s the hole in your body that’s reserved for your heart.

You had such a lovely partitioned ticker.

I don’t have no right to never even bicker.

You had those looks that you only find in books, those hugs that you read about on souvenir mugs, that style that when you pass it once, you remember it for a while.

Like now . . .

How, you might ask, do I know it was you who came by?

I can smell in the air like for certain as I’m going to someday die.,

It’s a fragrance and a feeling.

It’s sleeping upside down on the ceiling.

And then it’s waking up and turning the world around,

so that what’s up to you is no longer down.

You can make things like that turn on their axis

when you’ve got lips like yours to ax’kes.

It’s a bunny

hopping through a club trying to be funny.

Sorry about the hare!

a bald man jokes, and one voice laughing fills the air.

It’s me.

I’m a sucker for stupid jokes.

And I break like so many yokes.

I’m an omelet because of your absence.

Come back and let me sizzle slightly in your presence.

I don’t deserve to be so scrambled.

He said the words with a sigh, turned and walked away-not that’s not it!-he ambled . . . (or at least she thought so . . . it was hard for her to tell now since the time he’d lost his torso . . .)

5 IMPERFECTION

It just wasn’t the same without his torso. She wanted to love him, but it was so strange the way his feet attached to his hips, and then his hips just sat on his neck. He had been an attractive man with a torso, but with no torso, he looked like some kind of slight-of-hand joke or something.

I can’t do this anymore, she sniffled as she broke the news to him, I need a man with . . . a torso.

He spilled his coffee. What? I thought you said you didn’t care about things like that, that you loved me, that you didn’t need to rest your head on my chest, that you could rest it on my knee, that it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a torso . . . His voice was shaking.

I know. I know, I said those things, and you must think I’m horrible, and maybe if you’d never had a torso, I would have meant those things, but I just keep thinking back to your shirts, do you remember when you used to wear shirts instead of those strange turtleneck-pants that you wear now? I miss your shirts, and I miss you being taller, and yes, I miss resting my head on your torso . . . she started sobbing.

He waddled over to comfort her, and placed his arms around her leg.

Looking down at him, a pair of legs attached to a neck, she started crying even harder. He looked up at her with the same eyes that she had fallen in love with, and it hurt her to the core that she no longer felt that way for him.

She wanted to hug him, but she was tired of squeezing his legs, so she just patted his head some more, and realized that it was a man, not a puppy, that she wanted, but she wouldn’t say this to him. No, she would have to lie and say she had fallen in love with Mark from work. And if it had to be that way, she would sleep with ugly Mark just to prove it. She had, at some point, to have a torso in her life again.

6 WE

Are still looking, our universe is getting smaller.

Every day diminished us and each time it gets a little harder.

As our skin thickens and jades and our youthful idealism fades.

We don’t have much more time to wait.

So for the record, let me get it straight:

Are you somebody who will be absolutely crushed by my complete disappearance.

I’ll keep looking until I find you, out of ignorant self-destruction and lonely perseverance.

7 WAITING

He waited at the bottom of the stairs. He waited next to the phone. He waited after class, before work, during lunch, and all alone. He waited in line, outside, in the hall, and by the coatroom. He waited next to the people who were waiting until everybody found their soul mate and smiled and locked arms and walked away and he waited more. He waited by the door. He waited when he was rich, when he was broke, when he was poor.

He never found her.

pumpkin face

He had a pumpkin for a face. Not a symbolic pumpkin. Not a metaphoric pumpkin. He had a real, orange, high in potassium and zinc, low in cholesterol and good for the skin, pumpkin head.

Hey, pumpkin head! a man yelled out of the window of a passing muscle car, the words hitting the side of his oblong orange head like flies against a bug zapper.

He felt bad. He wanted to yell out that he didn’t want to have a pumpkin for a face, that he had been normal until yesterday, that he

didn’t believe in witchcraft, but he was silent. He was silent, and he found his own silence troublesome. He opened up his pocked knife and carved himself a mouth.

That’s more like it, his pumpkin skin stretched a little around the square toothes that he had carved, but at least he could speak. He walked into a nearby convenience store.

The man behind the counter looked out at him with an odd expression: What the hell is this?

What the hell is what?

A moment of tranquility passed between the two men, almost like a battle scene from a German Opera, but without all the leiderhosen and muskets.

„I‘d like a pack of cigarettes."

The manager of the convenience store had seen a lot of things in his day. He‘d seen babies sawed in half with machine guns, the whole world reduced to the microchip. He‘d seen airplanes borne and atoms split. He‘d never seen a man with a pumpkin for a head. Not in February. It was off-season.

„You know you‘re off season, son." He handed the pumpkin faced- man a pack of high-tar, no-filter cigarettes.

Handing over a five dollar bill, lighting a match, and sticking the cigarette between his wedged teeth so that his whole face lit up like a lamp, the pumpkin-faced man nodded, took a deep nicotine breath and waited for his change.

„Yeah, he blew the smoke out of the holes he had poked for eyes, „But it‘s nine short months ‚til November.

The man behind the counter handed him his change back. „Fair enough, son, and he felt a little bad about giving him a hard time at first and added, „Hell, in nine months you could have a little baby pumpkin faced kid runnin‘ around you! and he laughed and laughed.

The pumpkin man didn‘t laugh.

His mouth wasn‘t carved that way.

Old Man

Old man said to turn down the river after the trees stopped. I can see his pipe filled lips repeating it now. The horse must have smelled berries, so I rested it and let it eat. It had been a long time since Woman had left. I didn’t miss her, not like you miss water on a desert crossing, but I felt her absence like the shadows across the neck where the hat ends and the sun begins again. Still, Old man had made me promise to leave, and I always held my word.

The horse found the berries easy enough, and I let him rest a little longer before turning down the river. He was a good horse, and he only stayed that way because I rested him now and again. A good horse will turn nasty or dead if you don’t give him time to flex his freedom. He had taken me this far, anyway, him and God and my parents and the world, all together bound up, along with Woman, and here I was.

The leather smelled damp, so I drank some water. Can’t sweat too much in this heat or you’ll get fever. I’m no good to her if I end up there with a fever. Old man gave me plenty of water for the journey.

Rhythmic gallops and the sound of Horse’s feet along the bank lulled me to a daydream. I saw Woman and her father. He was yelling at me again, banishing me from the village, sending her off the land, and telling everybody how Woman and I were in love with a piece of dead, smoked salmon that we had named Curly.

He didn’t understand; none of the tribe understood.

Curly had deep brown eyes, dried like raisins, but still full and clear enough to sear your soul. Woman and I noticed Curly in the meat- smoking house at the end of the summer, and we had liberated him to my hut. We spent many afternoons there. Woman would pretend to be Curly’s voice, or I would, and we would laugh and love naked, the three of us, me, woman, and Curly, the smoked salmon.

Things got bad in August, when Curly started to wear out his smoke. The smell of dead fish was unmistakable, and Old man, who knew about these things, tried to warn me.

The elders will not look kindly upon this.

Yes, Old man, but I love her, and she loves Curly.

Will you stop calling that piece of meat ‘Curly?

Old man, he is not a piece of meat! Didn’t Spirit create him to swim in the waters, just as he . . .

Spirit did! Yes! Before we caught him and smoked him for food- food! That is the circle of life, we catch fish, we eat fish. We do not love fish.

Old man’s words stung me like a hornet.

Listen, I know you love her, and the truth is, I once loved a girl who loved a turnip we named ‘Petey’-so I can understand the ways of youth. But turnip is one thing. Turnip does not smell like salmon smells after it has rotted. You must get rid of the fish, er, Curly.

I nodded.

If only we had listened to the old Man then, we wouldn‘t have been caught in our state of fornication, the Woman and I, with Curly looking on under candles.

Her father didn‘t understand. We were accused of calling on false Spirits, and instead of being urged to marry, he cast his daughter down the river.

„Go with the fishes!" he had yelled at her in anger, setting her raft loose.

A full month later, he was prepared to banish me in shame, but I agreed to promise the Old man I would leave to save pride.

Curly was tossed into the fire that night as we were made to watch.

I can still hear Woman‘s screams and see the tears swelling her eyes.

Sticking my chapped palm against the saddle, I rested my thumbs. My lips were drying, and I reached for the leather pouch of water. There was no telling how far Woman had drifted in the past month, but I was determined to find her.

For all I knew, she had been catching fish, smoking them, and keeping them preserved as lovers in my absence. I felt a little jealous,

but she was a young Woman, after all, and she couldn’t be expected to wait for me forever.

Still, I hoped when I found her, if I found her, that she was not yet engaged in fish-love. Not yet anyway. There would be plenty of time for that with me.

Just make sure the little one’s don’t get confused, Old man had lectured me. If you have to, hide the fish, assuming you don’t grow out of it.

It was then that I noticed the talisman he carried on his belt. He must have had it his whole life, and I certainly had looked at it, but this was the first time I had ever really seen it.

It was made out of a turnip.

I nodded at the Old man.

Yes, sir.

Circle cow

The eggs were frying on the oven, in the pan, the wool was growing on the lamb, the hogs were dying into ham, and I, well, I was just cold. I was only wearing a sweatshirt, and I wasn’t used to farm life, and I was expecting lots of cows squirting milk at each other in the shower or something, but I certainly didn’t expect what happened.

My uncle got me up to milk the cows, which meant messing around with a bunch of knobs on a big machine, and then we went to collect the eggs, which just meant collecting a bunch of containers that sorted the eggs through tubes. I borrowed a sweatshirt and was extremely depressed.

Where’s all the old-time farm life? I asked my uncle.

He was drinking a can of beer. It was five-thirty in the morning. Old-time farm life?

Yeah, I want to learn how to live off the fat of the land, you know, without all these machines and stuff. I felt bad. I bet he thought I was an ignorant city kid, and I was expecting him to yell at me, but he just

took a deep breath, checked the pH level of the hog-slop, and motioned for me to follow him.

Where we going?

Son, it’s time to teach you something.

There was a cow behind the barn tied to a tree, chewing a perfectly symmetrical circle as far as the rope would reach all the way around the maple tree. I got goosebumps. Maybe I was going to get to hand milk it!

See that circle, son?

I told him that I did.

That’s a perfect circle, God’s circle, created by God’s creature, it ain’t no crop circle, it’s a cow circle, that there’s a cow and the cow’s chewing his way around the tree in a circle and the slip not is just loose enough so the rope doesn’t bunch up and mess up the circle when he comes around, you follow?

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what was going on.

You ever read any Plato, son?

I lied that I had: Yeah, philosophy.

Right, well then you know what he said about the idea of the circle and its relation to God and that even though there is no such thing as a perfect circle, every circle has imperfections, so all there are is ellipses and not circles, we still know what a circle is, even though they can’t possibly exist in nature.

I think he was waiting for me to say something, so I looked away stoically at the cow chewing on the grass. He continued speaking:

So there ain’t no circle, okay? There’s just ellipses, we’re in a world full of ellipses, and yet when I said do you see the cow circle you nodded like yes you saw the cow circle even though we both damn well know it’s a cow ellipse and if you measured it with a ruler there’d be imperfections.

He knocked me to the ground.

Get back up!

I didn’t understand, but I tried to stand up, and he knocked me again: Why didn’t you tell me that was a cow ellipse! Do you accept everything you hear as true! What shape is that cow chewing in a circle or an ellipse?

I didn’t answer. I didn’t move. He stopped yelling.

He continued: So anyway, God and all, like the circle, you don’t ever see it but everybody knows what it’s kind of like. There’s no circle, no proof that a circle could exist, but we think about them like they’re all over the place. Same with God. We’ve got faith in a world of God and circles, when all we really know about are cows and ellipses.

A moment of silence passes, and he turned to walk away from me.

I jumped up, my knees stained with dirt, my eyes watering, and I screamed at him in desperation: But the cows don’t know that! The cows don’t know!

He turned and looked me flat in the nose. Son, how do you know what the cows know?

I didn’t know what he meant. I hadn’t meant to say that the cow’s didn’t know that anyway, I just had gotten angry because I was sure there were circles and God and stuff, so I didn’t say anything back to him and he walked away to go back and check the dials on his chicken feeder machine and I just cried and stared at the cow that in my heart was not just walking around the tree. He was circling it.

He just had to be. Like the yokes of the eggs from the chickens around us, broken cleanly on the frying pan on the morning around us. I was young then, and it seemed like it would somehow change with age.

I’m still looking, though, for perfect circles.

From the country, I can picture them now, they float towards us like smoke and when they come there’s peacefulness and lots of time and finally a place for all those years, and yes my city tears, to dry in.

Pump

It pumped like a blindfolded gas station attendant with thirty years of service under his belt. It beat like a drunken stepfather. It woke him up in the morning and he immediately thought his arm was numb and it was all over.

Heart attack! he screamed. But it turned out his arm was numb because he had slept on it wrong, and his eyes were half-open because they had seen enough things in their days like baby seals being clubbed and Christmas presents being opened and they were suspicious of seeing anything new or exciting now that they required lenses to read fine print. It was a Saturday, which meant nothing since he didn’t work anyway, but at least on this day he wasn’t alone in his slovenly life. His hand held fast to his chest like he was pressing a nametag to himself or rubbing a nipple ring absentmindedly.

He dragged his legs underneath his body and wearing only underwear and a smirk that said ‘I care about people who have been injured by terrorist attacks’ he went to the fridge. Rustling through lots of rotting cartons of Chinese food, he settled on some strange colored rice that seemed to be at least as safe as sex with a circus clown in full makeup. Sure, there were masks and fog and mirrors and everything had an appearance that obfuscated its reality, but wasn’t he truly alone? Didn’t his heart wake him up in pain of the abyss created by the lack of another body rustling around in the near vicinity with a newspaper and orange juice?

Okay, heart, it’s just me and you, and then he added under his breath, and the rest of the organs, also, the kidneys, the spleen (he still had his spleen, didn’t he?), the liver, the appendix (oh, wait, he didn’t have the appendix, that was what it was), the lungs, the . . . he looked closely at the rice. It was a strange color, wasn’t it? It had an orange-red tint to it like it had been soaked in a swimming pool with a bunch of slaughtered caribou, and the chlorine might have covered the smell, but the color was unmistakable. Had he ordered caribou from the Chinese restaurant?

Well, they say Caribou is good for the heart, he said in a voice that people only use when little kids who need advice are near. It echoed off the walls and caught him back in the ears and all of a sudden he wondered quite intently if Caribou was any good at all or even if it might have clogged the arteries even more! Red meat, he mumbled, hmm . . .

His heart continued to beat, like it was in a parade or something, and he felt it with his hand and decided to have a few choice words with it.

Look here, heart, let’s have a heart to heart, I mean let’s get to the core of all this bullshit that you keep hanging over me like I’m gonna be unhappy if you aren’t taken care of already. He waited for the heart to reply, but it just continued beating.

He put his hand over his heart, like for the pledge of allegiance, and he got right to the point: Look heart, I don’t know if you have a mind of which the mind knows not, or if you’re just a thousand swinging ropes entangled in a knot, or if you slow down like a dump-truck in a bubble gum forcefield going upstairs in a convoy of wheelchairs. I don’t know, heart, if you have a heart, or even a body, anybody, my body, somebody, that tickles you an awful lot, or maybe you tickle it an awful lot. Maybe you’ve got a habit of tickling and taking for granted every thing you’ve ever got. Persons, places, all the faces, disappointed, heart, that you anointed, heart, someone else, heart, with your fruition, ambition, petition, extradition, or what have you, you know what I mean heart, the magic wings of an invisible dove and all that crap about love that you appoint on someone new or else or not at all or maybe, heart, you’re just another goddamned brick in the tell-tale wall!

He pumped at his chest, pounded it really, as if to show the heart who was boss.

You know, I could give you CPR and screw up your rhythm, you ungrateful organ! and he added, when I go, you go, heart.

And then he softened, the anger gone, and the heart still pumping honestly along.

He had told it how he felt about being guilt-tripped all the time: I’ll fall in love when I’m good and ready and I don’t want so much as a skipped beat about it from you!

The heart didn’t answer, but didn’t it though?

It got really quiet and his ears began ringing, and in the wonder of being lonesome, yes, he could hear it, his heart was still singing, beating, being.

Just a lump.

No.

Just his pump.

No.

Singing, beating, being the part of life that matters: the art.

Just his heart.

Look

I’d turn over every loaf of bread if I heard you were spread on toast, I’d drive my car through tar pits instead of taking the coast, I’d testify that I didn’t pay my parking tickets because I was busy finger painting with a ghost, I’d go fishing and then make a big deal about how good I am that I didn’t catch anything and this would be the extent of my boast, I’d sit in an oven and roast, insult deans, the chancellor, and provost, I’d find out whatever ethnicities you hated and then invite exchange students from there to host, I’d look for albums I knew you hated and play those songs the most. I am in the business, these days, of trying to aggravate you.

It’s just so I won’t have to look at you.

I’d tear off my arms and take donations for my legs, I’d be a card carrying member of society’s dregs, I’d throw cars at eggs, find a dentist who begs, turn my shirt inside out and my whispers to shout, be a town man about, eat all kinds of sauerkraut, foul-tip for the third out, experience the throbbing toes of gout, take part in an embarrassing rout, instill teenagers full of self-doubt, it’s all I can do when I see you to keep from curling my lips in a pout. I am in the business, these days, of trying to cope without you.

I find it excruciating to remind myself that I’m not supposed to look at you.

Remember how I photographed your breasts and put each one in my wallet, so that the left side had the left one and the right side had the right one, and every time I reached for my ATM card I got a crazy hard on?

I’ll put tape over every phone to disguise our voices. I’ll feel so goddamn alone, but these are the jackpots of slot choices. I’ll put my hand on the pillow and pretend to hear it moan, I’ll pick one of your

patented noises. The kind that says ‘oh my god I am filled with mint chocolate chip ice cream and salt water that I swallowed from that last wave and my tanned skin is burning for you touch from within and get your goddamned tongue out from behind your chin, I want to lick like a mad dog in a room full of milky raw pig.’ I want to quit society and put all of my energy into an Argentinean anthropological dig. I want to watch babies grow big, hairless men buy a wig, trees in the tropics of fig, play a saxophone only gig, dance a catsup inspired jig, stop at the titty bar with my rig, and end up on a straight line with a zag that follows my zig.

I want to grow old with you, catch a cold with you, sneeze and please and cough and wheeze and lay all day in bed touching knees with you.

I want to paint over stop-signs with messages of universal happiness and dedicate them to your memory if you get struck by a sidecar while jaywalking. I want to stop talking, keep rocking, prevent boats from docking, onlookers from gawking, flea markets from hawking, horse races from jockeying, bedrooms from locking, but even when I knocked you didn’t let me in.

Please, I’m sorry, I won’t smear peanut butter in your hair like I did last time when I said I wouldn’t, but I’ve learned and I won’t do it again.

I just didn’t want you to be beautiful without me.

The moon still glows of lunar lust and luminal vestibules without

me.

It’s like nobody but me noticed I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t even present to notice it. It’s like my presence opened up a million empty boxes of presents and didn’t really give a shit. It’s not what I wanted, anyway. It’s not like I saw you every single day.

Except that I did.

I’d pour sauce in my eyes, grow moss from the skies, get caught in a swarm of flies, be bought with a burger and fries, seek refuge in another’s thighs, be at a loss for true lies, remind myself that he who is happy still dies, and then wipe the salt from my cries, and strangle all my good-byes. I’d keep them murdered in my throat so nobody could hear them. I wouldn’t want you to be near them. I’d be afraid you might adhere to them. I didn’t say good-bye at all, I swear, not that you really care, or were aware, or could share. Besides, I’m hung like a horse-a mare. That’s, of course, a female horse. Because you steeplechased me around for years before the castration of ‘I don’t love you.’

Because the only time it doesn’t hurt, is when I convict myself that I’m above you, in a fury, to an imaginary, but very fair jury. Condescending from my throne that even peasant-girls like you