For Allen G

If knowledge is power than I am building a bomb in the garage. I go out there after work and family dinner, faithfully tinkering with my city killer. In America, nobody notices, because the rich are busy pretending to be poor as if poverty were street credit in a game you feign not to win. The poor too though, are counterfeiting wealth, a cubic zirconium nightmare. They front knowing the ladder's rules but the real manual comes at the price of a silver spoon. Yes, flesh has always been currency but we are running out, and with inflation there is more silicon, more plastic, and we are going into debt. Silver spoons make for broken teeth.

I am looking for special deals on answers at James Dean's five and dime. I'm going to run off and join a circus, train swine to dance in dresses. It won't be hard, even a pig owns a dress these days. Everybody takes the train into the city, they pine, they ail on vinyl seats. Ever take the train into the city? Commute sweat smells like anxiety. It smells like sickly yellow and formaldehyde. Even a corpse hates the smell of formaldehyde. All the children on the subway are malformed and have demerits. But not the good kind that makes you look like a badass. The kind that means when you grow up, you'll still have issues and they wont be in style anymore.

Nobody in my generation wants to be present, preferring a state of perpetual adolescence. I advise youth to die before you get old. Who takes that advice? The bald eagle's young are cultural cannibals. Princely avifauna. Do you know about the vulture? It gorges itself until it is too heavy and then has to vomit to fly. Bulimia bird. They will reprocess dead punk, dead dance music; pretend that reassembly means transcendence.

The rain pelts these old streets, and the smell of wet asphalt perfuses everything, and everything is washed down the drain. At night, I crawl on my belly and siphon gas from car's tanks. Just to make it north to freedom, to see my love. This love is pure from faith, eyes closed echoing forward, entwined by the sound.

If knowledge is power than I am building a bomb in my garage.
Such a dirty bomb.

#1

i wake
to the sound
of bones clacking
and when I open my eyes
all i see is your face floating
taunting me
waiting for me to tell you
that you were the only one
who ever looked this creature in the eyes
and saw me.

it would be easier
if you had no legs
to stand on in this matter
but at least with this silent way
we are both unsatisfied

maybe in another three years time
you will throw yourself bodily
into my path
again
and we will spend the length of your cigarette
knowing each other
just to rip it all apart again

the bleeding of the feet is difficult
but the dance is too beautiful to cease
a skeleton embrace
stripped it down to the base of everything
white and red and black

Exit 65

It’s in my blood.
“jerz.”
You know what I’m saying?
My non-native friends call it “the jerz”
but it’s a flexible word.
When I am being frank & vehement
I am “getting jerz” on the recipient of my attentions.
Sometimes it even sneaks up and becomes my name.

I had a Vermonter boyfriend who would ask me to say hot dog over and over
“hot dawg”
“hot dawg”
They just don’t know it like me honey.
They don’t have a skull crammed with goomba-english,
with that special “coming home to cousin Nick in the cucina”
something
that makes it home.
Walnuts, oranges, and figs
a course on their own.
Entire conversations held in yells from different parts of the house.
Trains pulling out of the yard
two blocks dopplered.
Their whistles cry destinations
“Hoboken”
“Hoboken”

The abandoned swimming hole in the woods,
it’s concrete docks, jutting out of reeds like aching molars
and haunted by echoes.
The twisted pine barrens, with their wet sap smell, and the 13th child of Mrs. Leeds.
The bitter and gentle shore, and the Cape May diamonds.
They could not know
So I lie,
content between my devil and my atlantic sea.

Gorehound

I’m a gonna bust you up
break you down
make you cry
I’m a gonna thrust
this axe in your head
but you ain’t gonna die yet.
Hot cherry!
You look good in red

Lemme go an’ trap you
stalk you, with a chainsaw.
Lemme tie your wrists raw.
Get the device revved up.
I know you ain’t fed up
you’re a gonna beg me
you’re a gonna beseech me,
entreat me and implore
and I’ll always always
have just a little more for you.

You like a good screw?
How ‘bout one through your eyeball?
Gotta get those bodily fluids going
all that vitreous humor really flowing.
And I’m a gonna get that fire going
get that pyre really growing up.

I got this need
you’re gonna oblige me.
I’ll fill your mouth,
but please
don’t stop crying.

And who’s a gonna tell me
it’s not exactly all the same?
There’s hysterical shrieking,
someone nearly naked.
But this way everybody’s
gonna be a screamn’ your name.




...

everyone please remember that writers are liars

Bloodless

It is common in the case of anemics
to develop Pica and eat any number
of strange objects. Coal, hair, metal
wax and dirt. I could never imagine
feeling that familiar weakness
and consuming nails and bolts.
Washers filling the void in my belly,
till my stomach jingled like a change purse.

But when I peel the heart shaped beets,
their red dye, reflective and pooling beneath,
and I eat the raw slices,
they taste like the earth that they were born from.
And I know what the others were trying to devour.

It is the fortification of the self.
Each piece a charm against the flaw in my blood
that grows up from my liver,
until it hits the follicles and I?m left pulling
a thousand tiny hairs from the bath drain,
and the comb, and the rugs of my house, and the pillow where I sleep.
As if my body laments the innate disconnection
in my mode of consumptive urban living
and the brick and mortar worlds and shells I?ve constructed
and then expresses it's sorrow by rejecting a thousand slivers of me.
Screaming as they fall, each piece reminds
that such surroundings are no path to real safety.
You must be brave enough
to swallow all the earth yourself
and stand to be shaped
by the wind and by the rain.

...
Christa Pagliei

With My Glasses Off

I step out and close the door.
Car headlights blossom like fungi,
growing in size as they pull away
Leaving behind the gentle ache of bitten, dirty fingernails
Try to tell yourself: if there is no kindness and courtesy there must be something.
I am not convinced anymore.
Stop talking about me like I'm a tinfoil valentine.

i met a girl: a snowball in hell she was hard and cracked as the liberty bell...

There is the sound of a sternum breaking. The half splintering wood, half soft fleshy sound that makes me nauseous and forces me to choke back acrid bile.

Then I remember twilight and I remember Pont Champlain

I dig my nails deeper pulling the ribcage apart a little, jamming my fingers into the spaces between bones. The body is surprisingly resistant to being ripped in half. Pain, and looks of anguish are of course all a part of the process.

Then I remember things you left behind: the smell of apples, sunshine. Hair.

Finding strength I rend the corpse in two. I am surprised, the heart is still in one piece. So many stab wounds from the rear torso...it defies any sort of logic.

I remember being warm once...

I box my little gift and leave it innocuously wrapped on your porch. A parting gift from the depths of me. Burn it in good health lover.

and I remember nothing at all