Read an except from Crabwise to the Hounds.
Read some Speculative Non-fiction.
NEW POEMS
NOTRE REINE REINCARNATED
Early this year, the Black Liberation Front, a hot-eyed batch of pro-Castro New York Negroes, got in touch with some Quebec separatists … Obviously, blowing up the Statue of Liberty would be as spectacular an event as anyone could wish for.
Time, February, 1965
With a hat like that she’s got to go
head down into the wind so the brim
holds fast to her head. But if our
Queen dons a crepe-paper crown,
a zephyr could dethrone our contessa.
Moreover, if her moped had sped
past the “Cliff Ahead” sign, we’d be left
with a waft off her two-stroke exhaust –
because the transparent sea calls us all
in or are we being summoned
to where we’ve already been?
Take our liege, cocking her crossbow
to skew a peregrine into flatspin
then straddling its breast to knock it off
with a jab of her hatpin. While all about
the rawskulled rocks, timber hogs comb
in fleets, like flocks of unfinished hawks.
It must’ve been hard for her bodyguards
to watch her push her miscarriage
down the boulevard, in Jackie Onassis
sunglasses and chandelier-sized earrings,
Daisy Dukes and thigh-high high-heeled boots
past knock-kneed trees to the see-through sea.
Offshore a witchdoctor re-casts her in obsidian.
Rebarred to the old reign’s rubble she reels
in the wage-slave ships each evening – dipping
her automaton Canadarm into the courtyard
of her crown to abracadabra a lit candelabra.
Published in CV2 33.3, 2010
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THE SWAN WITH TWO NECKS
The loveliest bird of Franguestan!
―Lord Byron
You may’ve heard before now, two better than one moms say
But as Christopher Walken and I were walking one day
We got to talking of the pond-giraffes lobbying off-shore
So serene up top, even though below their legs scuttled and tore
The pond’s surface – like pack ice with periscopes loosed
From a glacier’s lip – until a bleach-blonde with her dog noosed
In its leash screamed and barked as some four-breasted beast
Who burst from the deep and with Gorgon squawks creased
Our pleasant Sunday, like the linen suit I slept in for weeks.
That Layer of Leda, a Child of Chernobyl, an eyesore.
Throats flailing like unmanned firehoses at full-bore, or
Two tenors in tantrum; beaks braying like Kraken-sired foals
In a canyon of crystal bells where kamikazes collect the tolls.
The mauve purse of each bill begging for bankruptcy
As Walken and I ran to flee this garden-gone-Gethsemane;
Flaneurs folded at the knees when Olde Two-Beaks reached as one
And, with fine Siamese formation, deboned that blonde’s Dalmatian,
Dolling dog innards out as alms for a cavernous sun –
Just as the Oracle at Delphi would’ve done at each demi-god’s
Birth – then, swirling its cotton candy girth, whipsawed
The pond’s skin of paddle boaters and bathers like a surgeon
Swipes a dining table for the impromptu caesarean
Of a stillborn unicorn, or twin-breeched cherubim.
That saw-toothed soothsayer tweezed the gamey limbs
Off a dozen or so park-loving souls, shot-gunning gushes
Of arterial spray and re-planting each limb as bulrushes
Or five-fingered crocuses, bejeweling the rim of such and such’s
Octopied garden. Seeing this, Chris cussed a Thesian vow
Of violence: to gut-weave it an entrails wedding train. Now,
Tossing me the keys, Chris cartwheeled into our El Camino’s
Bed. As the camera phones panned in arms-length slow-mo
I godsped off the dock, transforming our truck into
A half-bred fossil-fueled warhead, catapulting Chris onto
Those wily albino adders now madder than method actors
Typecast as whores even the Marquis de Sade couldn’t adore.
Chris, pancaking out of his somersault and into a soar,
Drew his Douk-Douk mid-flight, its blade bright as matchstrike.
Second only to the sun as he socked it to the fridge-white
Right throat of that shift-shaped chimera. Twisting his wrist
Till the knife turned to a zipper’s tongue in his cinched fist,
Chris carved down, halving half our fiend from gullet to gizzard
Just as our truck struck like a crane-dropped crate in the freightyard
And smithereened. Petroleum flames phoenixed our fiend in a jiff,
Though its live side s-bent and bullwhipped, gator-clipping my midriff
As I tried to front-crawl away, flicking me inshore as if
I were a ball-jointed doll not-to-scale with its too-tall
Twin-towering maws. As if I’d brought the right one’s fall.
Leaving the left alone to wail, Chris swam up its rear
Ramp of tail feathers, shimmying the enflamed throat – near
Retardant in his asbestos overcoat – his Douk-Douk
A pike-diving diamond parting that fiend’s soot toque
Flaying its tonsils, gelding its brasswind cannonade-croak
Into a scat-talked castrato. Fire-polling that thrown throat
Chris landed on a bulkhead hatch beneath its singed coat –
A coat like the wing cloak Daedalus designed for his Fall line.
Can-opening the hatch, a black, smoke-blouse bellied, turbines
Unwound, axletrees cracked. But Whoa! Chris soon saw, low and behold,
once the smoke left it, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton pinfolded
To a dial-caked helm that sparked and arc-welded their bilging eyes,
Water geysering up gearboxes, antifreeze greasing their thighs.
Then the sump-pumps of both Báthorian queens hydraulicked
A last time as the Doppler’s chimed, kerplunking in a palsied fit
She sunk puffing the pond’s silt underscore. All this due to a verdict
Laid down by our Oracle Oprah: “The champagne of all
Anti-aging creams comes from the distilled blood of liberal
Democrats relaxed by a pond’s dulcet lap.” When
Chris finally felt his loss, I was found, deep in the fen
Lying so casual-like but for my cummerbund of blood,
My large intestine toilet-papering a nearby shrub.
Under the woodchuck woodchuck of helicopters in the sky
He held me, fist pumping, asking the gods, Why
When Charon bid me aboard had I so blindly said aye, aye?
I’d lived best supporting, but in death nailed the lead. It had
Been an especially dangerous scene, but I had had
The guts to lock my stand-in stunt man in a port-a-potty
And, with a little make up, stood in for myself. A flea
Cast as itself by default acts out its wildest dreams.
Now, a jillion earthworms perch at my casket’s seams
While Chris chisels this on my headstone shellacked in sun-sheen
And a writhing half-moon of bikini-clad teens scream:
One day, my friends, we all must step out of our machines.
Published in Arc: Poetry Magazine, Winter, 2011
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