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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