two hotelier visions for the country
the pillows stamped with a none-too-subtle masquerade eye.
the concierge has clean fingernails.
three queens smoke marlboro golds outside the pageant.the open-eye pillows never blink.
the fingernails chew themselves awake in the glare.
miss gay missouri america has been relocated
to a bunker in alma. i know this because
my family still holds claim to guns buried there.
i was born for these buckshot days. one king
in red searches for the valet. one king in red
rounds the wrong corner, where the queens haven’t smokedor eaten in days.
But It’s One You Can Hold
We are all pregnant with some manner of knife
halves swell apart and meet again
pairs of lungs coalesce into coal dust
mothers dissolve in the high heatexits, noise, and cold drafts,
these are cutlery. these are my children.
Holloweve
I raise my arms above my head, and the movements [shear] the theater light. The projector hums on the bathroom counter. I slip on the black thigh-highs for the first time. In the dark, silvered images of pornography dance across my abdomen and flat chest and spill over the shower wall’s tile. I wonder if the man in the elevator sees the [sheer] revealed slightly at the top of my sneaker. I recall something Janice Raymond said about “the artifact.” She’s awful, but I’m alone and distracted by slim margins of self-hatred. Semi-sober but still longing for thinner ozone. No real desire other than lust for a well bottom’s touch, the violet flame inside of eyes closed. The stairway to the Holiday Inn opens to a grey October chill. The streetlights are morning murmurs, barely lamping.
I often rent these rooms to make facial expressions that I can’t form elsewhere. I direct the assorted eyebrow shifts and mouth contortions at strange walls. Each of the mirrors silently auditions me. I move as he moves. In the carport, I return my hands to my pockets and raise my shoulders into a familiar plateau. Territory I know. I follow brass drums into a killing field.
(because he was a fungi)
i have a joke for you: a freight train a man and myself enter an alley and the man is in a pick-up on his way to work maybe on his way to kill someone from the percussive sputter into his phone and out the open window — that’s not a threat that’s a guarantee — a line i’ve heard in several movies about organized crime you know those period pieces when our country held true to more traditional values a simpler time of thieves where murderers could rob you of your life and we didn’t listen to podcasts about their acts as we fell asleep beside our husbands our eyes settling inside the yolk of a chorus yodeled by beasts out of sight in the treeline maybe our hearts still-still as a hole in drywall.