A Literary Feast

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Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

The Once And Future King

Posted on June 10th, 2016

Manila, Philippines. Friday, December 10, 1999. President Joseph Estrada is meeting with senators and the discussion is tense. Estrada took office during a time of major economic decline and now, a year and a half later, the debt and unemployment are still growing. His popularity falls while opposition to his policies rises. In August, tens of thousands of hungry Filipinos swarmed the streets in protest against his probusiness agenda, demanding he focus instead on the needs of the poor. “Whether removed by force or by the broad coalition arrayed against him,” US analysts said a few weeks earlier, “Estrada is unlikely to fulfill his six-year term in office.” In the midst of the meeting, in mid-sentence, the lights go out. Half the country has…

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The River Squid

Posted on July 14th, 2014

You’ll start with a terrific love, and later replace it with a merely serviceable love, but cheaper. There was no plesiosaur but there was a kronosaur.   When you swim the central channel your stellate ganglion remembers its jaws and the alarm shocks down the mantle. Now you know what it’s like to be prey.   Up ashore there are rote chants on oak pews. Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest To give and not to count the cost To fight and not to heed the wounds To toil and not to seek for rest To labor and not to ask for any reward save that in knowing that we do thy will   Tough syntax for a cephalopod. You…

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Spell

Posted on July 14th, 2014

a hot afternoon reading Henri Cole whose 1978 photograph is something i’m sighing over no matter that he has no interest in my underpinnings   it’s a season of push and want and limbs falling through the dead streets i wrote once some letter to a fiction, saying oh your white soft tshirt, your careless hair let’s eat plums or get drunk and let the quiet build up some force between us–   i call my own name in bed at night, drive with the windows down, eating strawberries   the way back to a lost town is non-fiction only.

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Lyrids

Posted on July 14th, 2014

I like to get unhinged in early spring: Hung over from dark, I want to spark a light that should be left out in the cold. I’ve caught magnesium flare of slow-streak meteors, twice. The first, in Boston, walking home too late: I saw it bright above the bridge. You blinked. Then later, soft warm night in Monterey, A sizzle by the bay, grand fireball shed pieces of itself as it went out. That one burned close enough to remark upon. Burned close enough to catch a sudden scrap of what you will; enough to draw a breath, lie still ’til March, when sun comes back to us and cold ground splits from burgeoning new words. Orthogonal to what we say, the heat of…

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A Box Opens

Posted on July 14th, 2014

What is the what of talking or not talking or the yard on the right side about to become peonies peonies peonies their chickens down at the asphalt edge, fat forgetfulness, bronze shuffling food purpose–   a box opens and the past falls out, mountains and longing and that time we stopped writing letters, started the truth instead   plants in the ground are you, and so is the turn in the bed, my ankle hooked around a blanket the coffee bag, the dirty spoon, an ocean   it says one name i swallow it with eggs.  

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Apache Chief and Little Bighorn

Posted on July 14th, 2014

They call me Little Bighorn because I’m little but my horn is big. Go figure. They call Apache Chief Apache Chief because Little Bighorn sounds like an Indian name and since we’re always together people figured he ought to have an Indian sounding name too.  I tried to tell them that Apache Chief wasn’t the chief of nothing but by making such a fuss about it I probably just helped the name stick since nobody has called either one of us anything else for a long time now.  We were out past the park again near the place we call Shouter’s Spot because it’s the place where we see the guy who shouts about the prisons to anyone who happens to be nearby.  We…

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The Ancient Egyptians

Posted on May 14th, 2014

    To the Ancient Egyptians, onions symbolized eternity since the concentric rings resembled the nested layers of the Earth and the Heavens. Don’t read too much into it though, to the Ancient Egyptians, everything symbolized everything else. Cats symbolized royalty. Peanuts symbolized democracy. The rippling banks of the Nile symbolized both death and the harvest. A rat with a locust riding on its back symbolized the 1972 Atlanta Braves. Seven white carnations being urinated on by an emu symbolized the sanctity of marriage. Norman Bates symbolized Gary Cooper. A hollow gourd inverted over a well symbolized traditional American values, which in turn symbolized me drinking an icy light beer and listening to ghosts singing through the floorboards. To them, even all of eternity…

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The Good Part

Posted on May 14th, 2014

The lack of surprise on Reg’s son’s face when the door to room number forty-three had swung inward allowing a slice of the blank heat outside to penetrate the dark in an elongated white pyramid should’ve told him something.  What registered there was disappointment.  He might’ve missed if it hadn’t been for the light, the angle of the bedspread, his last minute decision to look in immediately instead of down at his shoes and then up as he’d contemplated in the truck.   Happiness, he’d said out loud on the drive over, is as ordinary as a sandwich.  He wasn’t sure what he meant by that but liked the sound of it leaving his mouth.  There was a notebook in the glove compartment that…

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Parts of (Chinese) Speech

Posted on May 14th, 2014

One thing’s for sure: learning Mandarin is like cracking your head over a hot jagged stone. Again and again. Hard. It just kills you. Four tones, thousands of characters, stroke after stroke, all ordered correctly, the works. After a full day of studying you take yourself out for a beer or a plate of chicken, thinking you’ve finally come to understand something of this language and how it works, but when the waiter in his thickly wonderful Guizhouian drawl simply asks if you’d like anything else you just stare at him blankly—what the hell did this guy just say? The words shift not only region to region but family to family. People’s everyday use of Mandarin sneaks up on you, borne along the waves of social exchange by a stranger’s unfamiliar reference,…

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