iDeath

My father was driven to Drink and Despair in a donkey cart. Other men had died there, and the driver pointed them out, jumbles of bones for the most part, but one man had eaten a beehive, and he was perfectly preserved from the inside out by all the honey. Bees were buzzing away behind his eyes. There was a bunch of dust that used to be a river. Other men had dived from the high rocks and bent their necks at unkind angles. They lay around like the saddest geometry. There was no rain in Drink and Despair, just additional dust, filtering down from the gray sky. The dust piled up on the brim of my father’s hat. Pretty soon, it looked like a statue of a hat. There were statues of men scattered about at the sort of interval most common to trees. For the duration of my father’s whole life, and lifetimes before, men had been chopping down trees at a furious rate, and up there, in Drink and Despair, some of those men had slowly turned themselves into a monument to the forest. The driver pointed out a few notable features, men with famous last names whose names were now like a colander made from a tin can. Everything came in shades of gray, predominately carp, but also whiskey and hepatitis. Even though my father had been driven by donkey cart, the smell in the air was gasoline. My father got down from the cart, paid his respects to the forest, and then he was ready to go. I don’t know where. The driver told me it was a better place. He handed me the statue of my father’s hat.

A Private Education

I went away to college for eternal things, like uselessness and sex with female fencers. No one back home was articulate as a rapier. They took nail guns to their sentences. They nailed their sentences to the walls of the house. Those sentences kept out the wind of eternity. There was no returning to the childhood bed. On holidays, I slept in the pines, which I had made piney with my knowledge, and laden, too, with pomegranates. Anyone who saw me saw a deer mating with a unicorn against a millefleurs background. That much I could share of my sacred quest.

The Sheep That Day

That day, the sheep were diagnosed. They had fleece disease. They were fenced behind the house, and from the bathroom window, I could see the tumors of the wool. That day was the last day of the sheep. A man came to destroy them. He wore a white beard with a bloody handprint. He carried a gun from his other job as the police. It was a medical scenario, slow and deliberate. No one seemed angry. The sheep least of all, defleeced, and gently dead like clouds are dead, like dead bells. The bullets moved noiselessly for a long time afterward. Through the earth, through the air. Everything else was very still. And still is.

Nobody Loves Me

My breast milk expired but the baby was still good. What to do with it, the baby. I slung it up, in pantyhose. The pantyhose had hatched from a plastic egg, in the ’70s. The pantyhose had choked down so many hard legs. The baby was legless. It was entirely round. Its wetness was softly pleasurable. The moment a ball of worms loses definition and becomes one worm, entirely round, and you swallow with only your throat—that was the baby. The breast milk was mummies raided from the tombs of two breasts from the ’70s. I put them back. I wrote a formal apology. Not for my sake, for the baby’s. I am already cursed.

Mother, Again

When my mother died, I counted the days she had been alive. I calculated the middle day, also known as the median. It was easy to calculate. What was the mean day of my mother’s life? All the days were mean as snakes. Twenty-nine thousand two hundred and sixty-nine snakes. Sorry, mom. Sorry, snakes.

I Want to Hear My Father’s Voice

In Forest Park, where no one has ever found a human head, I called you on the telephone of the wind. I said, “Hey, baba, I love you.” It was quiet for Queens in the park. It almost sounded like a forest. The wind was late as a train. To wait, I rested my head in the fork of the tree. Years later, I went back to the tree for my head. It was raining. The telephone of the wind was out of service. The tree had fallen on the tracks. Of my head, only my ears remained. I gathered my ears, and I sat with them in the branches. “Hey, baba,” I said, but I couldn’t hear it. My ears were filled with you, and with the rain.

Bedtime Story

A little girl had a rich father and a poor mother. They lived all together under one roof that dripped onto the mother’s head. The father hired a team of carpenters to patch the roof, a vertical line of bearded men who passed shingles up a ladder. When the mother went to watch them work, a carpenter dropped a shingle on her head. It wasn’t a class thing, or a gender thing, or a eugenics thing. She just had that kind of head. Now with a dent.

(It Is Easier to Imagine) the Asspocalypse 

I want a comet of buttocks to hit the Earth. The buttocks of deep space Bolshevism. Your buttocks. As big as the Sierra Maestra. As shapely as the gayest moon of Jupiter. Inhabited by dinosaurs who eat the rich. Afterward: the large-scale production of ferns. Barring that, I want whatever you want. I want it with sexual and asexual fervor. Because I love you. Because I am a fern from the post-capitalist future your buttocks will have wrought.