Aspects of Possession on Halloween
She hid her hair beneath my trademark
black baseball cap, and I teased mine
with a ritual of one hundred brushes.
She hid her breasts beneath my favorite
red sweater, and I invented mine
with her lace bra and balled-up socks.
She slid her legs into my torn denim,
and I flashed mine in her black fishnets.
At the party, we paid three dollars
for plastic cups and the privilege
to wait in crooked lines for flat beer,
hoping that enough had been bought
to waste us all. We slithered through
a throng of masks: aliens, cartoons,
and animals kept time to the drizzle
of steel drums down a minor scale.
Drunk, I wondered who might note
my face behind such thick rouge.
A gangster in zoot-suit pinstripes
guessed her disguise, laughing as he
said she was me, then asked how
much? and groped my socks, her bra.
-Originally published in Pearl.
Copyright 2005.
Smithson in Love
My iguana longs again for the rain forest.
His consulting value has plummeted
since the locust infestation.
Most days, he refuses to even gaze
into the rise and fall of stocks,
and our work this weekend faltered.
We had heard of semi-conductors in Silicon Valley
grown so small they will revolutionize nothing,
but my iguana misses the songs of the Amazon,
and I have failed in my attempts to replicate
the nascent twang of his native tongue.
On Wednesday, Smithson reported us
To the Bureau. And now nothing stays the same.
-from The Bureau, a collection of linked fictions currently in progress.
Copyright 2006.