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http://quietlightning.org/sparkle-blink
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QUIET LIGHTNING IS:
a literary nonprofit with a handful of ongoing projects,including a monthly, submission-based reading series
featuring all forms of writing without introductions orauthor banter—of which sparkle + blink is a verbatimtranscript. The series moves around to a different venueevery month, appearing so far in bars, art galleries,music halls, bookstores, night clubs, a greenhouse, aballroom, a theater, a mansion, a sporting goods store, a
pirate store, a print shop, a museum, a hotel, and a cave.
There are only two rules to submit:
1. you have to commit to the date to submit
2. you only get up to 8 minutes
quietlightning.org/submission-details
SUBSCRIBE
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info + updates + video of every reading
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sparkle + blink 73
© 2016 Quiet Lightning
artwork © Sarah Irvin
sarahirvinart.com
“Would You Believe” by Miriam Bird Greenbergfirst appeared in Missouri Review
“Signal to Noise” by Robert Pesich first appeared in HillTromper
book design by j. brandon loberg
set in Absara
Promotional rights only.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any formwithout permission from individual authors.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the
internet or any other means without the permission of theauthor(s) is illegal.
Your support is crucial and appreciated.
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CONTENTS
curated by
Meghan Thornton + Ian Tuttle
featured artist Sarah Irvin
PETER BULLEN Author 1
MADELEINE MORI Sa-I-Gu 3
RYAN JOHNSON Fallon, nv 5 Arizona 6 Graceland Cemetery,Chicago, il 8
CASSANDRA DALLETT Fuck for Story 9 Bitch Be Cool 11
CLAIRE MARGINE Butter Lamb 13PETER BULLEN Dinner 19
LISA LOCASCIO Catch Up Over Drinksor Coffee 23
BRIGID HUGHES Cage Free Eggs 25
KIRIN KHAN Only People 33
HANNA PESHA Homage 39
KRISTIN ACREDOLO I Ask 41
CHRISTINE NO Western Ave 45
REI JACKLER Not the Slut You Think She Is 47
MIRIAM BIRD GREENBERG Would You Believe 51
DANNY SCUDERI Dear AJ 55
SARAH HENRY Through the Window 59
EMILY KIERNAN Country Dirt 65
DORIAN MOFFEI Between Two Dogs 69
JASON BUCHHOLZ My Life in 131–2 Interactionswith Law Enforcement 71
ROBERT PESICH Signal to Noise 79
http://meghanthornton.com/http://meghanthornton.com/http://ituttle.com/http://sarahirvinart.com/http://sarahirvinart.com/http://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://quietlightning.org/readershttp://sarahirvinart.com/http://ituttle.com/http://meghanthornton.com/
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Q U I E T L
I G H TNING IS SP O N S O R E D
B Y
http://www.sfartscommission.org/http://www.hewlett.org/http://obookspoetry.com/http://lagunitas.com/http://zff.org/
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QUIET LIGHTNING
A 501(c)3, the primary objective and purpose of Quiet
Lightning is to foster a community based on literary
expression and to provide an arena for said expression. QL
produces a monthly, submission-based reading series on
the first Monday of every month, of which these books
(sparkle + blink ) are verbatim transcripts.
Formed as a nonprofit in July 2011, the board of QL is
currently:
Evan Karp executive director
Chris Cole managing director
Josey Lee public relationsMeghan Thornton treasurer
Kelsey Schimmelman secretary
Sarah Ciston director of books
Katie Wheeler-Dubin director of films
Laura Cerón Melo
art director
Christine No
producer/assistant managing director
If you live in the Bay Area and are interested in
helping—on any level—please send us a line:
evan@quiet l ightning .org
http://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/abouthttp://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about/board-staff/http://quietlightning.org/about
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- SET 1
-
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1
P E TE R B U L L E N
A UTHOR
“I love how you do that,” she said.
I was flossing my teeth at the time. I felt the warm
glow of her admiration. You know what that can do. I
got the idea I could teach her things, be the well from
which she might quench her thirst. Her long, shapely
leg rested on the rim of my bathtub. I thought to
myself, that’s my bathtub, that’s her leg.
“What should we do now?” she asked in a seductive
tone.
“I could read you a section from my novel,” I said,
immediately regretting it, immediately sensing howsuch an answer turns your life to shit.
“What’s it about?” she said, the light going out of her
eyes, her leg leaving the rim of my bathtub. I plunged
ahead, thinking who knows what; that I might,
through well formulated self- expression, win back herformer good feelings for me.
“Well it involves a young man, who shall we say
aspires to be other than he presently is, who wants
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his life to register as actual, as in...”
“I don’t get it,” she said, interrupting and reaching inher pocket for some gum. “It’s later than I thought,”
she added, checking her phone. I wanted to beg, say
please don’t leave; it’s only nine-thirty and I am not
really a guy who wants to talk about a stupid book. I’m
a guy who wants your leg back resting on the rim of
my bathtub, a guy who wants to be admired for theway I thread that fine cord through my teeth. And I
was just warming up; there are many other aspects of
personal hygiene I’d like to demonstrate for you.
I never got to say it.
The door slammed shut. The click-clacking sound of
her heels got fainter and fainter out in the hallway.
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3
M A D E L E I N E M O R I
S A -I-GU
“Four-Two-Nine,” 1992
Deep in the desiccation of Los Angeles lawns,
everything’s been long half-bloomed.
A cigarette butt, a velvet breeze, now
begins the mid-air humming
of junked refrigerators out the backs of bodegas.
The thin red crime threads are cut,
the lawns gnarl in shadow:
oozing lemonheads glitter on the sidewalk
like the sweat of liquor money
that pools in Uncle Joo’s cash drawer.
I swab shelves of Soju and Goldschlager,
the Camel and chew, saved
behind this metal cage that lets only dust enter,
as a young brown boy drops a six-pack
of Miller High Life on Joo’s counter:
How much?
What do you mean how much?
For this man.
I’m not selling you this.
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Why the fuck not?
Because I see you! You steal from here every day!
You don’t know what you’ve seen--that ain’t me!
Of course it’s you!
It’s always you!
Joo screeches and halts like the Florence St. bus,
Boy curdles like a Sunday egg custard,hotbox couple above us fucking, then shrieking,
the hairs on my neck all blazing:
The windows broken, the new guns cocked,
the ribs concave, the ears slashed off,
wings of dried blood, resting like a brown ash moth,swept down the gutter, they’re illuminated,
gone.
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5
R YA N J O H N S O N
F A LLON, N V
alone at the saloon
cigarette smoke swirlsin wisps of cold light
I ask the bartender
does she have a room
to lie awake in all night
does she get gin
while the gray wool fogis poisoned by the moon
I’m just passing through I said
I’m just like this smoke
breathe and I’ll be gone
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6
ARIZONA
fingertips on the neck of it
arm resting on the doorshellI don’t know where I dropped that flask
where head out the window I vomited
where it sprayed red as lust all down the interstate
I know my vision warbled as I drove
I know saguaros to lean away
I know coyotes to scatterI know it was somewhere in Arizona
where a woman cut her wrists opening a pineapple
where the low sun took me in his jaws
and almost whispered me the reason why of
everything but for my body on his tongue
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RYAN JOHNS ON 7
GRACELAND CEMETERY, CHICAGO, IL
we wet our fingers and dipped them in the urn but
the ashes were bland
and I felt less than immortal
he poured them into a plastic thermos and noses over
the rimwe inhaled the plume
but it was spoorless
we tried to scatter them
and became cloaked
in her shadow, pale as ghosts
though statues of marble and weeping copper drosscould see us leave, could smell her
could taste her in the air of our wake
that day we died
more than the passing of an hour would allow
walking backwards toward immortality
as time curved onward and awayhoping to meet her somewhere
on the other side of the circle
in a dark so pure that even death
can no longer see to collect
what is not left for him
what else is the body but an object to smelt and pitchand see where dross does not collect?
what else is the body but one more thing to put away
at night?
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9
C A S
S A ND R A D A L L E T
T
F U C K FOR S TO R Y
I met Jimmy on the block holding a boom box.
We fucked all night in someone’s spare roomit was a narrow bed he was dark skinned
with a gold tooth and a deep and lispy voice.
I liked the way he said icy like there were s’s and h’s
in it
We played H-Town’s Knockin Da Boots
on rewind until we tire till the break of dawnTo this day I think of him when I hear the song
though I barely remember his face.
We were in Western Addition across from the
mortuary
A family business where he worked. A business black folks stay in.
In Jim Crow days blacks were always allowed to bury
their own.
In the ghetto business is still booming.
I was leaving town the next day moving away
but kept his pager # for the next two yearshit him now and again though I think he might have
been married.
When I came back I asked him to pick me up in
Oakland
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while he was collecting bodies.
It was Christmas Eve I needed to get to the cityspend the holiday with my home girls in Chinatown.
He scooped me up in the hearse
We got the corpse in North Oakland
at one of those big funeral homes
that takes up a whole city block
crossed the bridge with the shiny casketme and Jimmy.
We never hooked up again after that.
It was just the fact I could say I’d fucked a mortician
rode with the dead
seemed like an interesting way to show up for the
partyand I wanted to hear the way he lisped in my ear
when I was on top and we were Knockin Da Boots.
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CASSANDRA DALLETT 11
BITCH BE COOL
The Trumping of America means no lives matter
means steal up the walls the fences the razor wire
shoot your neighbor especially brown
asleep in their car minding your business
stab brown berets with eagle beaks and talonstick a flag up their ass for Christ’s sake
rotisserie
no apology rallies chant about guns guns guns
stew up of the masses water board or worse
call Indian people Isis awwww what’s the difference
China, Mexico fuck ‘em all build a wallwhere the hell is Syria Iran Fuck that fucking Pakistan
Bomb the fuck out of the whole shit-uation
this is happening though it’s hard to believe when
the only news on TV comes from comedians
networks love this American Idol election
a more sinister Simon Cowell all cranked upeveryday orange face clown
and I quote
it doesn’t matter what the media says
as long as you have a young beautiful piece of ass
Hair club for assholes calls us gold diggers
calls breast feeding disgusting
He’s going to sue you so
don’t call him an orangutan
don’t call him a liar
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definitely don’t call him for help
unless you got your white sheets on
your torches ready to burnbooks borders and bitches
shut up he says security dragging you out
his fans kicking you down
this is red and blue
and oh so white this is for the pigs the dogs the slobs
woman not carved thin and vapid dollhe will talk about your bleeding
say you’re gross call you animal
on podium after podium he will curse you all to hell
which is most likely where we’re headed
in a motherfuckin’ flag-waving cross-burning basket.
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13
C L A I R E M A R G I N E
BUT T ER L A MB
Easter is for children and gluttons and ghosts. Aisles
bloom with chocolate bunnies in pastel foil. A busloadof Catholic school children fill the corner donut
store, buying dollar crullers with ash smeared on their
foreheads. Somewhere, someone else’s son of God rises.
Polish Easter at my friend Layla’s house is family style.
Linen and tweed, flushed bodies in good spring clothes,painted walls suffused with sunlight. Strangers and
friends gather table-side; we tip back our heads and
slurp Buffalo vodka, full of sting and a wet smack of
grass.
Proper Polish, this spread. The hostess, Layla, luminouskitchen minx, serves platters of hand rolled doughs,
stuffed and fried. Her feast makes the table groan
and bend its tired back. Platters of the season’s tender
vegetables, skinned and scrubbed and roasted alive.
Taut crackling skin and flesh basted with lemon juice
and rosemary. Even the butter appears sentient. It’s atraditional Polish Easter butter, delicately molded into
the shape of a lamb.
Together, we strangers scrape and saw, point and
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taste. The magic of bodies at a table: we become
temporary family simply by eating en masse. We have
to brush shoulders, fill glasses. We must put our handsin the same dishes, pass it left and feed a stranger.
Our digestive systems spend a party’s length as twins,
identical pumpernickel and pork fat succumbing to
our bellies’ scientific machinations.
It’s festive and familial—happy Easter, new friends!Today we’re all Polish! Except, of course, I really am.
I can’t tell you what town my grandfather was from, so
little did we dare to trespass the past. Our Polish family
table wasn’t full of the previous generation’s dishes. It
was my grandfather eating tongue-razing hot soup10 full minutes before the rest of us touched a spoon
to our fragile buds. How he swallowed a meal whole
and ate the table out from under our elbows before
we lifted a fork. (We learned. Our Thanksgivings take
20 minutes, at most.) My grandfather loathed rice and
potatoes because he ate them raw when they freed himfrom his last concentration camp. His stomach, tight
with malnourishment, started and seared, a tangle of
nothing split open and lit. It killed a want for common
starches.
Here’s a traditional dish: I don’t know.
Here’s traditional dinner table talk:“You couldn’t just
say Auschwitz canteen?” my uncle and father would
say if they were sitting here, reading over my shoulder.
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The room grows warm, thick with our communal
scent---sweating hair and sweet cheese dumplings on
the table, Kielbasa split skin-popping from a grill pan.Someone exclaims, “Layla, where did you get these
butter lambs? They’re adorable!”
Layla is in touch with her Polish roots now. Layla hit
the point in life where she wanted to put her feet on the
ground, dig her fingers into family history and here’swhat she found: Her grandmother’s kitchen. Family
stories. Polish bakeries and delis. Local shopkeepers
and Polish unions and social clubs. A constellation
of cultural connections that brought her, finally, to a
display of the most perfect little almond eared lambs.
It all sounds so fun. I ask her “Are your parents Polish?”
and she laughs. “Oh no, just my grandmother.”
My boyfriend says, “Hey, she’s just as Polish as you!”
I take a piece of bread and eat it roughly. The waning vodka in my blood stream is slowly dragging its crisp
fingernails across my tender brain. My head hurts.
Just as Polish as me.
In high school I wanted to apply for a scholarship froma Polish Social Club---my grandfather was Polish, I
was Polish enough. I wondered what it would feel like
to belong to a culture that wasn’t a liability. I saw my
father’s MySpace page once and it said the people he
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most wants to meet are his grandparents. A Holocaust
speaker once told my class, “Jews can learn how to
speak any language,” when asked how he escapedand leapt from country to country in Europe, an
affectionate shorthand for: “The alternative is death.”
A bottle is passed, a cloud of sweet boozy breath fills
the dining room. Layla’s expectant face wants to
believe we could be cousins. Should she introduce meto her butcher?
Can he make Auschwitz canteen grub? Can the two
of us sit through the truth and meet on the other side?
“I’m so Polish that they killed almost my whole family andeveryone left over was tortured into forever survivors.”
But of course you can’t say that. There is nothing to
say that isn’t strictly unsayable and I, rudderless Pole,
have consumed my first relentless slurps of Buffalo
vodka—-cold, warm, straight, swirled, ice, a fissure ofcranberry cocktail.
She’s just as Polish as me and just look at her. I’ve never
been Polish a day in my life.
Tables are violent. Our rituals are sawing and scrapingand animal flesh in our teeth. Our blood alcohol spikes
and everyone sidesteps around the genocide in the
room. We eat family style, but lord knows we’re not
family.
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I don’t think revenge is much of a dish. How do you
serve it when everyone is dead? Who do you serve it
to? Certainly not sweet Layla, proffering poppyseedstrewn bread, warm from the oven, letting us all be
Polish if just for an afternoon.
I stay quiet.
I stay kind.
I do not say Holocaust at Polish Easter.
But when it’s time to cut the head off of the butter
lamb, there is brief violence in my dull table
blade. I slice through the tender butterfat fur,
smash its oily face into a split-open roll
and smear.
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P E TE R B U L L E N
DINNER
All the guests were couples. I was the lone single. I
told myself not to think of it as deeply symbolic. I toldmyself it might have been a coincidence, or maybe an
act of compassion on the part of the couples. I told
myself it would be over soon, like life itself, it would
not go on forever. Even when I had been doubled, I’d
felt single. I didn’t understand why. When I’d said to
my partner Cathy that I felt single, she said: “Wellfuck off then,” which kind of confirmed my feelings.
People say it’s good to have a partner who confirms
your feelings, but in that case it wasn’t so good. The
host of the dinner party had not told me that it would
be a couple’s party so maybe he didn’t see it that way.
Maybe he had an enlightened view, and saw it simplyas a people party, and by virtue of me being a person
I was includable. It’s good to be includable but you
never know how long it’s going to last. And I still felt
like the sole exception to something, which detracted
from any momentary joy associated with feelings of
inclusion. I hate when I have a moment of joy andthen a thought comes along to detract from it. But it
always happens. I wondered if the coupled people
who sat around the table from me also felt, on
occasion at any rate, like sole exceptions of a sort
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and made up for the ensuing discomfort by snuggling
up with another sole exception in a shared bed at the
end of day. I felt like it was a fair enough theory. ButI didn’t feel comfortable testing out my theory with a
question, because it simply wasn’t the sort of question
it felt wise to pose as the one single person in a sea of
couples. What I have noticed, is the good questions
often have to be shelved, or saved for another time,
a time that never comes. Unless of course there wasto come a time when I myself might share a bed with
another person. But by then it might be too late, at
least too late to pose an honest question or get an
honest answer, one that would lend some integrity to
the research. If you want to maintain your integrity, a
shared bed can pose unforeseen challenges.
Two large bowls of noodles slathered in meat sauce
were passed around. This was a cultured crowd
and the food, which came without a salad, or really
without vegetables of any kind seemed orgiastic and
out-of-place. That consoled me since an out-of-placefeeling was one I felt a special kinship with. A very
drunk woman sat across from me, which I have never
really objected to. As a rule, I rather like it at first, then
later not as much. She placed a tremendous pile of
noodles on her plate. I loved the lusty way she did it.
This is food, I’m having some, was the kind of style inwhich she went about accomplishing it. I was starting
to admire this drunken woman, who told me her name
was Sandra. I had not asked her her name. Between
mouthfuls, she just came right out and gave it to me.
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Fair enough I thought, and most sociable. I think
she knew things, like how the real questions seldom
get asked. And she probably could tell that I was anappreciator of her appreciations, her relationship to
the noodles being one obvious example.
I felt sure she sensed my growing admiration.
In this way she was her own type of sole exception;exceptionally attuned to a particular type of admirer.
She let me know that she was an artist who specialized
in installations, and said she could place me in one
of her installations because her intuition led her to
believe I’d be very installable. I was ready to have her
stick me any old place she wanted. She had formidableteeth, not something that worried me, and also a stain
on her white blouse that did worry me. I wanted the
power not to fall under the spell of that stain, which
had become, in terms of impression, as significant as
the person wearing it, if that’s the proper way to speak
of a stain, as something worn. I made efforts to lookaway but was continuously drawn back. I wanted to
alert her to it, but because of its location that felt too
daring, because as everyone, particularly her partner,
would surely know, her breasts were inside that blouse.
It was really the only place her breasts could be. I
wished that the stain had been on her sleeve, becausea stain on her sleeve would have led me to point out
its exact and fortuitously innocuous location. That
would have been perfectly appropriate and even
useful, and I had this theory that women appreciated
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men who were useful. But a stain shows up where it
wants to, and that’s life as Frank Sinatra once sang,
and a great many other people have come to much thesame conclusion.
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L I S A L O C A S C I O
C A T C H UP O VERD R I NK S OR C OF F E E
Hey. Let’s. You know? I understand you are coming tome dogsleigh across ten thousand miles of tundra, and
I know this is different from what we discussed, but I
hope we can catch up over drinks or coffee.
Hi there! Thanks for the update note. Can I call
you? You had in your mind this vision of the two ofus floating over the city, cocooned in spun sugar and
stuck together at the crotch, but after giving it some
thought I would love it if we could instead just briefly
encounter one another in a crowded elevator at my
office. Seventh floor, one forty-three pm. Be there!
It will be great to hear how you have been! Hope
we can get to everything in the seven seconds I have
allotted our interaction. I know we discussed taking
a room at the five-star hotel for seventy-two hours of
bathing in draughts of each other’s joy and loss, but
it works better for me to spy you from an oppositetrain platform and raise my hand in a wan gesture
of recognition, never entirely sure that it’s you at
whom I am waving. Can’t wait to see you!
We had discussed you painting your name on
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my back with your tongue, but can we instead have
you do an aisle or two with me at the grocery store?
Definitely New Age Drinks, maybe Ethnic. I know
we said we’d descend lost into the city catacombs,grope forward with only desire to guide us. Right
now I’m feeling more of a see each other at the bar
and yell incomprehensibly over the music, meaning to
but never actually talking kind of thing, though. You
know?
When you said that you hoped we could spend time
together, I know what you had in mind. Us driving a
melting black road hellfire down into a void, sunset
optional, our clothes and bags and jobs and lives and
faces burning off and into the nothing behind, until
we are only two energies clinging to the other’s axis, your mouths crying onto my hands and cock until
your tears are what we are and the car is just a bubble
and we evaporate into the unblinking eye of the sun.
I know that’s what you wanted. But the truth is that I
am terrified of you. In my sleep your desire opens upin front of me, a red maw, and I tremble. Whatever
toe or foreskin I once dipped in there was quite the
risk, and now I think the excitement I felt when you
snake-moved until your skin came clean off was in
fact horror. For the rest of my life it’s going to be flat-
front-khakied brunettes with a genetically diminishedcapacity for pleasure for me, I think. I’m lucky, I realize
now, that I got out with my dick and face intact.
I hope you understand. We can talk about it, over
drinks or coffee.
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B R I G I D H U G H E S
C A G E FREE EG G S
The One Where Nagelberg and I Understand Each
Other on a Spiritual Level
Before going to my friend Nagelberg’s place tonight,
I stopped by the Haight Street Whole Foods and
asked a white kid with dreadlocks who worked there
if they had any horchata. The clerk looked at my
mouth instead of my eyes as I talked, which made meuncomfortable, and then he said, “Hmmm, let’s go
check the soy milk aisle,” and I followed him.
I was a little nervous because I had just stolen a
kumquat from the kumquat display for Nagelberg
because, if you ask me, everyone should be surprisedwith a freshly stolen organic kumquat from time to
time. In that same coat pocket I had also brought a
small scentless votive candle to give her. You never
know when the next big earthquake is going to hit,
and I hate to imagine my friends in the dark.
On the way, we walked by a wall of cage-free eggs,
which didn’t make any sense. Presumably the
chickens are cage-free—not the eggs. I imagined
thousands of eggs walking around a large yard and
chuckled to myself.
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“There’s no such thing as cage-free eggs,” I said to the
clerk.
“’Scuse me?” he said.
“Never mind,” I said.
In the soy milk aisle, the kid sighed and explained
that the Whole Foods in Potrero Hill had all sorts ofhorchata, but that they didn’t seem to have any here.
“No horchata?” I yelled. “What kind of bush league
Third World Whole Foods is this?” He gave me what
seemed to be a sincere apology, but I’m not sure because
I have a hard time telling the difference between
sincerity and sarcasm these days. I smiled sincerely andthe kid looked at my mouth again, so I imagined what
it would be like to kiss him. After deciding it might
not be too bad, he said something about how much he
loved hemp milk and I said, “Whatever.”
When I got to Nagelberg’s house and gave her thekumquat and the candle, she said thank you. “Did you
know that you eat the whole kumquat?” she asked.
“Skin and everything?” I said yes, but the truth is I have
never actually eaten a kumquat. No one has ever given
me one.
Then she said, “That’s funny, the candle I was just
trying to light is all burnt out” and she went ahead and
lit the new one I had just given her. I laughed because
I could never light a candle that way. All mine are still
on reserve for the next disaster.
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The One Where I Realize I’m Doing It All Wrong
Yesterday Nagelberg and I were talking about men,and for some reason “The Helicopter” came up.
“What’s ‘The Helicopter?’” she asked.
“You don’t know what ‘The Helicopter’ is?” I was
stunned. How could a pretty girl like Nagelberg havegone her whole adult life without running into a
Helicopter or two? “It’s when a guy grabs his penis
at the base and then swings it around like a propeller.
You know, like a helicopter.”
I demonstrated with my imaginary dick and madethe ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch sound of a helicopter. Suddenly
I realized how much I was enjoying myself, and then
instantly hated myself for corroborating Freudian
psychology.
“Never seen it,” she shrugged.
“If I had a dime for every time I’d been chased around
a living room by a man doing ‘The Helicopter,’” I said,
“I’d have enough money to pay for an hour of metered
parking in San Francisco.”
“Well,” she said. “I must not be dating the right type of
guys.”
“Sure,” I sighed. “The right type of guys.”
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The One Where We Learn French
The other Saturday night I attended a Bastille Dayparty at the W Hotel. Despite plans for a “Girl’s Night”
guaranteeing drinking, stories about sex, and the men
we’d been having it with, my typical enthusiasm for
these activities eluded me.
I’d spent the afternoon wandering around nakedin my apartment, as I am wont to do, repeating the
word “Bastille,” to myself, bass-tee-yuh, thinking about
that time in Paris six years ago when I was berated
by a crêpe vendor for using incorrect conjugation. I
paused to check my reflection in the mirror, bass-tee-
yuh, remembering how inadequate he’d made me feel.
That evening Nagelberg and I got ready together
the way we always do. I coated my lips in gloss and
complained about the lack of fish in the sea lately.
Nagelberg said it sounded like a good night for a swim.
I told her I hadn’t been interested lately, and she saidshe found that hard to believe.
We arrived at the hotel before the other girls and
headed for the bar. Chandeliers, martini glasses, a
$3 coat check. Nothing like the hollow wood of the
spaces I prefer to hunker down in. Two models inwhite pouf wigs and thigh-highs offered us Mardi Gras
beads or plastic skimmer hats, all of which generated
an immediate internal list of shitty things to say, but I
corked it because the disparities didn’t seem to bother
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anyone else. Crammed elbow-to-elbow waiting for
the bartender, I heard a hard sniff, then another, and
realized the Suit-and-Tie behind me was doing blowoff his house key. I could see the flex of his jaw, the
tension in his teeth, and for a moment I missed one of
my ex-boyfriends.
I considered ordering a stiff drink but settled on
champagne, suddenly in need of a prop more than abuzz. Nagelberg got water. A gamey fellow mistook
our smiles as an opportunity to grind his pelvis in our
general direction. I yelled over the techno that I’d seen
an episode of Deadliest Catch the night before, and
something about the way the boats got swallowed
by the waves. Nagelberg told me to knock it off andsuggested we wander.
We headed towards the photo area, drawn like bugs to
the bulb. “I’m the photographer,” said a short fat man,
gesturing to black bags of equipment on the floor. “Do
you want your picture taken?”
Behind him on the thinly carpeted floor was a large
bed draped in red and white sheets. Not a pair to
hesitate, Nagelberg and I kicked off our shoes and
climbed on. We arched our backs and batted our lashes
at the camera. “Lift your chins,” the fat man ordered.“Touch your hair.”
When it was over, Nagelberg rolled off in search
of her shoes. I curled around a pillow and closed
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my eyes to watch the electrical parade of floaters
swimming across my lids from the flash. I could feel
the photographer sit down on the edge of the bed. “Ido professional boudoir photography,” he said, hitting
the b hard enough to blow a wisp of my hair from my
face.
“Boudoir?” I cooed, the word betraying the scowl on
my face.
Just then the rest of the girls arrived like a perfumed
missile of clicking heels and swinging ponytails. One
of my friends pecked the photographer on one cheek,
then the other.
“Brilliant,” she said. “I see you’ve met.”
“You two know each other?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said, wrapping a long arm around him.
“He’s the one who invited us.”
The One Where Nagelberg and I Deal with the
Cage-Free Egg Issue Once and For All
The other day, Nagelberg called me and told me to
come with her to find some new clothes at the mall.
I didn’t want to, but I had to acknowledge that I’d
been wearing the same dowdy black khakis and blue
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sweatshirt several days now, and it would be a good
idea to go shopping out of the need for something new
rather than something practical.
When we got there, Nagel said the big, noisy, confusing
maze of a mall made her feel anxious. And as we looked
at the giant five-level color-coded map for a bit of
orientation, I realized that after twenty-nine years of
avoiding malls because they’re banal and coffinesqueand full of bag-toters who think that buying whatever
they want is the same thing as freedom, they also make
me feel anxious as well.
“Let’s head for the elevator,” I said, steering us towards
Nordstrom.
Once again I was trying not to think about the true
definition of “cage free eggs” so I said, “Apparently
maxi dresses are all the rage right now.”
“A Nazi dress? That’s absurd,” Nagelberg said.
“What? No, Nagel. A maxi dress,” I said and pointed one
out from the no less than eight girls toddling around
in the long summer sheath.
“Whew,” she said, clearly relieved, and we laughed likemaniacs just like we always do. “That’s a dumb name.
Sounds like maxipad.”
“Can you even imagine?” I said. “A Nazi dress? I don’t
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care how hip they get, I’m not wearing a Nazi dress.”
“Seriously,” she agreed.
Then we found her some jeans, and I bought a new
sweater, and we went for dinner at our favorite place
and had drinks at The Libertine, where drunk guys hit
on us even though we weren’t wearing maxi dresses.
And in the end it was the kind of night that reminds you everything’s all right, even if cage free eggs are
anything but.
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K I R I N K H A N
O NLY PEOPL E
When they lived in the brick rental house on Osprey
Lane, when she was four or five and just beginning todifferentiate her form from the rest of the world and
its inhabitants, Breshna’s best friend in the whole wide
world was Katy. Katy was everything Breshna was
not—slender limbs to her chubby frame, milky skin
to her walnut brown color, blond waves to Breshna’s
oil slick of straight black hair. And most importantly,at least, so it seemed to Breshna, green eyes—sheen
stargay, that treasured Pashtun feature, featured in
tribal songs of eternal love, eyes that cause madness
and lust and devotion for the ages. Yet somehow, by
some alignment of stars, Katy loved Breshna. They
played together every day—hiding their My LittlePonies in the backyard to discover later, riding bikes
and pretending they were horses, dressing dolls
up and parading them through the doll town in
miniature convertibles to parties in doll mansions,
and playing house, or more specifically, “Husband and
Wife.” “Husband and Wife” involved the removal ofall clothing—underwear included. The two parties
would then lie in bed naked next to each other and
rub their bodies against each other. The individual
performing the role of “Husband” is expected to
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be the more active participant, and is often “on top”—
both parties are expected to alternate husbandly
duties. No kissing. No real “exploring” with the hands,absolutely no penetration (How? Where? It simply
was not part of their awareness)—more of a kind of
alignment-based frottage, touching as curious animals
do, with the fullness of skin as sensory organ, by feel.
Answering only the question, “What kind of touch
would feel nice?” and then providing that touch toone’s partner, expecting, and almost always receiving,
that same touch in reciprocity. It was best done in the
late afternoon, when one’s parents were napping or
otherwise engaged, and no one bothered to check on
two little girls “taking a nap” in the bedroom.
Another way of putting it:
The sheets pulled overhead make a secret room,
a flowing, sighing room, shaded but not dark,
feet tucked in, giggling. Skin tingling, glowing,
rippling—is yours?
warm in places—cheeks, the center of chest
flush.
skin feels too tight on hands, tummy hurts a
little bit, cramping, hot breath on neck.
air soft and warm, clean sheets and salt water.
Thigh is touching thigh is touching thigh is
touching thigh. Knees rub against each other.
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Your lips darken and deepen—do mine do that?
Chest flat like mine. Trace fingers on it, mostlyto get you to trace your fingers on mine—
lazy drawings that make skin tingle and bloom.
Bloom.
Mummy reads Breshna’s diary junior year and cries for
days without explanation. She picks Breshna up from
school early in the middle of the week without a word
to Breshna’s father, saying they are going on a “girls
only trip” (he never asks for details regarding girls-
only events, assuming they are of a biological natureso intimate and sacred he cannot dare to breach even
the boundary of inquiry), and drives directly to the
family psychiatrist, silent but shaking, the diary at
her side. Breshna is grateful for the silence, seeing the
diary lying there between the passenger and driver
seats, knowing there are so many reasons containedtherein for her mother to be upset with her, and she
uses the silence to steel herself should this girls-only
trip culminate in a beating. Instead, Mummy pulls her,
gripping her triceps in a solid pinch, into a nondescript,
one story brick building.
She knew her brothers were brought to a psychiatrist
regularly, and that her dad occasionally saw one when
he would stop talking or leaving his room for too long,
but none of the girls were allowed the luxury of a
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struggle with their inner selves or outer realities. She
had never been to this building before.
The white-haired man with fleshy red face, the
psychiatrist, sitting behind his desk squints from
behind his narrow rectangle glasses and asks Breshna,
“When did you know you were attracted to women?”
What could she say? “I’m not sure what you mean.”Who else is there?
“When did you notice your, erhm, sexual attraction to
women?” The doctor speaks slowly, as though Breshna
doesn’t speak English. As though she knew the words
for such things in Pashto.
“I don’t suppose I ever really noticed it. Until everyone
else did, I mean. I suppose I pay attention to what
moves me.”
“And women move you. In a way that men do not.”Statements, not questions. Breshna pondered that for
a while, gazing down at the lines in her palms, her
fortune written unintelligibly there. Her parents sent
her here. It is an extravagant expense for them, but
not more costly than the rumors of a lesbian daughter
would be. It is a compassionate response.
“Breshna? Men do not move you?” He presses. She
chews on that while he goes on.
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“Is it the men of your culture? Not all men are like that
you know. Oppressive. Backwards. You’re very lucky
to be in America; there are a lot of good men here, whowould let you work and wear shorts and you wouldn’t
have to wear a headscarf. You could, ahem, have sex
with them, you know, erhm, without judgment. Men
are different here.” He looks at her sympathetically.
Breshna feels her face flush with a brew of anger andshame.
“No, no, not like that, it’s not, I mean, they’re not like
that either, it’s just…they’re just different, is all. It feels
different. Thinking about men makes me tired. Really
tired.” At least that much is true. She looks at the clockbehind his head and hopes that’s enough to get her out
of there today—a little truth in exchange for a sanity
pass, at least for today.
Who else could there possibly be?
When women have been the focal point of attraction,
the ones she has always been closest to, the only
ones she was allowed to be alone with, sleep ‘alone’
with, the ones who whispered with blossoming rose
lips secrets into her blushing shell ear, the ones who
walked by and lingered in the swish of skirt or wave oftrailing dupatta. The ones she touched, who touched
her, before she knew what sex was, what attraction
was, when she only knew who made her feel safe and
who didn’t, who was like her and who wasn’t.
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Who else was there but women?
When a man was a heavy plodding weapon, a heavy
hand pushing her head down to prayer or a blowjob, all his secrets, all his sex and all his power, all his
and not hers, men with mustaches seated reclining
on cushions in the men’s room while she sat in the
kitchen or a bedroom with the women, men reclining
with their legs bent and spread apart at the knees just
enough, as though aiming their genitals at her, holdingher hostage while telling her to fetch more ché.
When women, soft and fleshy, shared some of their
fullness with each other, leaving each hollow in her
body fulfilled. When they left and her bed was filled
with silver glistening on her body and the scent ofsalty air and water-soaked flowers in her mouth, hair,
sheets.
When women were the only time and place where
she was allowed to be soft and open, eyes soft, heart
soft to the point of aching, to breathe in and out tomatch them. The only people she had touched before
a man forced himself inside her, splitting her from
the inside out with a growl and weight that paralyzed
her.
Women were the only people.
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H A N N A P E S H A
HOM A GE
My skirt unraveled as I wore it, leaving silver sequins
everywhere I wenta slug trail of beauty
an homage to my family.
Listen to the silences of my body.
Where does she wait to be held?
It’s okay if words come slowly, a sentence an hourThis is how the world is put together.
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- SET 2
-
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K
R I S T I N A C R E D O L O
I A SK
I ask but
no one can tell mewhere I’ve been.
I’ve been living outside.
But no one can tell me
where I’ve been.
I was chased away,and my pursuers were many.
When I stopped running,
I was alone in the forest.
Yellow pine, beetle-dust,
needles and amber.
I slept; I awoke
by a small, cold river,
a river of water;
water the color
the color and keennessof thousands of small cold knives.
I followed a crow, one branch to another, high-
crying.
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I followed a rabbit and burrowed into quaking grass.
I broke the steel surface and followed an otter;
I slipped up under the bank and I hid.
I dissolved into clouds,
splayed thin over canyons.
I dropped from the sky
and into the earth.
I lived in the earth for seventeen seasons, and thenI crawled out of a hole in the ground
like an ant.
There was a scattering of raindrops
cratering the dirt, and then nothing.
That’s how it is for me.
Nobody knows where I’ve been,
and no one can tell me.
I’ve been living outside.
But where I have been, nobody can tell me.
I heard horses’ hollow hooves
as they ran past me.
But I couldn’t catch them
by their glistening necks,
or their brown manes streaming.
I heard humming, so I followed a honeybee
to the side of a mountain. I found pungent herbs
bruised and clinging to rocks;
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KRISTIN ACREDOLO 43
tangled within their white flowers
were masses of crawling bees,
crawling and crawling, crippled with pollen.
Once a bear on the rocky slope
Shale-slid and tumbled.
I remember hearing
the bear huff-cough
as he struck the earth and slidin a loud flat clamor of clacking shale,
and how silence drew back at the bottom of the slope
until the bear climbed into his skin again and walked
away,
shaking the heat from his enormous shoulders.
That’s how it was for me
when I was living out there.
But nobody knows where I was.
No one can tell me the names of those places,
Not the place by the river,
Nor the place where the bear fell.
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C H R I S T I N E N O
W EST ERN A VE
Todd says the light’s green and we’re not moving.
Todd says love is a cheap trick.Todd says he loves The Germs—but wont play them on
our way to The Roxy. Todd says ‘cause it’s lame.
Todd says he doesn’t believe in boyfriend-girlfriend.
Todd says don’t ruin it the experience.
Todd flicks my hand from the radio dial.
Todd flicks his Parliament out the window.Todd calls Parliaments “P. Funks.”
Todd says noise is the shit.
Todd says Those People move hella slow.
Todd says the shit’s in the static.
Todd says something smells like fish.
Todd says it’s this street. Nah,Todd says it’s Those People. Yea.
Todd says it’s their genes, pocket billfolds, thieves.
Todd adds—green card, green card, passport. Dirt.
Todd says he’s got license.
Todd says—flash ‘em your tits.
Todd says they stare.Todd says I’m boring.
Todd says—and their eight kids; yardbirds.
Todd lights a P Funk.
Todd says punk rock is the noise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NAcn9kVXeU
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Todd says love is some bull::shit.
Todd says—get on the bus, man. Honks.
Todd says he’d rather eat shit.Todd sighs—at theMango Lady.
Todd sighs—at the bouquets and white buckets.
Todd sighs—at all the germs.
Todd says get out and walk, then.
Todd says don’t touch the radio. Anyway, he was
joking. Todd cuts off a rusty Datsun, hauling oldstoves. Honks. Todd gives the finger to the kid
riding shotgun. Honks. Todd says he loves Jeeps.
Todd says he loves The Germs.
Todd says he just loves too hard.
Todd says wait—and picks a blonde strand off the
dash. Todd has a theory:Todd says chicks always leave shit behind.
Todd hands me the strand—
Like, here, those bitches.
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R E I J A C K L E R
NOT THE SLU T
Y O U T HINK SHE I S
1.
Foster care is not the slut
You think she is
I know, I know...
Her skirt’s hiked highHer heels bleed red
She’s a real bitch—
I’m not arguing with this!
Sure, Foster CareGot funk, got gunk
Got shit, got splatter,
Foster Care’ll leave you
Naked on a platter, eaten,
All gone (The way You ordered it) if you ask,
But Foster Care, she’s no slut.
She’s just a Junkie—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvc1OJVmWE
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Just wants a fix
Of some home-like substances:
Butterscotch, Christmas Lights,
Whole Roast Family on Vacation, to
Shoot into her veins so hard
It shakes her out of all her
Dresses. Like now. In this bed.
Where you’re kissing me.
2.
There goes the best minds of my incarceration ledHalf starving, wild, wandering for ice cream cones
Through streets of social working busy-beasts:
Off, to the Soda Fountain Juvenile Detention
Feasts!
To the Candy Cane Sacrifice of CPS house calls!
—(Seriously. They took me out for Emporio Rulli’s
Ice Cream before dropping me at my foster home)
because the government knows that no
matter how little Mint Chip you throw atkids before walking us to our lynching line,
we won’t question why they’ve sent us,
we won’t question their crimes—because
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REI JACKLER 49
We just want one sweet mouthful
Before we go quietly
Into our adulthoodsOf numb-tounged,
Homelike-substanceless sobriety.
3.
And now you ask on my pillow About the cravings as if
It’s impossible that
I’m still hungry
For food in this mood,
But I’m famished.
Quick! Someone get me
A cookie, I’m jonesin’
For a sister!
Though, sometimes
Your familiesJust taste like it, too—
Sometimes someone’s sprayed PAM
And added hot sauce
To hide the bitter taste
It’ll leave you, and then You’re lost in the metallic tang
Biting down like a bear clamp
When you try to love again—
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So go on, try:
Keep up your slut shaming
While I stand pretty;While I redo your tie;
Shudder as if you’ve discovered
Something might be bitter
In the meat of my thighs,
But don’t mistake this—
Foster Care kids ain’t the Sluts you think we is.
No glittery highs and sequined shoes,
No prancin, techno dancing. Not even
Booze. Just nothing left toTaste, except
You.
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M I R I A
M BI R D G R E E N B
E R G W O ULD
Y OU BEL I E V E
—Three blocks from the Cyprus Freeway in Oakland,which collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake,
with a line by Sue Moon
We climbed from the mouth of a volcano
all year, the year I moved west with my sweetheart
to live three blocks from where the earth had brokenopen. Men in the Acorn Projects
remembered pulling strangers
trapped in their cars to safety. Brother,
one told me he’d said, we can be afraidof each other again tomorrow. Twenty
years after, they’d made good
on their promise. By then I waited weekly
in a food line
alongside Chinese immigrant women who fished
plastic bottles from the trash, eyes
roving for a coin, a lost prize, at the curb.
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Sometimes
I’d lift my hand to the lip—
look out over the volcano’s rim, and there,
in a crevice, a scrap of paper, shining:
someone’s private prayer
or prophecy. Everybody held out
hope, tended their small hustle. Women knocked
on the door selling broken-heeled shoes, loquats
picked in an abandoned yard, would try the knob
if no one was home. Could I make change
for a twenty, asked someone, unfolding one
she’d manufactured from a dollar bill.
Would you believe
what lengths I went to, to call myself
happy then? Star of blood that blooms
beneath a bruised fingernail, star
of silence left high in the heart of a room
after the door’s slammed. A couple sits, watching
one another’s reflections in a mirror. The two
talk like this as evening falls
around them, and neither has the heart
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to get up and turn on the light. “My body’s here
but no one’s in it,” writes a friend; for me
it’s different. I’d spent my childhood
in a house made of bees; on hot days honey
dripped through cracks in the ceiling. Me, I hummed,
coiled tight. It hadn’t been long since I’d slept
in a creosote field while grainers crashedin the switchyard nearby. Actual tumbleweeds
turned like prayer wheels crossing the tracks
and the constellations coyotes called to,
streaked across the night, were more miraculousthan freckles on the face of god. Around then,
hitchhiking past Death Valley, a pair of truckers
stopped for me. I used to haul cattle
to LAX, one said, But I couldn’t take lookinginto their mournful eyes anymore. I guess I wear
my heart
on my sleeve, he said. They were climbing
through the Sierras to pick up a load of honey, telling
jokes,
they both had wild white beards. I hadn’t yet come
in my life to peer over the lip of a volcano,
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I wasn’t yet made of a cicada’s coils
and tymbal. Still, I carried a bit of string, a quipu I
used
for eavesdropping on the passage of time.
If someone had put a knife in my hands, even then,
I’d have taken it. I can hear
two birds quarreling, tangled in midair. I’m afraid
one day I’ll find myself trash picking, tearing
corners from a twenty. I’m afraid I’m no longer
lost as the runaway I met hopping a train
out of Colton that summer
who carried a small white jar of her own baby teeth
with her in her pack.
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D A N N Y S C U D E R I
DE A R A J
You’ve been gone from this earth
Longer than you were ever on it.The curtain call has been longer than the show itself,
And my heart has been clapping ever since
That day in June
When my dad’s black Cadillac turned the corner,
Slow with the weight of bad news,
And found me on the sidewalk walking with my mom.I had just gotten a haircut.
Long on top, shaved underneath.
It was 1996.
So I felt the breeze on my neck
When he told me you died.That your memorial mass would be on Monday.
He asked me if I was ok.
I think…
I don’t really know.
It’s hard to process never again
When you’re just 10.When the only things that makes sense are
Super Nintendo Mortal Kombat tournaments,
Chicken fingers,
And laser tag.
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We did all of those in one night.
On one of your last nights.
They never told us the cancer was winning from thestart.
You weren’t there for the beginning of 5th grade 9
months earlier.
The teachers came in.
They said you were sickIn a tone heavy with defeat.
They said you had cancer in your bones.
We cried.
I don’t know why.“Cancer” was a word like “universe” or “algebra” or
“girls”—
We kind of knew what it was
But we were too young to really understand,
Too young to know how the chemo
Killed your childhood in slow IV dripsLong before the cancer ever did;
Too young to know that the strands of hair you’d
send in
As you dealt with going bald
Were road markers on a dead-end street shorter than
we ever knew;Too young to know that the trip to France for the
miracle holy water
Was a Hail Mary different than the Hail Mary’s we
said for you at school;
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But not too young to understand
That watching you fight over those 9 months
Taught me more about livingThan living ever could.
You taught me about time,
About how seconds and hours and days
Are just numbers that we’re living in
With no guarantee for the next one,So take a moment.
You taught about laughing,
That it doesn’t make everything better
Because it’s not supposed to.
It makes everything perfect right then,So do it. Do it often.
You taught me that dreams are taking a few steps
When life is a wheelchair;
And when I saw the pictures of you putting on yourwetsuit
For over an hour because your body
Was more like water than the ocean you wanted to
get into,
You taught me that fighting
Is throwing enough punches with your lungsUntil you breathe enough strength to swim one last
swim.
Your last wish was to ride the Pacific,
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To feel the power of nature carry you again
Before it carried you away.
I wonder if the horizon looked within reach that day.I wonder if you felt your own current.
I wonder what it was like,
To be 10 years old,
Floating in that water,
Knowing what you knew,
About days, and hours, and seconds…
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S A R A H H E N R Y
T H R O UG H THE WIN D O W
We decide that the squirrels are actually fairies because
we want them to be. The afternoons are long and wewant magic. They chatter at us from the trees, we talk
back in earnest. We’re invaders in their kingdom, two
small girls squatting in the dirt, poking sticks into the
ground. Both of us in dirty shorts and T shirts. Maya
and I tilt our heads up, trying to catch sight of them
leaping from branch to branch. There’s a mosquito onher knee but I’m not going to smack it off.
“Come down, we won’t hurt you.”
But we will, we hurt things. Maya knows how to fry an
ant with a magnifying glass. She doesn’t do it in frontof me anymore because I cry like a baby. But I know
how to snap a punch towards my little brother if he
pushes me too far. We are capable of hurt.
The trees stand straight up around us like we’re on the
inside of a matchbox. The ground is matted with deadpine needles and the whole world is brown with the
dead heat of late summer.
***
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Magic doesn’t come. The squirrels laugh in squirrel
language. We go inside because my parents are packing
up the truck to go to the river today. Redwood Creekhas
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