Popular Culture

Conchita debemos to speak totalmente in English
cuando we go into Sears okayPor qué
Porque didn’ t you hear lo que pasóIt say
on the eleven o’ clock news anoche que two robbers
was caught in Sears and now this is the part
I’ m not completely segura que I got everything
porque channel 2 tiene tú sabes that big fat guy
that’ s hard to understand porque his nose sit on his lip
like a elefante pues the point es que the robbers the police say

"Myrtle loves Harry" — It is sometimes hard to remember a thing like that,
Hard to think about it, and no one knows what to do with it when he has it,
So write it out on a billboard that stands under the yellow light of an "L" platform among popcorn wrappers and crushed cigars,
A poster that says "Mama I Love Crispy Wafers So."
Leave it on a placard where somebody else gave the blonde lady a pencil moustache, and another perplexed citizen deposited:
"Jesus Saves. Jesus Saves."
One can lay this bundle down there with the others,

But that dashing, dauntless, delphic, diehard, diabolic cracker likes his fiction turned with a certain elegance and wit; and that anti-anti-anti-slum-congestion clublady prefers romance;
Search through the mothballs, comb the lavender and lace;
Were her desires and struggles futile or did an innate fineness bring him at last to a prouder, richer peace in a world gone somehow mad?

Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips
on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another

pocket of  the room where six kids rocking holey
T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls

in words I cannot comprehend. All of this
happening in a time no older than your last

heartbeat. I’ ve been told the internet is
an unholy place — an endless intangible

stumbling ground of false deities
dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit

in a world without flies. My loneliness exists
in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched

The tint of the sky between sunset and night.

And wandering with you and your nephew
in that maze, half-lost — Madrid
of the Austrias — looking for Plaza of the Green

Cross where, days before you arrived,
an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels
straddling the curb, and so the van

heading for the barracks that morning
had to slow to squeeze
past... Back at the hotel your mom

is holding up her gift — Amethyst, she says
admiring how light
when passing through a prism

Correct answers: c, d, d, b, b, a, b, a, a, c, b, b, b, c, b, d, b, d, c.
— If you scored 14-19, you’ re a well adjusted person, a home-owner, with and income of at least $50,000 a year.
— If you scored 8-13, you either rent or live with your parents, never exercise, and consume at least a 6-pack a day.
— if you scored 7 or less, you’ re in trouble with the FBI and/or the IRS, cut your own hair, and use public transit as your primary mode of transportation.

In the harsh glare of an easily
reprehensible life. The channel changer is lost
in the crack of an infinite sofa.
Everything falls apart, everything breaks
down, torn into a million
fragments, Jericho everyday.

I want to be the blameless
victim in this canceled puppet show,
the marionette every mother loves, the one
souvenirs are modeled from.

The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by
a razor. Chug

say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered
ground squirrels.

The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin
is much dented by little winds.

The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces.

Here is the door he will paint on the rock.

Here is the glass floor of the cliff.

Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life.

There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.

She thought to brush her hand against his thigh.

She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail.

The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to
become a kind of grammar.

She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as
they drowned.

(she opens the door)
(he is twelve inches
away) her fingers

still splayed across the
battened-down brass latch
of his sternum (she

closes the door) (he
is eight feet away)
her palm skids down the

banister clings to
the fluted globe of
the finial (he

is twenty-eight feet
away) (she opens
the door) the black air

is fast flowing and
cold (she closes the
door) she clutches her

thin intimacy
tight under her chin
and trips down the steps