Asthmatic rhetoric urbanely conquistador grating cheese. And then frogmen
legs like Betty Grable, mottled to complement the rajah of la-di-da, no longer
clicky clacking their porcelain heels. It’s true. A bluster of belief in the city’s
faint odor of lizard droppings, wafting like a third world carnival ride, into the
anticlimactic sphere of what’s left of Schenectady. An oncologist plotting the
arc of the covenant to breathe. The getting wet. Swimming language with
loopholes. Beyond the pale of anorexic teenagers. Tinhorn anesthesiologists,
promoting amphetamines at a birthday party for inclement weather; not the
copilot, the time of day written on the palm of his hand, nor the unkempt
cosmetician leaving elbow room for the beauty of life. The too loose to be worn
in public falling into craters of suggestion. A parked car on the interstate luring
Floridian playboys to yodel biblical text into the frantic naivete of early
evening. Tegucigalpa and a toucan on a stick. A kamikaze refrigerator,
bringing the whole house down to where the brittle people live, like like is
love, and love is a house haunted with incompatible chocolates, and a
passenger pigeon on the breath of an inimitable missionary wearing his hair
just so.
(Originally appeared in Otoliths 9)