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A Field Guide To The Wilderness Area Known As Me

Smog Baby

Soccer Until Dusk

Euphemism

Like the time I was in fourth grade and my hair / reached all the way down to my butt and my mother / said, “Let’s get a trim,” and my cousin Kathy cut / my hair all the way up to my chin, and when my / friend Carol laughed at my “cut” I said it was a / “trim” and she shut up.

Carl’s Department Store Bathroom

was on the third floor up, past slipcovers and tablecloths. There was even an / elevator girl in a black-and-white uniform who listed each floor’s contents, / Ladies’ apparel, china, silver plate, until almost halfway into the nineties, / when Carl’s, the last of three department stores downtown, took down its last Christmas / window, outlasting my mother, who near the end was no longer able to tear through / dress racks for bargains, and sat thinly on a chair

June 1954

I was conceived / in a shack by the sea, / its shingles bleached / and beaten nickel gray. / There were waves that day / washing over the foundations / of the old saltworks.

Dream Of The Common Life

I have had the most wonderful dream. / My neighbor is playing a flute in the back yard. / I don’t even like my neighbor. / You wouldn’t either if you knew him.

Ending It All

i called my brother a fag / and he ended it all / at fifteen he was peeled from the shiny red snow / fully nude / with his dick in his hand

Stripping

Strip off the shoes and pantyhose, / the grown-up drag. Undo / those soft white arms and their blond down, / moss made of light. / Wash away the sour working sweat, / fatigue of heels and fluorescent lights.

The Can Of Paint

Kathy opened the front door one Tuesday morning dressed in dirty rags and holding a little aluminum paint can in her arms. “From the moment she stepped inside the shelter, she mystified us,” one woman says. “Whatever she did, wherever she went, the little paint can never left her hands.”