The next day, I woke first and made French toast. I had a teenaged hangover, buzzing and giddy.
The story of religious mania and the story of political violence look very likely to converge on each other. Having consciously elected the first, Lucas keeps being drawn, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes unwittingly, toward the other. Both feature his new inamorata, Sonia Barnes.
I count the number of murderers in the class.
There was something that she wished to start, and when she started it, she figured, her life would take on new meaning. But in this moment in time, she ate breakfast bars all hours of the day and worried about money.
swang
at night i sleep next to you, your skin balmy course. like grinded down sweetgum made smooth in the sweat of the mississippi delta summer. you tear and bend at my will. your spine disjoints
There is a universe of existence we have no words for, and maybe that is why we sequester ourselves in naturally quarantined cities: fear of the unknown and unintelligible.
Nick your shin shaving, stare idly at the blood coursing down your foot and down the drain, and maybe this is how you do it, empty out all your insides until your shapeless skin is all that’s left.
I wanted to be “that girl,” but my new high-waisted pants from the Marais were already unbuttoned once.
EMOTION CASINO
welcome to your life
your face changes as you watch
outside the frame
among the distractions
you are right now
a body prone to emotion
Google Maps
attraction
you never
During our first few years together, Leopard went through the washing machine after I peed on him, many times.
If Lucas is the most obvious Bob Stone avatar in Damascus Gate, Adam De Kuff might also be a contender, sharing with his author an improperly managed mental illness (it’s made very plain that De Kuff has stopped taking his prescribed bipolar meds a long while back)
Brian was psyched too. Not about her requests—Tom Waits was more his groove—but about where things seemed to be headed.
I render a coin
for something
I forgot
the sky
scratching itself
into decency
when I
wake up
always rattling
around
in my skin
a new aesthetic
I
“How do I know if it’s right?” I wrote. “How did you know?” “I just knew,” she texted back.
I ain’t supposed to know about these woods. But I did know the coyotes.
To be naked on the beach after a storm is something special—the salt and the petrichor and the hum of being unsettled that maybe the torrential rains caused damage, that maybe there were nearby ships that will never make it to harbor.
My Magic cards were the coolest thing about me.
Stone had two modes of handwriting: one a gnarly cursive he used to talk to himself and the other block capitals, more easily legible. On a scrap of torn paper in a crate of Damascus Gate research material is a draft of a self-mocking doggerel poem...
Violet and I sit in her bed a while and talk. She shows me how to unhook and snake a bra through a sleeve.
I could not imagine the dark well of her grief. I wanted to pretend it had nothing to do with me. But I felt compelled to bear witness somehow.
“When Zac started writing the poems, I didn’t think it would get to this.”
so long to call back
the first time the phone
rang i was beneath a
bridge when you rang
again the roar of cars and
cargo overhead made it too
loud to hear you sense of
sea partially
Two thousand nine is the centennial year of Malcolm Lowry, the British novelist and poet, whose extraordinary novel Under the Volcano appeared in 1947. Lowry’s first version of it was a loosely constructed story about Britons who witness a violent crime in Mexico.
