A Single Condom Full of Condensed Milk

Sauces are important. Sauces are the culmination of a lot of technologies. They increase the attraction we feel for portions of meat. Thinner sauces are popular on the coasts. Thicker sauces can be stored in sacks made of stiff cotton canvas. I personally like the thicker sauces.

Our sauces provide an occupation to spices in thumb-sized jars. We find these jars all over town, source unknown, and we don't feel right leaving them sit for the raccoons to covet, collect, and molest with their prayerless hands. We take them and our pantries fill and without all of the sauces we know, our lives would be destroyed by the surplus.

Without spices, the raccoons are depressed and starving creatures. They lay across curbs like beached whales. They are a feast for oily-eyed carrion birds. Fattened, unable to fly, we fell them with projectile weapons bought in retail stores, next to the automotive department. We clean them on special patios, dress them, roast them, and serve them with our sauces. We all have favorites. Personally, I prefer a thicker sauce.

Flummoxed Banker

I like the streets of the town here. The people, I find not much likable about them. It is a despicable thing to watch a person and think about the probability of Escort Services. These are services that are for obliterating people's loneliness, but to me it is like making beef jerky in the middle of a star like the sun. Our sun is a star.

When I walk, I carry a cassette player at chest height for maximum delivery of the emitted sounds. Also, there is another thing. I wear a mask in the likeness of antelopes. Antelopes are a thing with legs and eyes and the ability of jumping. I restrict myself from jumping specifically so the people who see me in the antelopes mask won't be aware of who it is I am. I can jump frequently in the mask and never at all when I am not wearing the mask. That protects me so much.

I know already about the last day of the antelope mask. I am scared of it and I consider it my practice death. It is like a rough draft of death. It was spoken to me in a dream that was like the light of a fading flashlight.

I will be about town, seeing the streets of the town and knowing that the people have no awareness of me, on account of the antelopes mask. And the cassette player will be emitting its sounds. As I jump and jump like something frantic in the street, the battery cover of the player will come apart and the fat D batteries will fall out like dead beetles I was trying to keep secret. And I will be helped by a man who calls himself my servant, and collects the batteries from the asphalt, but one of them, it rolls far. The man runs to the battery, as fast as antelopes, and as he grabs it, a soda truck obliterates his body the way a prostitute obliterates a man's loneliness.

The mask, it is something cheap. I find that it disintegrates at the touch of my sigh. The people become aware.

Robberies in Close Up

Against the cold and the rough light of this place, we apply fruity moisturizing lotions to our hands and the exposed parts of our face, our cheeks, our nose, and our forehead. We hold jewelry in our teeth and fix our attention on subtly flexing muscles in our catalog apparel. We kick at rocks with the weathered toes of our shoes, errant pieces of the greater rock. Inside of them are stories of movements, swells beneath the flimsy soles of our shoes.

We leave evidence of ourselves. A shoestring tied to a lost finger of a juniper. A chewing gum wrapper folded into a sailboat and set in a wren's abandoned nest. A false eyeball, pushed into wet soil, unlidded, staring at the sky's endlessly shifting interaction of light and matter. The rock here is filled with the opposite of awareness, which is not to say that it is not aware. Not exactly.

Whoever Put this Catcher's Mitt in the Oven is Not My Friend Anymore

I heard that you sat with Claire today. I hope she told you about the weekend we've planned. It pleases me to know that you know about the farmer we know, who grows heirloom winter squash on a farm in another county. It complicates things when the farmer's wife is around. There is something wrong with her that causes her to covet me lustfully. I would be very surprised if Claire told you this, as it is an embarrassment to her.   But I am happy to. It pleases me to know that you know about the farmer's wife's lust for me and the embarrassment it causes Claire. I feel like it will enrich your impression of me. Now you will never look at me again with that look, that look of a dullard gawking at a fast food advertisement.

You Learn to Follow Master

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

My father invented his pedophilia one summer with a sophomore girl I knew, conceiving a half brother for the family. It also became a slow manslaughter when the girl became a suicide. My father was a real multi-tasker.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

The boy is older now, speaking, an alien voice in this apartment, unable to recognize the dim light in my mother's eyes as a strange thing. This half-brother doesn't wear clothing. He wears laundry. He has a song of nonsense. He sings it at least a hundred times a day, which is not an exaggeration. It is seriously not an exaggeration.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

My mother explains to him that it is fine to let the mouth say silly things when in private; for instance, when driving. You will love driving cars. You can drive them far to see high states with skies like being inside God's eye. But you will never get a license to drive if you don't stop singing this song in public.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

I personally hope that he keeps his song forever, and never stops singing it to doctors, teachers, cashiers, and the odd relation who can abide his presence. I hope that he finds a person to love, and sings it on their first date, and during their wedding ceremony, and while creating his own good offspring.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

This is how I avoid madness the madness my mother is flirting with. I imagine the life of the boy and the stubborn song that is tied to his throat, and I imagine the song in other people's ears, I imagine their amusement, annoyance, grudging acceptance. I have written it into a story, but I changed the words a bit to make it more fictional.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

I tell people where he came from, and to relieve their awkward horror, I have a line I recite. My father, I say, was a real multi-tasker.

Video of an Impossible Fight

We watch our step. Paper is scattered about the floor here, a hazard we know. There are syrups and bitter spirits for drinking, and a wall upon which patrons write messages in permanent marker. I watch someone write "hungry for tacos." He hands me the sweaty marker and I draw the shirt I wanted to wear, but didn't because of gaudiness concerns. My companions remind me to turn off the little telephone I keep in my pocket. I thank them and do so, and we stand quietly behind a fizzy couple, watching their hands bashfully. A man arrives and stands amidst devices with uncertain names and purposes.   At the sound of your voice, why do we cry like you're gone?

Shapes of Modern Colanders

Sweetly several of us tall and shadowed loom over your bed on your birthday to sing the Song of the Naked Sleeper, composer unknown.

You loaf of hairless malice. You swaggering fart. You plank of chapped flesh.

You swallowing void. You falconer's bane. You spelling bee deserter.

You uncertain beverage. You colony of curdled nerves. You ceaseless whine.

You filigreed hairbrush. You floating coin. You charred pupae.

You verbless declaration. You flat knuckled combiner of cancers. You customer of lust.

We take the pillow from under your head. It is choking with your death dreams. It belongs to us now.