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ALEX LEMON
Shall We Be Merry?
You can call them boots on the ground but I’ll still say leather houses filled more with sand than bone, but big fat deal—I’m sleeping in late having those puckered dreams that catch in me like Wal-Mart bags in the trees. I’ll point out that the fluttering shape in the elm is the same as our DNA on the hottest days of July, and you’ll nod. You’ll kiss my hand and start to cry. Tell me that you wish none of this would have happened. My eyes, oh my pinhole pupiled eyes, I’ll wail. So stare into them and tell me what you see filled with shadows sitting around a table yelling Yahtzee! and plucking at the light that pools in the corner of my eyes with busted up pool cues. If they catch you peeking in tell them I’d like my tools back in each memory I have of Keenan. In each he touches a spoon to his nose at the breakfast table and tells me that the oven nearly swallowed me whole the night before. That it was one of the funniest things he’s ever seen, but some- how, at the same time, it makes him want to weep. Jason stands behind him strumming a guitar and it is on fire. It is smoking. I guess that sums up what’s happening on the flickering screen in there. Look again and it’s the sequel. Man screws his own hand into a phone pole, gets mad and then screws everything around him until everything, everything is dead. So we passed all of the time we had shaking incontinent in the backyard and reaching out for things that keep moving right on by, leaving us to stand in line getting more bovine and poorer until the weight of our cataracts tug on us like the pull the man who stood in the locker room of my college felt. Tennis shoes tied around, and dangling from his brain- like scrotum until security chased him away. I guess my position on this scorched and windless day is more about sitting outside staring at the rat in the orange tree than saying howdy governor to the asshole that lives across the way. If it means I don’t get the extra chicken skin, even if it means I go to hell, I have found a way to be at peace with this. Welcome, I say, put it in the hole chief, please place all of your belongings in this here duffle bag and get on the fucking floor. Check one, check two. Hold the mirror below you can’t get wrong. Four plus four equals a white sheet large enough to cover a football field packed shoulder to shoulder with the dead. Next, try multiplication and painkillers. Some of us are having heart attacks right now.
Reckoner
You wake behind a wheel. You wake riding a horse. You wake on your back in a field while above you stars whir. The wheel is slick. The horse is soft. The stars are too many to count. You rest your head on the wheel. You rest your head on the horse’s neck. The stars seem to pull your head up and you rise. Whatever the wheel is controlling has not stopped moving. Each time the horse gallops your jaw snaps together. You name each star George—pointing and turning and pointing—until you are disoriented and you can’t tell one George from the next. There are too many Georges. It is a car you are driving. It is raining when you look up. Finally you are stopped, but it is a ditch you have stopped in. The horse, on the other hand, will not stop. Many ditches you have leapt over or down into and then back up. Here, too, in the ditch it is raining. There are spiders on your eyelids, you think, as your stomach rises into your throat. And there are so many brilliant Georges above you—the rain coming down, the stars fizzing in the sky, leaves pinwheeling off of the elms—it is no longer just your stomach rising. It is everything going red red red as you turn inside out.
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