Lincoln County Road

Midnight in the garden of blood and eagles.

We’re bleeding from puncture wounds, something viscous, crimson, and warm.

No one tied you down, you rolled up against the dock, buffeting and clunking hollow through the solitary night.

How does anything lay claim to any of it?

Humans, I think I’ve fallen out of love with you now I’ve learned you spurt dirt-drenched aerosols in a jet out front of your faces whenever you laugh or cough or yell or sing. Ew. Really. Fucking ew. That was a revelation on the disappointing side of the ledger. You initially gained points for your relative hairlessness, lost most of them with this. Wear a damn mask, act like a fucking grown-up, and you might regain a few.

Ha, wait. You know what this is like, the strings sweeping over us, the low notes growling under your hallowed contralto like the final tales of long-forgotten wolves. 

“Something’s comin’ over the hill, and I ain’t so sure you gonna like it.”

“Well. Try me, cholo.”

Remember, compadre, we always came to this same piece of waste ground, filled with hazards, and each time we tried to create our own jogo bonito. The feel of the ball a-spin atop your foot, quieting its gyre at the exact right moment, the hock, the updraft, the rainbow, that feeling when you let it fall and check it with your instep, dead, or nestle it like an egg in the nape of your neck, the heartbeat pause, and then all your friends stream your way, laughing, cursing, slapping, and take the ball and do more joy to it, calling you always the best and most beautiful names.

Venerated, unseemly. The ribald colours of longing. 

“Come. This way.”

“You know where we’re heading? How long we’ll be riding?” 

“Follow the spiral dust, and give thanks to the night songs of coyotes.”

“Señorita, if we don’t make it, won’t you feel good about me right to the end?”

“Keep singin’ and playin’, music man. And meet me in Laurel Canyon. Your luck has to turn.” 

Drenched with salt from inside, collected near the shoulder of rock like scarabs, we peek around it, and we see the hopelessness the world tried to spare us.

A black hole spinning blind and silent, an accelerating cluster of stars sucked processional into its holy ravenous lightless maw.

Death. It’s not onrushing. At its moment of truth, it’s a quickening absence, a sucking of an ebbing wave pulling you into the riptide. You feel it hollow and infallible in your chest, an intake of breath and a twinge of hurt before a vast unbreathable pain and before pain is then erased. A great accumulative loss and a great mercy both. That moment. That volatile, hectic instant before everything’s gone.

True, the past echoes and echoes and echoes. Some of it is a story, poured from cut crystal, pored over by feeble old men, teased and unraveled and dreamed of again.

For who, no one knows.

Hear me, though.

The truth is a story too.

And while the landfill’s where it ends, for now—like love and loss—it’s only recycling.

______________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Spurned

I got thirty-five stories; I forgot at least twenty. 

“Her name is Audrey, but everyone calls her Drey, pronounced like the good doctor.”

“Sounds old school, like a movie star.”

“Well, yeah.” 

He wears a blue suit worn shiny at the shoulders and the hip bones, he stalks the common margins, and he might well not be human. 

Don’t ask me to elaborate.

*** 

“Love tangles thickly the world. Green limbs

Hold our throats like snakes. Love

Is the dripping forearm encircling

Everything.”

Here come the dominoes, toppling like we once imagined buildings would topple in a city besieged. Infernos. Towering. But a bright fall day in the early months of a long century taught us that metaphors are cartoons, and these dominoes aren’t bricks with numbers; they’re the salmon run upriver thwarted by a dam, they’re the monarchs starved of milkweed, the bees assailed on every side, orca pods bereft of chinook. And if the salmon can’t spawn, the bears will starve, and the forest won’t be fertilized by carcasses of fish, and the trees will pale. The little coastal wolves will turn on each other. The shiver of disquiet whispered by the conifers will crescendo. The raven’s madcap gulp will go unheard.

In a world of malfunction, everything’s a canary. 

Who brought the voices to drown us out? How did we end up here in the harbour wondering where all the boats went? Which lovers were allowed to consummate, and who was condemned? Spurned is maybe the worst word ever coined. A greasy-haired girl with encompassing hips tiring at the mic. A dancer alone under unflattering glare, the spit and piss of her efforts like COVID, droplets coughed like headspun sweat, the spun lucid dirt of our humanity, the unearned wages of our fluids and spleen. Her goose bumps each an impediment. Her reluctance a blastocyst, each tumour filled with spumes of wrong, each infected globe shimmering on the edge of… what? A song by Nina Simone. A beseechment. Deflated hubris. A worn-out demon coming for us all.

“Drey, tell me another story.”

But she has turned inward like a dying sun. Will there be a supernova?

“Then dance for me. I deserve spectacular.”

But she is still.

What is this world, with its swirls and pirouettes of light? Why are silhouettes of branches like sludge-clogged waterways or the blighted decaying capillaries of terminal patients? Were we wrong? Is everything illusion? Merely local and terribly strange?

Are we seeing the death of hope? Or its birth?

Is sundown the furnace in which the twinkling gems of night are forged?

*

"Great Bear Anchorage" image © Roy Henry Vickers

Lockdown Tales

Grey skies and this endless loneliness and the mad subliminal chatter of our frightened species are wrapping me in a blanket woven by a slow beast named despondence. Friends who are suffering, everywhere, all around. I feel like the jaundiced eye of a human hurricane of pain. My calf seized today as I walked the streets, so I lurched like something contemplating raw brains, and I passed a store that blared: BUY SELL PAWN and I read it as HI, HELL SPAWN. On the way home, I had the radio in my car tuned to Jack FM, and I noticed that BTO's "Taking Care of Business" is almost the same song as "Keep on Rock'n Me, Baby" by the Steve Miller Band. Classic rock is weird. Or maybe it's me. I kept my eyes level, so no one knew I was screaming behind my mask.

***

He is in the living room pretending to watch that dumb tiger show on Netflix but I know he isn’t really watching as he’s waiting for me to say something he will decide is stupid or disrespectful to him so he can hurl a pint glass at me or worse get up and come at me again even though he said he was sorry last time the time when he broke my nose which still hurts and I can barely breathe through it and yet if I go out on the balcony for air he’ll notice me again and plot something else if only out of boredom because he isn’t going to get better or kinder and oh my god what will I do I haven’t even told him about the baby bump which he just assumes is my new quarantine weight and what will set him off next I know what will set him off as he already said he’d rather kill me than be a father as his dad was a total cocksucker and this life is getting so dark and scary.

***

Outside, the bat is tracing a toddler scribble in the waning light. Felipe Ortega is an old man and it takes him time and effort to move from the window, put on his shoes, and shuffle outside to the step so he can lower his creaking frame and try to read the story of the bat. His face is a landscape of fissures, but an uneven smile cuts across those deep lines when the bat flits close enough to raise a few cottony wisps of Felipe’s remaining hair.

“You keep on doing that,” he croaks, and then turns to add an aside to María, something like, “See that crazy little sonofabitch? He’s enjoying his damn self.”

But he’s forgotten again. María isn’t there, and Felipe’s smile withers on the rough bark of his face.

The men in the baggy white suits took her days ago and reassured him she’d be cared for, but Felipe can’t forget how her whole chest seemed to clutch at the air for sustenance, how panicked her dark brown eyes were, locked on his, deep in their folds of skin like besieged fortresses.

Was she asking him then and is she asking him even now to defy them?

Defiance happened to be his shtick when he was a young punk. He god honestly doesn’t know when that candle guttered. He ran a few things, brought pride to the hood, cut a few corners, but far fewer than those who walked the cold panelled hallways in those mansions on the hill.

The bat loops and swoops and once again almost brushes him. Felipe wishes he could move like that: abrupt, like a hot needle, stitching the wounds of the world.

Night is coming, they won’t let him see María, and suddenly, as the bat shifts course in the cooling air, he is gut-deep afraid like he’s never been.

* 

Image © Rebecca Loranger