Any Day Now

• 2012-04-26

  ∞

  Sam drawing infinity signs and for how long will this go on? We are outside raking pinecones and peering through the screen door. A stick in the mud plays sundial. As I remember it, he kept the game running for a few days with the consistency of an IV drip, the endless line when stretched out can go anywhere, Sam, but you somehow stand at a terminus, you turn over in my mind always, though the rarefied air feels like a block of graphite, you remain focused, head cocked to the left, two eye sockets in your dancing figure eight.

• 2012-04-11

  Believe

  Don’t kid yourself; you freak out each time you hear it, because right when you think it might take, it takes. Another ghost story set on a tugboat; in a stranded 4x4; under a clearance rack, the space between the hem and the carpet; in your parent’s bedroom, you already snuggled tightly in the middle; outside of an abandoned theme park; inside of a lice-ridden baseball cap. It’s obvious when you nod and say that you believe, how your face belies it all, how the spirit girl sweeping my dirty kitchen appeared not for her own sake but for me.

• 2012-03-28

  Focus on the Family

  Dad explains how the trails of flames must be hotter than the cores and I am busy scribbling the Commandments into a notebook cut to tablets. We throw the remaining scraps into the air and feign surprise when they don’t all land on the same tile, unless of course we first glue the scraps together, but my Elmer’s is already tipped, seeping through ridges in our extendable table in some freak accident that years later must have undermined the whole dumb thing, I bear witness at the same glue-soaked table, the movie camera in the sky watching us contemplate dinner.

• 2012-03-25

  On Delivery

  It’s as though I need a girl who knows her current events, catching her peeking over some creased worn copy. We’d be a slow burn, filling in the hours with weather forecasts and Nielsen ratings. Every night over the phone we could run through the obituaries. And maybe on our first night together she could lean in close and whisper something about a recently deposed dictator and I’d laugh and trace outlines of the Balkans on her stomach.  Under the covers, I’d finally spill my thoughts on nuclear disarmament, and she’d pull me in like no morning edition ever could.

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  The Valley

  Who broke for the trees at the first red-and-blue sign of trouble? Who half-suggested, bottle in hand and cops on the trail, that we could just leave you for dead? Who was nuts enough to think that drinking at an abandoned prison was poetic? Who was still giggling at the way you had pronounced “forty” like you were a character from a bad novel? We came looking for you the next morning and there you were in repose underneath the brush. In the car you said the only currency you carry is in other people. I’ve never known someone so poor.

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  A Wall, a Century

  Tracey is double-jointed but can’t keep it to herself, her poor brother untangling the a/v cables knotted around the tripod while she practices hugging her body from behind, clasping the hands in front. This will do, the brother says as he sticks a cassette labeled Fireman Sam into the holder and cues action. A record of posterity for the coming years of arthritis, the changing scenery of finished basements, the future scene when Tracey’s small niece starts an old episode of Fireman Sam only to find a girl convulsing on the floor with one bone where the other should be.