Mike returns for the next Rejoinder curtesy of my Patrons! We talk about the new piece: Burnin' Oceans
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Ted Prokash joins Joe to talk about being on the outside of the outside, translations, appreciating prose and more.
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Mike returns for the first Rejoinder curtesy of my Patrons! We talk about the new book: Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede
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Never Angeline North joins Joe to talk about being cozy, indie scenes, religion, and more
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Ash Miranda joins Joe to talk about poetry, laying words on a page, astrology, and more.
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Find Thirteen Jars: How Xt'actani Learned to Speak
Find dolores in spanish is pain, dolores in lolita is a girl
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Sophie joins Joe to talk about writing from intuition, the subjectivity of poetry, having an identity as a writer, and more.
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Find Hot Young Stars
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Joe and Olivia talk about teaching and reading poetry, trash TV, and Joe asks Olivia questions an interviewer asked her what she would ask herself from 2014.
Olivia Cronk is the author of WOMONSTER (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), LOUISE AND LOUISE (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016) and SKIN HORSE (Action Books, 2012). With Philip Sorenson, she edits The Journal Petra.
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Find Louise and Louise and Louise
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Joe is joined by Cavin Gonzalez and they talk about his book I COULD BE YOUR NEIGHBOR, ISN’T THAT HORRIFYING? There's also talk of their substance problems, frustration with different methods being used to fight for justice in the world, and more.
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Joe is joined by Sarah Gerard to talk about her new book True Love.
Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection SUNSHINE STATE, which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and the novel BINARY STAR, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seindenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism hhave appeared in the New Yor Times, T magazine, Granta, Baffler, and Vice, and in the anthologies Tampa Bay Noir, We Can't Help it If We're from Florida, and Small Blows Against Encroaching Totalitarianism. She lives with her true love, the writer Patty Yumi Cottrell.
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Mike Corrao joins Joe and they talk about writing as design, weird websites, book reviews and more.
MIKE CORRAO is the author of two novels, MAN, OH MAN (Orson's Publishing) and GUT TEXT (11:11 Press); one book of poetry, TWO NOVELS (Orson's Publishing); two plays, SMUT-MAKER (Inside the Castle) and ANDROMEDUSA (Forthcoming - Plays Inverse); and two chapbooks, AVIAN FUNERAL MARCH (Self-Fuck) and SPELUNKER (Schism - Neuronics). Along with earning multiple Best of the Net nominations, Mike’s work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Collagist, Always Crashing, and The Portland Review. His work often explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object. He lives in Minneapolis.
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Zac Smith joins Joe to talk Barns. Also, writing in the age of social media, trying to write as a full time job, or not, and more.
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Sam Pink is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including the No Hello's Diet, The Garbage Times/White Ibis The Icecream Man and Other Stories and many more. I find his writing to be funny, direct, and wholly compassionate. There is a quality to his work that makes him, in my opinion, one of the greatest American writers working today. Our talk rages from talking about editing, community, his visual art and more, but I think what comes across most strongly is that his writing is exactly that, his writing.
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Joe is joined by Grant Maierhofer and they talk finding new things to read, crafting experimental writing, and more.
You can help the victims of the Nashville tornado by donating to the Middle Tennessee Emergency Response Fund.
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Joe is joined by Mika and Anthony, the editors of Surfaces.cx to talk about their work and vision.
SURFACES.cx is an open literary arts platform, acutely oriented toward works of spontaneous creation by self-taught artists working outside of existing literary communities and the academic system.
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Joe is joined by B.R. Yeager to talk about his new book Negative Space, angry reviews, and More!
B.R. Yeager reps Western Massachusetts. His previous book is Amygdalatropolis (Schism Press).
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Joe is joined by Noah Cicero and they talk about a turning point in Noah’s writing, Buddhism, and how to live in the world.
Noah Cicero is 38-years-old, grew up in a small town near Youngstown, Ohio. He has lived in Eugene, Oregon, Grand Canyon, Arizona, Seoul, South Korea and currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. He has a movie made of his first book called The Human War which won the 2014 Beloit Film Festival award for Best Screenplay. He has books translated into Turkish, Kurdish and Spanish. His first book of poetry Bipolar Cowboy was voted one of the best books on Goodreads in 2015. He has many short stories, articles, and poems published at such places as Thought Catalog, 3AM Magazine, Wales Review, and Amphibi.us.
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Javelinas
I had a mission. I was going to walk into the forested part between the railroad and the West Rim road. It was probably not a good idea, no one ever did it, no one ever left the trails. But there was a part of me that didn’t care if I died. During those days, I felt like life was endless. All I could see was endless life ahead of me. There were no locations, no stopping points, there were no candles in any windows. The world had no place for me, I wasn’t even being sad, I wasn’t even having self pity, I had no interest in anyone telling me, “It is going to get better.” The banal platitudes of my country would not save me. All my friends were in Korea, or they had gone back to their homes in America, but I had no home. Where I was, I was just there, and that’s all.
On the way out the door, Dream was walking down the hall and asked me where I was going, I said to the forested part. He told me, “Man, I am scared to go there. Are you allowed to go there?”
“Hmm, I don’t think anyone will care. Do you want to come?”
He stood there thinking about it and said, “Yeah, let me get the right shoes on.”
Dream and I walked down the railroad tracks. Dream said, ‘I don’t know if my mom wants me going in here, she says there are rattlesnakes. I might run if I see a rattlesnake.”
“If there are rattlesnakes it will be okay. They won’t even notice us.”
“I don’t understand how a rattlesnake couldn’t notice us,” said Dream.
“Because they are busy. We we are afraid of snakes, we are projecting ourselves onto the snakes. We are making the snakes aware of us, but really they are snakes, and they are doing their snake thing. They have places to go and things to do, they know what they are doing, they aren’t looking for humans to bite.”
That calmed him a bit.
Right before we entered the forested part, I said, “We have to walk quietly if we are going to see something. Walk like this,” I placed my foot up and then put it down on my toes softly, and then mindfully pushed the back of my foot down. “See how quiet that is? You try.”
Dream, even though he was a big man, did the same kind of steps.
“Okay, let’s be quiet,” I said.
We slowly walked through the forested part. There were old Utah Junipers everywhere, little tiny cactus balls on the ground. I stepped on a cactus ball, I felt the spikes drive into my foot. I wanted to be angry but I didn’t care. I let it happen. Dream was like, “Oh shit, Billy, you stepped on a cactus.” I was like, “Yes.
We sat down on the ground. I took my shoe off and picked the needles out. The bottom of my foot was bleeding a little but it wasn’t bad. We stood up and walked. I realized we were lost but I didn’t tell Dream, he seemed to have full trust in me. It felt good that anyone trusted me.
As we were walking we heard noises, we both stopped. I loved hearing noises in the woods, I loved feeling the rush that something big and scary might be hiding behind a tree, ready to eat me. The desire to be eaten was overwhelming at times, but I didn’t tell anyone. Dream and I walked toward the noise. I looked back and Dream looked nervous, like he wanted to go back but he had to live up to a certain level of masculinity and keep going.
And there they were, a small family of javelinas, little pig like creatures covered in fur. There was a mom and three kids about 30 yards away. I pointed at them and Dream looked, his face lit up, our faces were full of excitement. The mom looked at us, then suddenly dashed ahead five yards toward us, stopped and made a noise. We both got scared neither of us had javelina training. We both picked trees and got up in them. We were both only four feet above the ground, but that was enough. Javelinas can’t climb trees.
The mother javelina realized we were no threat. We weren’t going to come any closer to her babies. We stood on branches in the trees, looking at the family living their lives. They were just living outside among the ran and cold and heat.
Joe is joined by Dan Hoy. They talk about poetry, books, poetry books, and more!
Dan Hoy is the author of The Deathbed Editions (Octopus Books, 2016) and several poetry chapbooks, including The Terraformers (Third Man Books, 2017) and The Tree (Solar Luxuriance, 2016). His collaboration with Mike Kleine, We R the World, was featured in the 2019 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, and his collection The Terraformers was the recipient of an Elgin Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. His work has also been featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Triple Canopy, Novembre, Elderly and other magazines and anthologies. He lives in Nashville.
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We R the World can be found HERE
Joe is joined by Brendan Vidito. They talk about body horror, illness, eye opening events, and more!
Brendan Vidito is a writer from Sudbury, Ontario. His work has appeared in several magazines and anthologies including Dead Bait 4, Splatterpunk’s Not Dead, Strange Behaviors: An Anthology of Absolute Luridity and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana Del Rey and Sylvia Place. You can visit him online at brendanvidito.com or on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @brandanvidito
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A Feast of You
1. The Road Out
Ryker looked at the sky reflected in his coffee. Thick iron clouds pushed in from the city he had just fled, moving toward the diner with almost predatory purpose. He shifted uneasily in his booth. Cracked and blistered vinyl creaked under his weight. He brought the mug to his lips and drank. His hand shook so badly, a thread of coffee dribbled from the corner of his mouth. It was scalding, but he barely noticed. The only thought that occupied his mind was how he needed to get as far away from the city as possible. And as soon as the caffeine kicked in, he couldn’t afford to waste another minute. He was, after all, still within their zone of influence.
Despite its stinging warmth, the coffee—straight black and electrified with three packs of sugar—did an excellent job jump-starting his system. He hadn’t slept in over forty-eight hours and the energy now easing into his bloodstream almost brought tears to his eyes. The only thing was, he also had very little to drink in the last couple days and the coffee was beginning to fill his bladder to the point of discomfort. An itinerary formed in his mind. He’d take a piss, finish his third cup, leave the diner, drive until nightfall, find a cheap motel, unplug the room’s electronics to prevent them from learning of his whereabouts, get a good night sleep and finish up the drive in the morning. There was bound to be someplace where they couldn’t find him. He hoped with every quivering nerve in his body that it wasn’t simply a pipe dream.
The bell above the door jangled. Ryker spun around so fast his neck cracked. A family of three stood in the entrance. They looked like they’d stepped from the pages of a department store catalogue. The father had a kind but plain face, balding, the dark hair on his temples turning grey. He wore a t-shirt with the logo of some sports team Ryker remembered from his childhood. His wife was a head shorter, also plain but beautiful in her way. A scarf was knotted loosely around her neck and a purse dangled form one arm. She held her daughter’s hand, the diamond on her ring finger catching and refracting the diner’s fluorescent light. The child was clad in bright colors and in her other hand she carried a plastic, zipped container decorated with leering cartoon characters.
Sweat popped on Ryker’s forehead and trickled down the groove of his spine. An invisible fist punched through his stomach and squeezed his entrails. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. He watched, riveted with terror, as the father inclined his head, said something to his daughter that made her laugh, and together the family made their way to a booth on the opposite side of the diner. The only other patron apart from Ryker, an older man with a grey beard and weatherworn jacket, smiled at the little girl as she passed.
Ryker tore his eyes away from the new arrivals. The clouds reflected in his coffee were closer now. He scooted to the edge of his seat, shot up and walked briskly to the bathroom. His bladder was so full it hurt, and for one embarrassed second he thought he’d pissed himself, but it was only sweat. It coated every inch of his body like an amniotic sack.
The bathroom door hit the wall with a thunderclap smash. He darted toward the urinal, fumbled with his fly, and let loose a stream so powerful it splashed back from the stained porcelain. He bowed his head, breath coming out in labored gasps. His heart hammered, gunfire-quick. Empty, he zipped up, and staggered to the sink. His long black hair was plastered to his forehead. He threw cold water in his face, made a sound crossed between a groan and a whisper. That family…they’re just people…they’re harmless. Even so, they reminded Ryker too much of them—those things he’d fled from.
He remained at the sink for another minute or two, hands grasping the edges, head bent toward the drain. When his heart rate slowed and his breathing grew steady, he straightened and exited the bathroom.
The family, the old man and the waitress behind the counter all stared at him. His throat moved. He directed his gaze at the floor. Quick, purposeful strides carried him back to his booth. He gripped the handle of his coffee mug in a quaking fist and downed the rest of its contents, wincing at a bitter taste he hadn’t noticed before. When he turned around, running a hand over his mouth, the waitress was standing inches from his face.
“Ready to settle up?” she asked.
“Y-yeah,” he managed to stutter, removing the wallet from his back pocket.
He threw a five on the chipped Formica and got the hell out of there. He had to move.
The engine of his rusted beater growled in protest before sputtering to life. He peeled out of the gravel parking lot, throwing up dust and hitting the highway at sixty miles an hour. The woods on either side blurred into abstraction, flashes of green, brown and grey as the sky leaked through between gaps in the trees.
When the diner shrank then disappeared in the rearview mirror, Ryker finally eased off the gas. The speedometer swung from one-twenty to ninety. Thankfully this piece of shit didn’t explode—and he couldn’t help but laugh. It was strained but genuine, and the longer it went on, the louder and more unhinged it became. Soon he was howling, tears blurring his vision, an open palm beating a crazed rhythm against the ceiling. Calm returned in waves until he was silent and staring at the road, his throat and chest sore from the outburst.
Silence reigned for a time before he decided to turn on the radio. It should be safe to listed to a couple songs, he reasoned. As long as he remained quiet, they wouldn’t be able to hear him over the airwaves.
The jockey said, “Now here’s a favorite of mine. I think many of you out there can use some of its medicine—especially with all the bad in the world lately. So here’s—”
Ryker relaxed his shoulders, easing back into his seat, allowing the music to wash over him. The drum beat a slow, heavy sound. The guitar was mellow and muted, the lyrics deep-voiced and lullaby-smooth. Combined with the monotony of the road, the flashing yellow lines, Ryker felt himself lulled into a trance-like state. His eyelids grew heavy, his muscles slack.
A flash in the rearview mirror. He shook his head to clear it. Another flash and Ryker recognized it for what it was: lightening. The clouds and the storm they carried were closing in.
His head was full of cotton, his eyelids dropped and his limbs were growing numb. What the hell is happening? He blinked several times, but his vision refused to clear. It was like his eyes were smeared with petroleum jelly. He pulled onto the side of the road and could only tell he was on the shoulder by the crunch of gravel under the tires. His eyes were useless and he could barely keep them open.
His breathing grew shallower by the second, the rise and fall of his chest a lulling rhythm. Oh shit. No. I can’t fall asleep now. What’s going on? He lifted a leaden arm and clumsily jabbed the button to turn off the radio. Silence except for his own breathing. Thunder rumbled not far behind. His eyelids fluttered closed, his head lolled onto one shoulder.Please. Don’t fall asleep. The plea crawled around inside his head. As he plunged into a mire of unconsciousness his last thought was of the strange bitterness in his last mouthful of coffee.
Joe is joined by Autumn Christian. They talk about politics in lit, video games, Goodreads goals, and more!
Autumn Christian is a fiction writer from Texas who currently lives in California. She is the author of the books "The Crooked God Machine," "We are Wormwood", and "Ecstatic Inferno," and has written for several video-games, including Battle Nations and State of Decay 2. When not writing, she is usually practicing her side kicks and running with dogs, or posting strange and existential Instagram selfies.
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We took his truck out to his secret place, near the creek littered with beer cans. He parked in the trees and together we climbed out onto the rocks. Their shadows hunched over
the fire of his lighter as he lit another stolen menthol. He chuckled while he told me a story about pawning his sister’s antique dolls and his mother’s Tiffany lamp for weed money.
He wouldn’t let me drink his Four Loko. Not at first.
“You’re just a baby,” he said, refusing to look over at me as he smoked. “You’ll blackout and I don’t feel like carrying you home.”
He didn’t look at me even when he said I reminded him of Daenerys, from Game of Thrones – the Mother of Dragons. I thought at first he meant because of my pale hair, long and unkempt, but then he said:
“You have a face that’s so soft, but it’s a softness like fire.” He finally let me take a sip of his Four Loko. I grimaced and had to struggle to swallow.
“Told you,” he said. “And don’t roll your eyes at me like that.”
“Tastes like fermented gasoline,” I said, handing it back to him. “My favorite.”
I needed to lose my virginity. I was already fifteen, and I wanted someone bad. I knew Spider was bad because he had a spit cup in the cab of his truck and thin white scars on his forearms he refused to talk about. We locked eyes for the first time in fourth period, his teeth hard-set, his stare like the sensation of chewing ice. He was older than me but still stuck in sophomore classes. I asked to borrow a pencil. He reached into his duster jacket and handed me one while time slowed and focused to a point in space between me and him.
“You might look pretty if you wore your hair down,” he said when I took the pencil, and his tongue touched his front row of teeth.
I couldn’t stop thinking about him since.
There were perfectly nice boys at Montamount High I could’ve lost my virginity to – boys who would tell me I look perfect with their chests about to cave in, who would straighten my hair on the pillow afterward, smiling at the way my shoulder clenched. But they didn’t have the bruised knuckles burnt with stories or a duster jacket with the arms held together with pins.
I didn’t look at those other boys and felt like at any step, I’d sink underwater, backward, bound in chains.
I read once that humans can’t help but seek out excitement - it’s why we first made fire and invented the printing press and slept with foreigners on the other side of
large bodies of water.
I liked that idea because it made me think that even a terrible mistake like Spider was cosmic destiny. Something imprinted into my DNA.
Something calling to me across the waves - through the window, after my parents had gone to sleep. Outside, wearing night time like leather, his neck lit up in oily porch floodlights. He looked good in starshine, in 2 A.M time, even with his stick and poke tattoo of an eye on his neck, his combat boots held together with duct tape. The way he tried not to smile made me smile, and after I pulled on my hoodie and my sneakers and climbed out the window, his hand
twitched, as if he wanted to reach out to me.
But he didn’t, and this made me smile even more.
Breathe in. Air feels cool. Breathe out. Air is cooler. That night my chest felt like a cavern and I could fit the whole world inside.
“How’d you find this place?” I asked.
“It’s my secret place,” he said.
“Do you bring girls here a lot?”
“You’re the only girl here,” he said.
I stretched and scooted a little closer to him. I yawned as an excuse to try to show him the cute outfit I wore, but he continued to stare straight ahead as he lit another cigarette.
I crawled across the rocks and slipped my hands in between the chain of his crossed legs. He opened his knees when I leaned into him as if inviting me in.
I kissed him in a halo of nicotine smoke.
He gave me another sip of his Four Loko as he cradled my waist between his knees. I felt high off our proximity, like the smell and sensation of him would make me float away if
the wind blew in the wrong direction. “I know why you don’t have a boyfriend,” he said.
“Because I wear my hair up?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
It became silent, and I knew he wasn’t going to tell me why.
“I brought condoms,” I said.
He gave a terse nod.
I didn’t realize it’d be so awkward with both of us fumbling for our clothes in the dark without speaking, without touching, breathing out cool air like shiny oil slicks. Nobody ever talked about that moment before the act, when zippers got stuck and your lipgloss rubbed off on the inside of your sweater, when you laughed nervously because you had to do a weird shimmy to get out of your tights. And finally, when all the clothes were off, and all that was left was the interminable space between two bodies, there was the holding of breath like the next noise should be something tremendous, and not just the crinkling of a condom wrapper.
***
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” he asked.
I spread my jacket on the rocks and lay down. I shivered and the creek noise grew to a roar. I hadn’t noticed before how cold it was.
“No,” I said.
“Yeah you are,” he said. “I can tell. You think you’re being cool, but I can see it.”
I fumbled with the condom. He plucked it out of my hands.
“I’ll take care of that. Just touch me,” he said.
“Where?”
“You know where. At least, I hope you do.”
He didn’t take his eyes off my chest, although he had such an intense stare it was like he looked through me instead of at me. My nipples hardened and I felt the rocks underneath me.
I reached out, unable to control my trembling, and began touching his cock.
A swallow stuck in my throat. I thought at first that he’d remain limp, that I couldn’t get him up and I’d remain a virgin forever, but then after a good half minute I felt his cock harden.
His hands traced my ass and my hips. Then he touched me between my legs, and I flinched at his cold fingers.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Trying to get you to relax,” he said. “Virgins. Have to teach them everything.”
He pushed his cock inside of me in one fluid motion. One second I’m a virgin, and then suddenly I’m not. It didn’t hurt like I thought it would. It was more like a pressure, a fullness, stretching inside of me. He went slowly at first, in and out, and I found myself holding breath. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I could see the place between my hips and his that I thought resembled an abandoned alien landscape.
“Here,” he said. “Get on top.”
He rolled me over. I felt awkward and unsure of how to move. All the videos I’d seen couldn’t really prepare me for the moment I was looking down at another human being, his cock inside of me, feeling split in two but also sewn together, conjoined.
“Like this, “ he said, and guided my hips. “Like dancing.”
But it was really nothing like dancing.
Something began to build in me.
I thought it must’ve been an orgasm but this wasn’t like any orgasm I’d ever had. It started in my stomach and swirled downwards, heated, a little warm bundle of nerves inside the bracing cold. There was an intense pressure, and even when I clenched my hips together or shifted it didn’t relent. And strangely, Spider felt it too.
When I tried to stop he grabbed me again by the hips. The whites of his eyes grew like cracks of light through a darkened gate. Tears welled in my own eyes, although I wasn’t sure why. I saw the moon in double, shimmering through water, reflected off his pale chest.
I’d fingered myself before. I had my first orgasm riding a washing machine and I even bought a few sex toys off the Internet. Although sex-ed in middle school was all bananas
in latex and warnings about STDs, I watched enough porn to fill in the gaps. I’d even read part of a PDF of the Kama Sutra, although I didn’t really get it.
I wanted to be ready for this moment.
But there was no way I could’ve prepared for this. This definitely wasn’t a normal orgasm. This was an unbearable friction, a dry plain about to catch fire, a swelling, growing, heaving, pulsating, liquid swell inside of me that was louder and bigger than everything I’d ever experienced before. Nothing could’ve prepared me for the feeling of my body rumbling like an earthquake, turning my bones into tectonic plates.
I held my breath.
And I exploded.
A depth charge of intense pleasure ran through me. It spiraled out in all directions, not just into my vagina, but up through my heart, my throat, and down into my toes, moving in pulsing, frenetic, golden waves. It buzzed on the top of my skin, but also deep in my organs, my pressurized blood. It froze in my throat like black ice and seared my eyeballs. It licked the edges of my hair, curling through my scalp like fire.
Could someone die from having sex? Had I pushed a button that was the bomb inside of me, currently making its way to my vulva and my heart? I’d never heard of anything like that happening. I thought I was breathing but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe this was a rare form of sex-induced brain damage. If at that moment someone had asked me my name, my address, my birth-date, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. I’d become a frisson ball of nuclear-level sex energy that couldn’t contain a single coherent thought for longer than a fraction of a second.
God, surely I should have heard about something like this.
Yet for a few moments, I couldn’t hear anything except the rush of my own blood. I looked down, expecting to see my organs leaking out of my vagina, or a hole blown straight through my stomach. Maybe I’d even see Spider’s corpse below me, his cock still erect inside of me, his eyes dissolved into glowing goo and his tongue swelling in his mouth like a slug.
But I was intact, and Spider was intact. There was nothing missing, no injury, just smooth skin and moonglow.
Spider grabbed one of my wrists, and I realized he was speaking to me, trying to reach me through the hissing scream of my body.
After a few seconds, the noise subsided, and the flush of lightning went down to a low tremble.
“What was that?” I asked when I could finally hear again.
He spoke, his voice thin,
“Don’t stop.”
Joe is joined by Leza Cantoral. They talk about sex in lit, fairy tales, bizarro fiction, and more!
Leza Cantoral is the Editor in Chief of CLASH Books. She hosts Get Lit With Leza, a podcast where she talks to cool ass writers. She is the author of Cartoons in the Suicide Forest & Trash Panda & the editor of Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana Del Rey & Sylvia Plath. You can find her spending way too much time on FB, Twitter & IG @lezacantoral
You can contact the show at noisemakerjoe@gmail.com - Just put WTR in the subject line.
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Art photo by Arielle Tipa
MARILYN IN WONDERLAND
Don’t look in the mirror,
Don’t look because you will see,
Marilyn,
Through the Looking Glass.
Her twin brains
Glitter and digest the celluloid dream.
The forest is thick
For those who wander—
Lost and found,
Crumbling Underground.
Where does the rabbit hole end?
I wander through the streets
Of New York City.
I see my reflection
In the shop windows,
Half expecting to see
Marilyn looking back at me.
Her body might be in the Westwood Cemetery,
But her heart is in NYC.
In NYC
She could finally disappear.
In NYC
She sought refuge from the swarm—
The camera eyes that
Stripped her bare.
You cannot X-ray
A soul.
Skeleton face,
Calavera of love—
I look for Marilyn
In the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
She’s not there
But I find the Urn of Peter Lorre,
And I wonder why
He couldn’t afford a nicer gravestone.
Marilyn, tangled in Egyptian cotton sheets,
Wound up in her telephone cord—
A Hollywood mummy,
Preserved for all eternity.
Still she haunts me,
Phantomwise,
Marilyn moving under the skies,
Never seen by waking eyes.
She’s not in the dirty NY snow
Caked to the curb.
She’s not in the radiator that groans like a mechanical beast,
From the bowels of Mordor.
She found her voice
In the Actor’s Studio,
A bookwork—
Devouring Ulysses.
In madness, she walks,
Through mirrors far and wide.
She died in beauty,
Like the night.
A psychic in Greenwich Village
Tells me that my aura is white,
But I don’t believe her,
Because my shadows eat up all the light.
Dark twin
Devouring me—
Dark pairings
Of souls lost at sea.
I hear her laughter
Bubbling off the shore.
I find Marilyn in Key West,
In front of the Tropicana—
Her smile frozen in plaster,
Blowing her skirts to Cuba.