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Drawing by Takashi Murakami/ Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. |
AT THE MOVIES WITH WAKOSKI
Diane and I sitting in the dark
like sitting in a death you actually want,
a death you have
always wished for, looking toward
the lights of Hollywood, the long legs
of swimmers, cocktails and rum made out of water
and iodine. Earlier that day
something like twelve city blocks crumbled inside me
every time I thought of you
and how walking toward her always felt perfect
like a silver key with a red ribbon announcing
its specialness and how I would suddenly burn away
like a shot of whiskey some bride-to-be dropped
a match into. Somewhere Johnny Depp is sleeping
or turning to his right because a woman is there
and has touched his elbow with the soft cloud of her fingers,
or he’s facing the mirror and listening to all the gods
inside him begin to rage; the god of childhood and the god
of his mother, his father. Diane and I are standing
on a street corner together
in the world, after the credits, in the crushed-ice rain,
looking westward toward the dark-sunglass-
Coppertone-white-beach-heaven that waits for us and us alone.
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Woman with Flowered Hat,
Roy Lichtenstein, 1963
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G.L.O.W.
by Cathy Park Hong
Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling
in their spandex regalia parade the Vegas suburbs,
among spider cottoned smoke trees and foreclosed one-tracts,
half-full whirlpools spiraling
a confetti of limbless G.I. Joes;
the sun is at high lament, and Mountain
Fiji is barefoot, and cuts her toe on a Sudafed foil.
Mountain Fiji, you ate too many hamburguesas!
Now you have the diabetes and tonight you must
body-slam Vallerie Vendetta. Look at how
Ebony and Habana with their bedazzled eyelashes
laugh at you. You hate them.
They smoke reefers in the Tiki ballroom where sheets
of moonlit rain pour whenever Lala sings Blue Moon,
but the moon never comes, though sadness always does,
like Palestina in her hijab and her ammo camo bikini.
She’s always supposed to lose to Hadar the Brain,
who is the Good one. When you made love to Palestina,
a sob was stuck in your throat and that sob remained
in your throat, an itching nest that threatened your sinus.
You need a good cry like a good sneeze, and you keep shuddering
your face to make it come. Bahama Mama lends you sunscreen
and you smear it on your broad nose and you wave at hooting boys
whose features seem not quite formed, like God started
pinching out their noses and eyes and then left,
because he got distracted. You shrink to the size
of Thumbelina on a TV in La Jolla. She never wins.
It never comes. I am always waiting.
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“Untitled” by Julie Mehretu, 2013.
Watercolor, ink, spit bite and etching on paper.
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ICEBERGS, ILULISSAT
by Jean Valentine
In blue-green air & water God
you have come back for us,
to our fiberglass boat.
You have come back for us, & I’m afraid.
(But you never left.)
Great sadness at harms.
But nothing that comes now, after,
can be like before.
Even when the icebergs are gone, and the millions of suns
have burnt themselves out of your arms,
your arms of burnt air,
you are with us
whoever we are then.
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