Hope
He rose up on his dying bed
and asked for fish.
His wife looked it up in her dream book
and played it.
(Langston Hughes)
"The fact that the UW characterizes this incident — 41 surgeries on 14 monkeys — as a clerical error seems unduly dismissive to me," said Debra Durham [of] People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "Ethically speaking, we can't afford to lose sight of the animals. For them, the difference between two surgeries and six or 10 is much more than paperwork."
Sex and Taxes
Plum black & the blush white of an apple
shoulder, melon & cream, in tones to list
the flesh; in light, washed colors off at last
& textures sheer with damp I slowly pull
from you with your quick help. Weekend's ample
procrastinations to forget the least
of what we want to do. April, half a blast
of cold, half new light, green & simple.
Now dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe
on this short form, our numbers good enough.
The goose-neck glare undoes how we spent the day.
Each bite each bee-sting kiss each bitten O
all aftertaste. Later, at the drop-off,
postmark queue, we joke: "Now we can die!"
Go Greyhound
A few hours after Des Moines
the toilet overflowed.
This wasn't the adventure it sounds.
I sat with a man whose tattoos
weighed more than I did.
He played Hendrix on mouth guitar.
His Electric Ladyland lips
weren't fast enough
and if pitch and melody
are the rudiments of music,
this was just
memory, a body nostalgic
for the touch of adored sound.
Hope's a smaller thing on a bus.
You hope a forgotten smoke consorts
with lint in the pocket of last
resort to be upwind
of the human condition, that the baby
sleeps
and when this never happens,
that she cries
with the lullaby meter of the sea.
We were swallowed by rhythm.
The ultra blond
who removed her wig and applied
fresh loops of duct tape
to her skull,
her companion who held a mirror
and popped his dentures
in and out of place,
the boy who cut stuffing
from the seat where his mother
should have been--
there was a little more sleep
in our thoughts,
it was easier to yield.
To what, exactly--
the suspicion that what we watch
watches back,
cornfields that stare at our hands,
downtowns
that hold us in their windows
through the night?
Or faith, strange to feel
in that zoo of manners.
I had drool on my shirt and breath
of the undead, a guy
dropped empty Buds on the floor
like gravity was born
to provide this service,
we were white and black trash
who'd come
in an outhouse on wheels and still
some had grown--
in touching the spirited shirts
on clotheslines,
after watching a sky of starlings
flow like cursive
over wheat--back into creatures
capable of a wish.
As we entered Arizona
I thought I smelled the ocean,
liked the lie of this
and closed my eyes
as shadows
puppeted against my lids.
We brought our failures with us,
their taste, their smell.
But the kid
who threw up in the back
pushed to the window anyway,
opened it
and let the wind clean his face,
screamed something
I couldn't make out
but agreed with
in shape, a sound I recognized
as everything I'd come so far
to give away.
(Bob Hicok, from Insomnia Diary, 2004 University of Pittsburgh Press)
Do You Love Me?
She's twelve and she's asking the dog,
who does, but who speaks
in tongues, whose feints and gyrations
are themselves parts of speech.
They're on the back porch
and I don't really mean to be taking this in
but once I've heard I can't stop listening. Again
and again she asks, and the good dog
sits and wiggles, leaps and licks.
Imagine never asking. Imagine why:
so sure you wouldn't dare, or couldn't care
less. I wonder if the dog's guileless brown eyes
can lie, if the perfect canine lack of abstractions
might not be a bit like the picture books
she "read" as a child, before her parents' lips
shaped the daily miracle of speech
and kisses, and the words were not lead
and weighed only air, and did not mean
so meanly. "Do you love me?" she says
and says, until the dog, sensing perhaps
its own awful speechlessness, tries to bolt,
but she holds it by the collar and will not
let go, until, having come closer,
I hear the rest of it. I hear it all.
She's got the dog's furry jowls in her hands,
she's speaking precisely
into its laid back, quivering ears:
"Say it," she hisses, "Say it to me."
"If it wasn't for zoos participating in national breeding programs, these guys would just die out and that would be a shame because they're gorgeous animals - really, really cute and unique looking....
J. Learns the Difference Between Poverty and Having No Money
After Ernesto Trejo
And the morning’s marine layer cloud cover’s just beginning to unhinge,
to let the buttery light of another daybreak slip through
And weigh down the dead lawns and sagging rooftops
of this neighborhood, where Cold War era television antennas
Still cast shadows like B-52s heading offshore, where poverty, this early
is the smell of Malt-O-Meal and the dregs of thin beer
Washed down the sink. Where the shift begins at 7AM,
but consciousness has a way of coming round as slowly
As this old computer monitor flickers its dull sixteen colors into being.
On it, the names and numbers of laundromat and liquor store owners,
Fast food managers and lawn care companies; it’s my job
to cold call them, read from a script on the benefits of membership
In the Executive Dining Club, not take No for an answer.
I’m no good and both the boss and I know it, and he’s hovering
When the scraped-out voice of the woman on my phone answers me with
My husband’s been killed, and then, instead of hanging up,
Throws the receiver down next to something — dishwasher or window AC,
I don’t know — but something close, it sounds, to tearing itself apart,
Something cycling through an awful, screeching noise.
And it’s because I’ve paused that the boss flings a pencil
Into the wall in front of me and edges closer, and because of the fear
of unemployment forms or the sky opening up if I were to walk out,
And because this sound — the un-oiled, flak-fouled crack of it —
has left me standing suddenly at the end of a runway, planes
Screaming low overhead and loaded for the beginning of the end of the world,
that I start back into the script, start back as if I believe each word,
Even though, in the rattle and dust of the jet-wash, no one hears a thing.
Monkey Brain Gives Clues to Human Interaction
...the monkeys were given juice rewards to look at different images. They would forego a reward of juice to see positive images: the hindquarters of a female, for example, or the face of a dominant monkey. But they had to be "paid" more juice to view negative images: a lower-ranking monkey or a simple gray square.
