Cherry Blossoms at Night

Helen Keller owned an Akita named Kamikaze, before the word had connotations of suicide bombers and meant merely “divine wind”. It seems like a strange name for a dog. In the Akita Journal, she wrote, “If ever there was an angel in fur, it was Kamikaze.”

Kamikaze fleas
cutting through the fluffy clouds
...Close my eyes and leap

Toward the end of WWII, the Japanese army put young girls to work to fashion a number of balloons from rice paper, the air inside heated by tiny torches. The balloons were just strong enough to cross the Pacific when the atmospheric conditions were right. Dangling beneath each was a single bomb.

The spirits left town
unwilling to find out if
split atoms hurt ghosts.

Nearly 1000 were released, a third of them actually making it to the US, and though they didn't cause much damage, one of them did kill a pastor's wife and five of their children picnicking in Southern Oregon. A plaque and a number of cherry trees mark the spot today. Unexploded bombs were still being found 20 years later.

Rain of weightless grit
Infectious ash on our tongues
strange weather these days 

There was another plan which would have released plague-infested fleas from planes carried in the bellies of submarines off the shore of San Diego. This operation was code-named “Cherry Blossoms at Night”. We dropped two atom bombs on the country before the plan could be put into effect.

A milkweed hand grenade
explodes; night obscured

by downy shrapnel

The night is so black I can’t see a thing, the moon smothered by clouds. Early autumn and the air churns with the creaking of insects. The cherry leaves, already starting to burn pink and crimson, will soon be drifting downwards, too heavy to hold on to their limbs any longer, calendar pages blanketing the ground.   

Grass Window

The breeze borrows your veil. Snaps it like a curtain.
You ask for soap, but are handed a can 
of ash. You brush it into your hair.  
Those brown eyes had not been closed 
in time, and now they are coated  
with crumbs of earth. A spray 
of seeds. A thatched mask with a beak of reeds. 
Latch the shuttered fields, ask for a basket 
and receive a bucket brimming with suds, 
a dry sponge dusted with 
a blinding crust of salt.
Ducts absorb the settled flecks. The glass streaked 
with dark as you cry mud.

Sleight of Fin, Claw, Paw, Antenna, Wing

These aren’t hawk eyes, but spots on a moth’s wing.

One actor insect disguises itself as a wasp with an ersatz sting.

This serpent’s no coral snake, despite its coloring.

Before I enter the bar, I pocket my ring.

Some deep-sea fish dangle glowing stalks as bait.

A squid squirts ink to cover its escape.

The cuckoo’s eggs are hatched by feathered strangers without complaint.

Foundation hides the blemish on my face.

A puffer fish inflates itself to disguise

the slightness of its girth. Cats’ fur stands on end. Likewise,

a collared lizard’s frill will serve to amplify its size.

A girdle does its best to diminish mine.

A buck shows off its rack while it crosses the glade.

Roosters shriek and swell in a barnyard parade.

Peacocks strut with fans proudly displayed.

An honest man has never gotten laid.

A pitcher plant’s a sweet death trap for flies.

A possum will convince you that it’s died.

A croc looks like a log when it shuts its eyes.

A man may stand for truth, but nature lies.

The Dolorous Stroke

It's tricky, maneuvering the walker down to the water's edge,
but he manages, dodging dented, exiled appliances
and car parts sticking out of the sod like prehistoric bones.
He plops himself, creaking, into the skiff and folds  
the aluminum legs, leaving the collapsed contraption 
to wait for him, a faithful hound on the dock.
The air is fuzzy with sweat and cicadas. The cypress trails
its moss tresses into the brackish muck. 
The ragged bark hide of a gator floats on a carpet of green crud.  
He rows out to the middle of the lake,
his arms grown strong to compensate for his nearly useless legs.
His wrist pops as hie flicks his line, sending the rooster tail whizzing 
out over the water to land with a satisfying plunk.
He listens to the peeping of the frogs and the distant wheezing
of gnatcatchers and nuthatches. From time to time he squirts brown juice
with a ping into a metal can at his feet. 
Sometimes he cups a hand to one enormous furry ear,
thinking he hears Goodwills chewing the gravel. But there's never anyone there.
He's patient though, just as he is with the fish, even though he's only ever
caught one and that was many, many years ago.  
One eyelid droops, curtaining a smoky pearl. 
Yesterday he found a bittern, wings stretched as if crucified,
swarming with ants in the bottom of a rusty cistern. 
He spits. Plink. Runs knuckles through his frizzled hair.
The crinkled crepe of his face sags as if coming unglued.
Globules of saliva quiver on the tips of his whiskers. 
When the sun dips low behind the trees he rows home,
careful to take the can with him, 
nestled next to the bait in his swinging bucket 
as he makes his plodding way up the slope.
The trailer is furry with kudzu. He sits on a folding lawn chair,
unfazed by the clouds of mosquitoes, stuffing another wad of Skoal
into his cheek. He toes the can, careful not to spill it.
He smiles grimly, idly wondering, as he rarely does, 
how it was ever assumed that the grail should be a goblet.
How arrogant, to think that one could drink from the same cup
as their Lord. No, the sacred relic is a spittoon, 
the very same that caught
the Lord's holy spittle as He hung 
on that creaking limb, drooling
and dripping blood. What an honor it is, to be permitted to mix
one's own spit with His, in this very chalice!
He hocks again. A shotgun blast echoes from far across the marshes.  
Over the years he's grown sloth-like with patience,
though some nights he twitches with restlessness,
anxious for that day when a man, pure of heart and rich in spirit,
will drive up, parking in the weeds beside the double-wide,
and ask the question that will heal him
so that he can rest at last, 
wade into that swamp 
and stretch out his hands 
and catch that final fish. 

Kumari Kandam Trailer Park (The Sunken Kingdom)

The screen door banged like a shotgun behind her

and she clomped down the wooden stairs of the trailer

the moment she heard our tires crunch on the gravel.

As soon as I stepped from the car into the moat

-displacing hundreds of larval warrior mosquitoes

with one thick splash- I knew that peril was close.

But I was merely the page, the squire, the Sancho

to this trailer-tilting psycho, my pal I’d accompanied

these thousand miles, squeaking through speed

traps and cutting off truckers, this maniacal hunter

crushing caffeine pills and littering the floor of the Pinto

with cellophane and the spent shells of energy drinks.

Maybe it was just the hot, slimy air making my hair

want to slither from my scalp, making me gulp for breath.

He’d met her on a family vacation in Key West.

When he’d returned to Pennsylvania they’d kept in touch

over the fledgling internet, and now he was back to scoop her up,

torpedoing south to rescue her from the sawgrass nest,

deliver her from the soggy prison deep in the gator-infested

swampland of Florida. And I was the madman's backup, my legs

buckling beneath me in fear at the prospect

of getting lost, of being accosted by back-woods perverts,

subjected to their toothless twang, their barefoot justice.

I watched his lit-up face go dim 
as her rubbery lips stretched into a grin,

revealing sweet-corn teeth pressed into the rim

of the pink reef of her gums. Freckles dusted her face

like cayenne sprinkled on mayonnaise,

like creeping rust. But that wasn’t the worst.

Behind her thudded the trunks of a toad

as the oblong blob of her mother descended the planks.

Chinless and squinting, her jowls jiggling as she hugged us.

Then the father emerged, a stoic, pop-eyed manfrog,

a beer barrel propped up on scrawny legs.

They gave us the tour of the manor, pointing out the room 
where we were to spend the weekend, the greasy sleeping bags.

I pulled my captain aside and he staggered beside me in a stupor

between the aluminum hulls of the submerged wrecks.

Collapsed lighthouses, fallen towers.

We can’t stay here, I hissed. He nodded. Behind us an engine revved

and a black four-wheel-drive behemoth sidled up beside us.

Two ghouls sat behind the wheel of the leviathan

staring at us with the crab-eaten, eel-riddled eyes

of drowned mariners. We raced back to the car

and didn’t stop driving until we hit dry land in Savannah,

where we spent a speechless night staring at the motel television.

We took to the road the next morning, the sun risen

over the sea to our right. I should probably stop

and give her a call from one of these diners, he said,

but never even slowed down. Just kept on driving.

The Slime Net Returns

I haven't written any science fiction (it should technically be called biological fiction, I guess, though people would probably shorten that to bi fi, which sounds like a whole other thing altogether, so I probably shouldn't have even brought it up) in ages, but that's all about to change! I'll be posting a new short story, Free Range, in four installments on my neglected sci fi blog next week. In the meantime, feel free to scrape the gunk off the stuff that's been lying around for five years.

The Slime Net

I-95 to Avalon, FL

The armadillos did their best to stop you
but you sent them bouncing like bocce balls 

into the rustling gullet of the kudzu.
The scrub pines lopped off their own limbs
and hurled them into your path, but your radial tires
snapped through them like wooden matchsticks.
The garrison of crows stationed on the twin yellow lines 

turned out to be cowardly, evaporated by the battle-cry

bellowed by your engine.
A short order ex-con in a truck stop
tried to poison you with an okra omelet
but you just vomited a while in the parking lot
and continued on your way. Due south.

The floppy fangs of the orange cones were less menacing 

than the miles squeezed to a claustrophobic corridor 

for resurfacing and patrolled by tar-belching behemoths.
Countless multitudes of insects martyred themselves
against your windshield, perhaps in the hope
that their accumulated goop would glaze the glass into opacity.
They didn't count on the Stuckey's, with its bucket
of gray crudwater, in which was sheathed
the rubber blade Excalibur, that mighty  squeegee.
No, nothing could keep you from completing your quest,
from rescuing your damsel in distress
(whose ample gums and girth were not apparent
in the pictures that she'd posted on the internet)
from the room where she was being held against her will
in a trailer park in a suburb of Gainesville.
Knight errant, you kept spurring on your metal steed. 

You gritted your teeth
on account of all the caffeine pills you'd popped.
Nothing -not shed dragonscales
nor flipped hubcaps, nor state cops
could ever convince you to ease up.

Keep Your Eye on the Knife

My gaze pierces the clear plastic window of the pink donut box,

scuttling like a crab across the cardboard floor, scouring the corners

but finding only yellow crumbs and a few clumps of white powder.

For a moment my vision sticks

in a single glistening smear of dark chocolate frosting.

There are so many other things I’d rather be looking at

but I can’t bring myself to reel in my attention.

I just keep peering through the square aperture

into that dull little room, desperate for distraction,

until the sun suddenly bursts from the clouds,

glazing the wavy cellophane, turning it into

a sheet of solid gold, and I find myself locked out,

forced to squint and turn my face away

...just as, hours later, I’m jolted awake

by the sound of the receptionist calling my name,

and I look up to see the smiling aide appear

from around the corner, wheeling in the gurney,

ready to deliver me down that long corridor

of which I will see nothing but the ceiling,

my sight dragged unwillingly along, gripping each

fluorescent light fixture, clinging to every sprinkler,

digging into the cracks between the tiles.

Ice Station Zebra

Black satin ribbons snap in the wind,
twisting around the defunct aerials
above houses slathered in frosted stucco
deep in the lush suburb of Drexel Hills.
Inside, the rooms are all cold crystal doorknobs,
glass ashtrays, veined marble coffee tables. 

Sliding in your socks across the salmon-stained
tundra of the linoleum, you long to escape
to the sweltering, root-ribbed patch of dust
of the backyard, to pluck the cicada husks
that cling by their thorns to the cyclone fence .
Listen: locusts. Air conditioners.
But no, you're stuck here in permanent winter, 

stealing slabs of rubbery provolone from the platter
of cold cuts on the counter, swigging skim milk
(not even 2%!) as the ancient ones snore 
in tandem with the television static,
adrift on an ice floe in their leather recliners,
warming their half-empty slippers before the
plastic logs that glow with a dull buzz
in the hollow of the fireplace which,
though made of real bricks, does not connect
to any chimney.