The Obligatory Poem About Baseball, and Fathers, and All That Becoming-a-Man Bullshit (or, Trying to Explain to Myself Why I Did Not Lose My Virginity Until I Was Well Into My Twenties)

On bright summer nights as a child,

I played catch with my father, 
both of us bathed in a milky wash of moonlight. 
I understood, even at that young age, 
that the glove was a kind of 
substitute vulva,

its fragrant leather enveloping

my pale, tender fingertips.

Puffing with exertion, and shining with sweat, 
my flaccid old man 
would gently lob the ball 
in my general direction

and I would stretch to enfold 
that hard round missile

in the pocket of supple flesh, 
before hurling it back to its place of origin

where it would drill into his mitt

with a satisfying smack. His palm

would be red for days afterward.

We only ever played catch,

neither of us having any idea 
what a man was supposed to do

with such a heavy, unwieldy thing

as a bat.

Sacrificial Version

Her hand disappears, knuckle by knuckle, plunging
up to the elbow into herself. The edges of the sidewalk crumble.
The street is splotched with grease. Green antifreeze oozes from
her undercarriage. Figs burst the sack and tumble
to lie mashed beside the curb.A hungry scarab 
stretches its wings across her chest, feathers
like blades, its turquoise shell centered
on her breastbone. Water bubbles ominously 
in a pot on the stove. She washes her hair in it,
a single strand at a time. 
A cardboard carton of saltines takes up 
most of the tiny bedside table,
battling for space with the box of tissues.
The nightly skirmish sends the lamp 
plummeting over the edge to shatter 
into porcelain fangs on the carpet.
The headboard is drilled with dozens of splintered holes.
Teddy bears dangle by their necks from spiked collars 
with buckled straps, bolted to the wall.
She moans. The floor is covered with a scattering
of wet straw. I haven't seen her for ages, but
I keep her bra size written
on the back of a coat check slip in my wallet,
just in case.

Passenger in a Plane That Never Lands

As the wheels became unstuck

and we filed our restraining order against the earth,

my eyes turned to the tiny television

embedded in the seat in front of me

where on the screen appeared

three attractive women dressed

in business suits, standing in a park,

fighting over a candy bar.

The candy bar flew up into the air

and floated just out of reach

as they silently shrieked and leaped around,

grasping wildly for it.

 

Out the window, far below,

the neighborhoods glowed like rows of coals,

like colonies of luminescent creatures

lighting up the ocean floor.

Styrofoam Stars

Clunky but lightweight, dipped in glitter,

they would crunch if they fell,

if the monofilament suspending them

suddenly snapped with a twang.

I know you’re probably expecting 
some pulpy, lunar crescent as well,

the requisite paper moon, in other words, along with
cheesecloth tsunamis, burlap volcanoes, 
the whole nine yards. But no, it’s just these lousy stars 

from where I sit in this sticky orchestra pit,

spacing out and watching those heavenly bodies,
orphaned after some holiday party, twirl slowly 
from the ceiling of the office 
to form new constellations no one ever 
placed an order for:

the Staple Remover. The Paper Shredder. The Guy

Who Used to Come in to Repair the Photocopier.

Those celestial signposts used to help us navigate

as we threaded our way between the cubicle icebergs

on our journey to the far off land of the supply closet,

the restroom, the hallway where once they kept

a fine selection of coin-operated vending machines.

Not anymore. We’ve forgotten how to read these star charts,

our memories have gone as blank

as the faces of our unplugged computers,

swept clean as a stage after the last ripple of the curtain.

Rafflesia Arnoldii

A hysterical lipstick smack bloodies the backside

of a perfume-soaked missive

posted to me by a smitten bovine blob of a teenaged girl,

asking if I want to go steady, and providing me with her digits

so I can call her to accept this generous offer.

The note closes with the words “Good Night,”

the two words underscored multiple times,

the pen nearly tearing through the tulip-bordered stationery.

Twenty-odd years later I still shudder

when I picture that sticky smile, shy but smug,

so certain I would return the affection

which she confessed to, with the encouragement 

of a counselor, after one of our group therapy sessions.

That bloated blossom, that overripe fruit 

fairly bursting its skin to reveal

the pungent mush festering within.

Even my adolescent self, so sweaty and desperate

for a taste of flesh, was repulsed.

I wonder how many of the girls I’ve asked out

-or, worse, lunged at- over the years, were similarly disgusted

but were too polite to say so,

too composed to show their discomfort.

Perhaps they were just so appalled they were struck dumb

as I was that day, stammering some feeble rejection 

while the counselor nodded in support of our efforts 

to communicate like grown-ups.

I tried to summon some feeling of compassion 

but couldn’t get past her eclipsing dimness. 

The orbiting satellite crashes through 
the thick, noxious atmosphere of Ishtar, of Venus.

And when, on a rainy group field trip

to a music festival, I brusquely repelled her attempts

to force me to stand with her beneath her umbrella,

her pained expression made me wince with pity

but no real sympathy. As much as I loathed

and wanted to destroy myself, I still felt superior

to this lisping behemoth.

Years later, she came into the store where I worked.

Waddling ahead of her was a man, possibly

her father, who was even more enormous. 

Her eyes had sunken into her face

like the cushion buttons of an old couch.

Mercifully, she didn’t recognize me.

That night, the images rushed at me unbidden:

helplessly, I pictured her plump fingers 

probing the folds of her own moist flesh, 

her lips puckering to kiss that reeking sheet 

of stationery, stuffing it into the envelope. 

The fat slug of her tongue, licking the stamp. 

What would it be like to be intimate with this creature,

this woman who will never have a poem 

written about her, much less a poem steeped in passion,

dripping with desire, swollen with love?

For all I know, her unlucky life might be long since over,

her corpulence whittled to a few dense twigs,

unplucked petals fallen from the empty stem, 

etc. I could lie and claim I still possess

that letter, and that the passing years 

have served to made me softer. 
I could lie and say that if I saw her 
now, I’d take her puffy hand in mine

and squeeze it tight, and give to her 
my warmest, gentlest gaze, my kindest smile.

The End of the Year

Spent the last few days of December
squatting in the shitter, expelling what seemed like
a never-ending stream of fecal matter.

It was baffling; my meals had been far from exotic,

in fact, I hadn't eaten much all week.

My bowels became an excremental clock,

striking every hour without exception,

as if my body was incrementally being purged

of the year's dregs, emptying itself out

so as to start off fresh. It could have been worse. 

The other day a woman at work

was heard screaming in the lower level restroom,

apparently trying to give herself an enema.

Of course, it's tempting to make cracks

about these events, and how, looking back, 

they seem indicative of the type of year it's been.

Besides, our discomfort about defecation still compels us

to titter when the subject enters conversation.

But I felt for that poor woman, shuddered at her frustration.

It's hard to move forward when you're doubled over,

clutching your stomach. My own biggest goal in 2011

was to unblock my own psychic constipation,

to stop holding in the lifetime's worth of shit

that had accumulated in my system.

I made a concerted effort to gaze into that chasm,

to face the ordure armada down there in the basin,

and to accept the truth about myself, no matter

how offensive the bouquet. I long to create 

something beautiful from that waste.

Like a virgin roll of tissue, the new year awaits.

Malibu Sunrise

The strands of spider silk that connect us

across great distances in this random flyspecked life
are suddenly drawn tight, like laces corseting the tongue

of a hightop pair of Chuck Taylors,
as he slips onto the bar stool beside me
at the fire hall, orders two highballs, one for himself

and the other for his latest lady friend, 
waiting blankly back at the table for her man. 
I haven’t seen him in years, 

and considering everything he’s been through,

I shouldn’t be shocked at how he’s aged,
and yet I am: eyes popping from deep sockets,

grin gone snaggletoothed and gray.
“I guess you heard,” he slurs, and I nod and ask,
“How are you doing? Are you okay?”
“I’m doing great,” he spits, pickled in sarcasm.

“How would you be doing, you hear some asshole’s 
been going around saying he put his prick
in your daughter’s mouth?” He leans in closer, 
breathing Johnny Walker, breathing kerosene, and mutters, 
“I sit in the car, in front of the house, waiting 
for the motherfucker, and when he steps out 
then all I say is, are you Jesse? And dude says yeah, so then...”
He cracks his knuckles into his palm, again and again.
His forearm is decorated with script, the word Princess:

the name of his daughter, who just turned eighteen.

By some coincidence, it's also the name 
of his old lady, herself just twenty-one,
and still waiting back at the table for that orange juice and rum.
She recently honored him with him another son.
He delivered the child himself, pulled over

by the side of the road on the way to the hospital
a month after making parole.
Another in an seemingly endless series 
of exhausting miracles. 

“The system’s rigged,” he declares, 
savagely tearing at his cuticles
and hocking a great wad of phlegm at the linoleum. 
“Fucking assholes. I got three years probation, 
anger management classes up the butt.

I know I fucked up. No question. I mean, I got caught. 
But look. In my shoes 
you would have done the same thing. 
You know it’s true. I guarantee.” 
A braid of November cobwebs dangles from a vent 
in the ceiling, twisting along with the crepe paper streamers.

My mother trills that it’s time to light the candles. 
It’s a surprise birthday party for my stepfather, 
though later, out of the earshot of his old lady,
he’ll assure me that he was only pretending 
to be surprised, that he knew the whole time, 
and also that if it been his daughter, this Jesse guy 
would no longer be in possession of a full set of genitals. 

But right now, his son, having become hypnotized
by the television broadcasting the game, 
suddenly remembers his mission 
and swivels and staggers away from the bar, 
each fist clutching a cocktail the color of flame, 
as everyone in the hall begins to sing. 
And, downing the last of my drink, I join right in.