Search All Winners

but we are still at sea     we climbed into the rocking

boat again     the things that we could not afford

to remember in the vernacular      

                                                                       sun

                                                            sinking backwards into the world’s

                                                            light industry    Eros in idle hands

1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.

2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.

3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.

4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.

5. Stay

6. Alive.

“This was when my dad was still living with us, but he would come to services from work, so when we went home afterward I’d have to choose who to go home with.  I don’t know if it upset my dad, but I always went home with my mom.  Mostly because she drove the Beetle, which was so much more fun. She would play these old Patti Smith cassettes, and I’d sing with her. But the best part was she’d let me put on the dome light, so it felt like we were in this little space capsule, just the two of us. That’s my favorite memory, me and my mom going home from temple Friday nights.  That car was like a lit-up igloo rolling through the dark.” 

The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.

I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my

smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut

might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad

muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took

me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the

willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of

course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.

My father believes that the United States is destined one day to be engulfed in a socialist revolution. All revolutions are bloody, he says, but this one will be the bloodiest of them all. The working class—which includes me—will at some point in the not-so-distant future decide to put down the tools of our trade, pour into the streets, beat the police into submission, take over the means of production, and usher in a new epoch—the final epoch—of peace and equality. This revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent. It is not only imminent, it is quite imminent. And when the time comes, my father will lead it.