.elected.day.

It was rather easy to separate the loyal, the faithful,
from the dissenters:
they wore their own yellow stars often,
patterned kuffiyehs like cloth waterfalls.
More importantly, they spoke with a harsh tongue,
as if all their stories and memories were thrashing in their throats
like fish writhing in nets.
And it was rather easy to remove their spines,
filleting muscles from organs, disposing of the heads
as children challenge each other to touch the unseeing eyes.
Their branches were pruned,
to keep the faiths apart
within a people already walled up
like a reversed siege.
The fallen olives were smothered into the dust,
the pits picked out from the treads of the bulldozer,
the oil seeping into the earth.

It's all rather easy when, after all,
God has chosen you.

the hen

potbellied, puffed
up, she pressed against
the wire cage. bizarre
hiccup, each cluck.
her neighbor plucks
its feathers the way
a child strips flowers,
one for love, one
for rejection. the hen
opens her mouth, but for what?
she knows only fear,
only useless wings.

losing sleep

where do the pages of night go
once they've been turned
and the stars lose their spot
fastened to a fleeting robe
of dark? the daybreak
is unremarkable, business-
minded in its wakefulness,
its constant routine, until
buried under the labours
of evening, that slow tide
pulling the sun down lower.
the days smear together.
they look like my mother's
favourite poem, the one she cried
over for years.

.economic.diets.

It's not that my job sucks. I mean it's a relatively decent job, I suppose.
Oh, come on, how much are you making?
Well, ten bucks an hour, but
Exactly! I mean, you're getting paid for it.
Yeah, but the amount of work and responsibility we have is ridiculous.
Well, I will grant you that. You guys have more responsibilities than I do as an assistant professor.
Oh, John, lay off her.
I'm just saying, I think people just like to complain about their jobs!
Well, like I said, I don't think my job is the worst one out there. They just come down really hard on all the employees unnecessarily.
You know what they need to come down hard on is their prices.
John.
What. We bought our meal, didn't we? It's just pretty steep.
Well, our price point is pretty set with the amount of organic and local sources we try to use.
What are you defending them now? You were just attacking them a second ago.
I didn't say there weren't things I didn't like.
Leave her alone, John. Eat your food.
For a ten dollar burger, I'll eat it whenever I damn well like. Why don't you quit, though, if you don't like it so much?
I need the money. And the economy sucks so much right now I don't think I could find another job anyway. Not one that wasn't worse. I mean, we do make a decent wage here, I guess, and we do sorta get tips too, even if it's probably not as much as I could make at an actual serving position.
Do you make a lot in tips here?
I bet she does. This doesn't seem like crowd: single-handedly supporting the economy out of their pockets. But who knows. Maybe they're tightasses anyway.
When it comes to helping other people, yeah. Most of them expect you to wait on them hand and foot, as if we didn't have better things to do. As if they couldn't walk up to their counter and pick up their damn drinks themselves.
Don't you guys have some kind of communal tip thing? Like you split it at the end of the month or something?
You ever slip a little into your pocket off the table there? Ha!
Yeah, we divide the tips by the hours and everything we all work. I don't know. It's weird.
Hm.


Oh man! Did I tell you guys about the guy that stole money from the tip jar?
No!
Yeah, he totally came in and was really sketchy looking, smelled real bad.
Did he just take off running with the money or something?
No, no. He just kind of stood around the counter and said he was waiting for someone.
The shower police, no doubt.
And he was just fiddling with a pen on paper and everything, and it was really busy so we weren't really paying attention to him, you know. We were helping all these other people, and I guess that he must have been sneaking bills out of the jar periodically while we weren't looking, because all the money was gone when he finally left.
How much did he take?
Like eighty bucks.
Jesus Christ! Did you call the cops?
Nah, they wouldn't let us for some reason.
Really?
That's bullshit.
Yeah, you're telling me. Anyway, I called my mom about it, since I was so pissed off, and she felt really bad. Told me she was going to come in the next day and put in eighty dollars herself.
Really?
Yep.
You should have told her it was eighty dollars for each person working.
Yeah right, like she would put in that much money.
Well, the woman is putting in eighty dollars out of her pocket regardless.
Yeah, I guess that's true. I don't know. My mom's weird about these kind of things, I guess. Like she felt bad for us and everything, and this is her way of helping. But I mean, on one hand, she's going to just drop eighty bucks off in our tip jar because some dude ran off with it, but she's not going to help me with my student loans?
Did you ever catch the guy?
No. But get this! The fucker came in the next day and tried to do it again, as if we weren't going to notice him. He flipped his hat around too. Ha.
Did you call the cops this time?
No, but it wasn't busy at all so Casey and I were just staring right at him the entire time, while he was at the counter. I had been putting the big bills behind the counter all day anyway, but there were still a few singles and all that. He asked for a pen at some point, and I handed him one so he had no excuse to reach over the tip jar.
What'd he do?
I mean, what was he going to do? Steal while we were staring at us? He just left after a while. And I had taken the tip jars behind the counter anyway. He seriously thought he could try the same thing twice. I told everyone after that what he looked like so they'd know who he was.
Wow.
Oh man, but that's not it. We found his wallet outside after that. I guess he must have dropped it or something?
Ha!
Ironic, right? In any case, it had all his shit in it: social security card, food stamps, ID. Food stamps, right?
What did you do with it?
Nothing yet, but we just have it.
I think the better question is what will the guy do without his food stamps and ID. He'll probably have to go rob another store.
Yeah, well, as long as he stays away from our tip jars.


So have you done a tattoo recently?
No... business is slow, with the economy and all.
That sucks... I was thinking about getting one, though.
Really?
Yeah, I'll send you the design soon. I think I have it figured out, but I need to make sure I have enough money for it.
Ok, yeah. Let me know. I'd love to see it soon.
Yeah, she needs some money to support her jewellery addiction.
It's not an addiction. I just like jewellery.
As long as I don't have to buy that shit for you.
I never asked you to. Is Mike still unemployed?
Yeah. He's just been sitting around the house. I'm kind of jealous of him. I want to just sit around and be able to afford to do nothing.
How's he doing that?
His parents are helping him out right now, and he's waiting for the bike shop hours to pick up again, since it's been getting warmer.
What's he do at home all day?
Who knows. I think he reads a lot. He's trying to learn Arabic right now from a book.
Sounds hard.
Yeah, we looked at it together once,
I wish my dad had spoken Arabic to us while we were kids. That way, I could have been perfect at it! I prefer to blame him, rather than my own lack of effort.
Didn't Mike live in Saudi Arabia for a while?
Yeah, like ten years.
Jesus, and he didn't learn Arabic?
Guess not.
Tell him he should call me soon. I don't have class on Fridays.
Sure.
And I'm free on weekends too. Tell him to come get another tattoo!
I think he wants them. He just is living on a budget right now.
I thought his parents were helping him out.
Yeah, but he's still in budget mode. I can see him cringing at buying groceries, you know? Oh, and that being said, I read this article about how Americans spend the least percentage of their expenditures on food, compared to the rest of the world. Isn't that crazy? If we could just spend a little bit more money on better food, we wouldn't have to put up with all this gross corn subsidy garbage all the time.
I think that those numbers might be a bit deceiving though. I mean, I think Americans don't spend less on food; I think they just spend more money on a bunch of other crap.
Yeah. I guess that's true. But still, I was reading the stats for how much money Americans spend on food a year as well. For our age group and everything, and Mike and I spend way less than the average person our age. And we buy good food too. We try to buy mostly organic foods from the co-op, and we only end up spending like a hundred to a hundred twenty five dollars each a month.
Wow. That's really good.
Yeah. And I'm pretty excited since I just got my tax return.
Oooo. I should probably do those soon.
Ruth, you don't have a job.
I know... but don't I need to do taxes anyway?
Mike just sends them to his parents. I think he's still a dependent. I guess he says it's so he can get health care and everything.
So you did yours already? And you already got your return?
Yeah, if you do it early enough, it's really fast. What time is it?
Almost four thirty.
Oh man, I'm almost on shift soon. I gotta go change soon to get ready.
Ok, we have to go grocery shopping anyway. Thanks for eating with us!
Pshhhh. Anytime. Even though I'm sick of the food here. But you know what, after this tax return, I finally realized that I can afford to eat at the place I work.
Haha.
You're moving up in the world.

.floaters.and.sinkers. are.both.still.shit.

So I saw something in a movie yesterday which was too outrageous to really let go of. I won't mention which one, since it doesn't even deserve that.

In any case, after our protagonist had driven his car off of a bridge into the lake, he found himself sinking quickly, and for various plot reasons, he wasn't allowed to be separated from his vehicle. So, obviously, quick thinking chap that he was, he proceeded to release the air in his tires into some duffle bags, which he then proceeded to somehow attach to the car, and no shit managed to float his car to the surface using nothing more than the air from his tires.
I kid you not.
So my first impression, of course, was that if the air were already in the tires, why would the car sink in the first place? Sound thoughts, but maybe we can skirt around that loosely by assuming that the air was pressurized and therefore the lack of volume in expansion prevented buoyancy from kicking in. After all, helium tanks don't float up into the heavens.
But then, as I was considering trying to run the mental math of estimating the air pressure of the tires, their volume, approximate volumes of the bags and the air pressure within them, and so on, I realized that no! I didn't even have to go that far.
The bags clearly had less volume than the interior of the car, and a cabin full of air is incapable of keeping a car afloat, so there is certainly no way that the duffle bags, with less volume, filled with air would be able to float the vehicle upwards. We don't even need to factor in that the water pressure on the duffle bags would have made it even less buoyant than a cabin full of air at normal air pressure.

I won't get into the fact that his window was magically restored after he had kicked it in earlier on in the movie. Or the fact that after being fished out of the lake, he was able to immediately drive off on a high speed chase on what should have been flat tires.

So, feeling vindicated, I then realized that
a. I had seen the Hollywood garbage in the first place and
b. I had turned it into a physics problem.
I lost anyway.

In any case, I think it just went to remind me that every so often I need to expose myself to what passes as American pop culture, just enough to remember why I avoid it so desperately.

.simple.cycles.

it feels good to relearn how to ride my bike

not that you forget totally, of course

as the axiom goes

just the little things

the pushing and pulling

pulling and pushing

that's pretty much it:

simple lines for a simple machine

each wheel turn and pedal stroke

reminding me of cyclical natures

and the green lights of spring

the four chambers

funny, this thing, the heart. the diligence
with which it works, the clockwork precision of each
beat. a warehouse
of oxygen and blood.
a fickle
little
creature.

this could happen to you

.written.in.blood.

They called him an idiot. And when the impending pounding of political correctedness piled on, they apologized profusely, and pushed the letters of Philip's pejorative over: idiot. For good measure, to garner some form of restitution and immunity, some of them tacked on a savant.

It was such an easy accusation when one can't dress himself, can hardly tie one's own shoes. But what do you expect from those exotic parents anyway? leaving their country to squander in ours, playing with nails in a salon, coercing nails into walls. Let their hunger and poverty be the nails in their cross, as they die for the family of Phan-kind.
So, really, what more could anyone expect of their progeny?

Nevertheless, Philip Phan managed to persist through primary school, assisted greatly by his older sister, one grade ahead and several grades better.
It was quite the tragedy, then, when on August 21, 2006, she was brutally raped by a gang of, wouldn't you know it, no good niggers. It is simply appalling the sorts that are allowed to run around in this country.
Penny Phan stopped being Penny that day, resorting and responding only to her native name and tongue, which, let's face it, is rather unpronounceable anyhow.

Philip, then, was by all accounts failing on his own accord.
What an idiot, to draw a triangle with four sides.

But the day came, when Philip Phan realized how redundant the alphabet was. Not just his native Vietnamese, which he was never taught anyway, lest it confuse him, but even the English one, which for all intents and purposes looks nearly identical to Vietnamese stripped of those annoying exotic flourishes and embellishments, letters wearing tailcoats and hats beyond all rhyme and possibly reason.
No, no, those diacritics had reached a critical mass. And for that matter, the English was no better.

No, the day came when Philip was able to reduce his alphabet into four letters:
A - the letter Adenine
T - the letter Thymine
G - the letter Guanine
C - the letter Cytosine

The more Philip read in his newfound language, the more plots and characters unwound themselves for him, unzipping their prom dresses like no sensible girl ever would.

Eventually, his language was discovered, and his name quickly shifted its weight towards his surname, savant, catching him and his family off balance completely. In the gravity of this miracle of molecular-biological, genetic revelation, gravity dissolved from under Philip's toes, as he was elevated into the Asgardian halls of bearded scientists, drunk with divination.

They started slowly, checking and double-checking Philip's reading mistakes.
He made none.
They accelerated, checking and double-checking the limits Philip's reading capacity.
He had none.
They wondered, was there a terminal velocity of his voracious literacy?
He showed none.

So finally, we cut to the chase. Forget the mice. Forget the sheep.
Can Philip read us our stories before we are tucked in to our eternal sleep?
He could.

The lines queued up on cue, as the bearded scientists nodded sagely that world leaders should have their biographies read to them, to test their merit, to weigh their hearts and fists. As blonde Valkyries were dispatched to round up the leaders of the world, twitching like giddy children, the movie stars and celebrities pounded on the oaken hall doors and demanded that their pecuniary sacrifices be heeded.
And why not?
Soon, Philip's shelves were filled with more and more novels, in little vials, petri dishes, and even corked up eye-droppers from enthusiastic suburban parents-to-be. He was loved. He was adored. He was the world's most revered storyteller, cantering through the cantos of the biographic bras under those genetic zippers, his tongue enunciating every bodily curve and notch like a lover's kiss.

But the day came, when low lit monitors and bright-skinned books took their toll on Philip's eyesight. Atrocious that he should have been devoid of proper healthcare as a child! The Phan family should learn to take care of their young like proper respectful folk. For a child to lose his eyesight at the shallow age of 24, daylight fading away with each passing hour.
If only such a prolific reader had been born in this country, to the right, white people. Then we wouldn't have to suffer from such trifling setbacks.

They tried braille. They tried reading to him.
It was pointless.
Literature is meant to be read, and Philip could not understand the jumbled sounds and dots that clamored over him like ticks.
Oh, but if he had the fortitude of Beethoven, to continue giving the world his gifts. But we must remind ourselves, it is in his own selfish natures and cultures that we must respect his incompetency and shortcomings.
He, after all, has the right.

The howling crowds tore down the doors of the Asgardian halls, as the bearded scientists threw up their hands in despair. Let the wolves come in, if the pigs can't keep them out! After all, Rome was founded by a son of a bitch; we will see what becomes of this Ragnarok.

When Philip died shortly thereafter, his body was whisked away from the Phans, his sister clinging to the body defiantly with perfect nails. They were to incinerate a genetic Rosetta Stone! The audacity of such scientific rejection.
No, the bearded scientists had found their Rome in Philip's brain, and all roads led from it.
And besides, the Phans were given an even bigger house with a commemorative plaque, having borne such a hero. What did they have to complain about?
And why were they still working that damned nail salon? shopping at that same atrocious market?
You can lead a horse to water.

And after another decade, after Philip's parents were long dead and gone, after Philip himself had faded from public memory, it seemed that there was no scientific answer at hand. Horses had become scientists. Rome had burned. Years of planning had led to a collapse of the empirical research, as the barbarians at the gates had criticized the project into bankruptcy.
Finally, in disgust, they returned Philip's body to his sister, to accompany her lonely spiraling towards death. Their final report was drolly written, a somber voice of defeat, and the conclusions were read by few and forgotten by everyone, save Philip's sister, who was the only person delusional enough to claim to have understood the bottom line.

"Philip Phan's brain is made of flesh and blood like everybody else's."

the news

early this week in Rochester, a 14-year-old boy shot a cop in the back of the head.
boom. down.
my boyfriend can't understand why i'm not surprised. i ask, haven't you read Native Son? but he doesn't get it.

i imagine the boy trapped beneath the moonlight, a searchlight, after the drug bust. the police were gonna let the kids go, but the adrenaline was already pulsing full-force. what else can you do with a .22 shotgun other than aim & fire?

desperation is a funny thing. it can make you think you've got nothing to gain, nothing to lose.

.of.tunneling.natures. and.shadowing.futures

The groundhog, General Beauregard Lee, has been blind for years, a fact he has grown accustomed to. What does he need sight for underground anyway, he thinks to himself.
Nevertheless, he doesn't tell his friends or his fans.

Nature and natures favor resilience.

It's been a few days since Lee's big day, not quite a holiday. More of an omen, ominous festival, really.
It seems that the people have become fed up with the temples of Delphi, and oracles of riddles, and have moved across the ocean to something more natural: a temple tunneling downwards, a silent prophet.

Nature and natures favor zeal.

What does he care about his shadow? He lives underground, where shadows serve to remind him of patchy ceilings, holes in the temple domes. Shadows, General Beauregard Lee scoffs, are all light and heat down here, doing nothing but begetting more shadows. And how much easier is it for him to simply be blind to it all, and live in the simple darkness.

Nature and natures favor simplicity.

And this year, as he had regaled out of his home, castle and temple, his corpulent mass into the bundled masses of his Mass, as he capered through all the divinities of his insightful charade, he wondered if, this year, his shadow could see him.

.but.these.chords.have.7ths.

Chef Team Lacey and Sam gave us a tour of Asia today, with our stomachs as vehicle of choice.

bad news

here is how today ends:

you get an email telling you that you are on the waitlist to get into your first choice MFA program.

.it.matters.it.antimatters.

all things come in pairs

A basic premise, be it physics, or literature.
My professor illustrated the point with arrows
one showing the force vector of the bullet,
another recoiling backwards
presumably into a shoulder.
My aunt illustrated the point
with just one photo
of a prison cell
and a handful of letters.

all things come in pairs

Positron: an antielectron composed of antimatter,
comprised with the totality
of all the opposite traits of an electron.
+1 charge
1/2 spin
mass: identical

Alternatively, I've had it described to me that a positron is nothing more than an electron that moves along the opposite time vector as the rest of us.

Crab canon: two things arranged complimentarily and backwards
similar to a palindrome.
See J.S. Bach's A Musical Offering.

all things come in pairs

And I can't help but think about myself
comprised of all the things I'm not
faltering backwards through time
seeing all things that came before
as easily as all things that lay ahead

the long walk

It is early evening and I still haven't left
the house today. From my bed,
everything looms: impossible dresser and
its flank-like shutters, the bellow
of the old furnace, a letter
I have not responded to. My mother told me
about a man who walked 2,000 miles until
his shoes wore through and each step
ate a little more of his feet. She doesn't know
why and our long distance call
ends.

Outside the window, the trees in winter
are skeletal. The pigeons prefer
the sizzle of power lines for a perch,
and I count them, my electric choir.

I put on my coat, wrap my scarf
like a noose, and take
the walk no one knows about.

another mourning

I wake up this morning happy for the first
time in weeks. The sun sleepily eased
through the blinds, throwing
lines like notebook paper across
my bed. The dogs shift to the movement
of dreams. I fasten
a robe around my body, flex
my hands and toes.
I could leave here, I
could just go.

.home.thawing.

Mark O. sits at his desk, bowls formerly containing food sprawled out in front of him.
He is waiting for the mail to arrive. His W-2 form should be here today.
He has lived here his entire life.

Mark O. looks out his window as if it were a painting.

There was a time, steeped in escapism. He read Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and was envious of his namesake, travelling through Venice after Venice, and recounting everything to Kublai Khan.
He had even bought travel brochures.

Mark O. doesn't leave his house very often, much less his city.

The mail arrives.
Somewhere, he can hear birds telling each other stories of where they've been.

He slides into his jacket. He walks to the door. The weatherman said it was exceptionally warm today. Possibility of more snow next week, though.
Maybe his kids will walk home after school. The sidewalk snow seems to have melted.

Mark O. opens his front door and can see, for the first time, the street that he lives on.

what remains

the gravel beneath
my feet
does not remind me
of you, the rock
in my shoe.
they are just
shards of stone
hot with travel,
stuck between
the toes
of a girl who
forgot you.

.long.island.iced.tea.

Hey.
-Hi.
I'm leaving again.
-I heard. New York, right?
Yeah. Long Island.
-When are you leaving?
Next Sunday. A week.
-Sounds fun. Are you moving in with the boy thing?
Yeah. Isobel is going to be with her dad for a week while I figure things out.
-We should hang out before you leave.
That'd be nice.
-At least there will be more there than Arizona, right?
Yeah.
-We should really hang out.
Yeah.
-You can bring Isobel. I haven't seen her in a while. She's, what, almost two come April?
Yeah. She's a little terror now. Gets into everything.
-I bet.
Yeah.
-When was your last day at work?
Friday.
-Cool. I still don't have a job, so I'm pretty free all the time.
Yeah.
-We can take those family pictures and send them to Nick, like we were going to a year ago. Just to piss him off.
Haha. We could.
-I guess maybe it's a little late for that.
Maybe.
-I guess maybe it's a little late to hang out, if you need to pack and all. It's cool, I guess. Don't worry about it if it doesn't work out.
We'll see.






-I'm sorry.
Me too.

calculations

every person,
a variable,
must
be stripped
of its value, assigned
instead
some vague descriptor--
say x,
then plugged
into society,
a formula.