three day rain, odd to
see the flooded plains
in place of prairie choked
and lit; brightening night.
chilled wind stirs humid
days, sun foresought.
forced to sleep a
few days more.  and:
'i never see the
devil, but i do
see demons.'
stated as people walk the
spring streets covered to
cease rain from drenching.
refusing natural occurence.

a thigh gap
a peering spine
a cat eye
a cerulean highlighter
all of this and more
all of this, yours
21 mind-blowing *** tricks
5 ways to convince your doc you've ADHD
all of this and more
hack your closet
hack your pantry
your cellar door
all of this, yours
an e-thank you note
Facebook status remorse
an it's complicated
all of this and more
self-checkout
automatic hand dryer
automatic towel dispenser
automatic doors
all of this, yours
ask Siri where to bury the body
ask Jeeves where to buy the Molly
Google "the triumph of death"
and salute it with Bacardi
all of this
all of this
42 celebrities who used to have braces
8 Instagram hotties we love
42 gin recipes sure to inspire envy
all of this and more
how to love yourself
how to be a gentleman
how to make sure you marry the one
all of this yours
******* that read Angel Off Duty
boxers that read Reporting for Duty
ride the escalator all the way to
Jesus's heaven
fist bump Little Richard
and that kid from Malcolm in the Middle
watch St. Peter wave all the **** sorority girls
who've recently died in drunk driving accidents
to the front of the line
breathe, in from the nose out from the nose,
pick up a copy of Men's Health and read
an article titled
69 ways to incorporate gravy into the bedroom TONIGHT
all of this and more
all of this, yours

The young novelist wrote in his rented room, a claustrophobic nook under the stairwell, where the ceiling sobbed dust each time the owner hurried down to work or hurried up for a forgotten prescription. Shelves crammed with the owner's yearbooks and photo albums lined the walls. He typed at a long oak desk. On which, he had one plant, a gardenia, white flowers in full bloom, and a quote by Buddha on an index card in a four-by-six-inch frame. "You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."

The sun had quit for the day. He got up and poured out his cold coffee in the bathroom sink across the hall. He dried the mug with a paper towel. Then to the kitchen, where he pressed the button on the box of Merlot, filling the recycled mug. The denouement was coming together. But he hadn't hit his stride, tapped into that secret space where words flow with natural rhythm and proper grace. His hungry or starving or emaciated mother character--he struggled with the diction, the balance between subtlety and a Coca-Cola slinger's criminal word abuse--would decide to eat her baby. Not the ******, the denouement. Critics would **** as only critics could.

He drank one cup of wine while standing in the kitchen then refilled and stepped back into his room. The plant and the Buddha quote were suggestions by his mom. She didn't like him spending so much time alone. Time alone killed her uncle. The young novelist argued it was an indiscriminate heart attack. No, his mother said, it's from all that cheese he would eat. Cheese, his mother contended, was the unitary measure of loneliness, killing you one comforting slice at a time.

Google the symbolism, his mother said of the gardenia.

Secret love.

Oh good.

That's just the first result.

I always loved them.

That was only the first. I bet they're part of the funerary tradition.

Your father used to get them once a year for Pastor Mike. Do you remember that? Around Christmas time. It was your father's way of saying we appreciate your work.

Secret love.

The quote made just about as much sense. A devout--dare he think staunch--Methodist since she was old enough to disagree and berate, his mother's selection of a Buddha aphorism begged suspicion. The young novelist assumed this was an appeal to his academic worldview, a panoramic ideology that protected him from having to value or defend anything, really. Buddhism is **** electronic dance music; Methodism is vaudeville, tired and exploitative. And if his mother was trying to be cool, that disgusted him. But if his mother was trying to meet him halfway, that excited him.

That's it, he thought, the mug now half-empty. The mother is not hungry, not starving, nor emaciated. It's a loving mother. A mother that knows the lows of living. She eats her young in an act of compromise, to protect, to prevent confusion and isolation, hell even Kraft Singles.

He sat and scooted up his chair. He wrote in a fever, a frenetic fictive dream, page by page, scene by scene through the night.

I.

Up the stairs Suzann without an E went.
8" X 10" bright white rectangles dotted
the yellowing and dusty walls,
clean reminders of bad family photos.
Her parents, Bob and Theresa,
had picked out wallpaper. Lilacs
and vines and oranges. Why? She
didn't know.

She tossed her backpack on the floor
at the foot of her bed. Her senior book
was still on the night stand. Charity and
Faith, her sometimes friends, had spent
the last two weeks filling out every page
of theirs, printing hazy images on cheap
photo paper at their homes and sliding them
into the plastic holders or taping them to
the pages without.

They coerced boys they
had liked or still liked or would like if to
fill out pages. When the boys simply signed
their names or names and football numbers,
they guilted them into writing more. Give
me something to remember you by.

Suzann liked to look at only one boy,
Casey Stephen Fuchs, pronounced "Fox,"
though you know that's just what the family
said. She didn't want him to write in her
senior book. She enjoyed the space between
them. She knew what her peers didn't:
she was seventeen.
She knew she didn't know
the right words yet. She knew the heart-bursting
flutters she felt were temporary--enjoy them, she thought,
shut up and enjoy them.

Her parents set her curfew at 10:30. So
this Friday, like most Fridays, she stays
home.

She opens ****** in the City of Mystics,
a novel she's burned through. Fifty pages
or so left. She likes detectives. The methodical
stalking, the idiosyncratic theories and philosophies
that allow them to connect dot after dot.

She shuts her eyes and sends herself walking down
the streets of New York, where hot dog vendors
whistle and say, "Nice legs." She flags down a cab.
She sees Casey across the street. What are you doing
here, stranger? She waves the cab on.
The driver, a brown-skinned man from some vague
country, throws his arms up. "C'mon."

She cuts across the traffic, dodging a white stretch limo,
a black Hummer, a hearse.

Casey's straight hair hangs over his left eye. It's both
melodramatic and troubled. There's a small shift
at the corners of his lips, the corners of lips, this
is a detail she writes of often in her journal--why?

She can almost hear Casey ask her, "What brings you here?"

"Business."

"What kind?"

"None of yours."

He takes this as an entry for a kiss. Not yet, handsome. No no.

"Make whatever you want for dinner," her mom shouts up the stairs.
"There's stuff for nachos if you want nachos. Some luncheon meat too.
Only one piece of bread though."

"Okay."

"Alright. Just whenever. Dad and I are going to go ahead."

"Okay."

"Alright."

Get me out of here. Suzann's whole life is small: small town,
small family, small church, all packed with small brained, short-sighted people. She wants New York or Chicago. She wants a badge--no not a badge. She'll be a vigilante. "You're not a cop," they'll tell her.

"Thank God," she'll say. "If I were a cop then there'd be nobody protecting these streets."

II.

She's read mysteries set in the middle of nowhere, small towns like her own Kiev, Missouri. They always feel phony. Not enough churches.
Not enough bored dads hitting on cheerleaders.
No curses. Every small town has a curse. Kiev's?
Every year someone in the senior class dies.

As far back as anyone she knew could remember
anyways. Drunk driving, falling asleep at the wheel,
texting while driving, all that crap is what was usually
blamed.

This smelly boy named Todd Louden moved out of Kiev
in the fall semester of his senior year a couple years ago.
Suzann was a freshman.

A few months after he was gone, people started saying
he'd killed himself with a shotgun. First United Methodist
added his family to the prayer list. They had a little service out
by this free-standing wall by the library where he used
to play wall ball during lunch. People cried. Suzann didn't know
anyone that hung out with him. Maybe that's why
they cried, unreconcilable guilt--that's what her dad
said.

Then in the spring Todd moved back. The cross planted
by the wall with his name confused him.
He'd just been staying with his grandma. Nothing crazy.
The churches never said anything about that. He was
just the smelly kid again. Well until late-April when
he got ran over by a drunk or texting driver.
They hadn't even pulled up the cross by the wall ball site
yet.

III.

You call it the middle of nowhere, a place where the roads didn't have proper names until a couple years back, roads now marked with green signs and white numbers like 3500 and 1250, numbers the state mandated so the ambulances can find your dying ***--well if the signs haven't been rendered unreadable by .22 rounds.

The roads used to be known only to locals. They'd give them names like the Jogline or Wilzetta or Lake Road, reserved knowledge for the sake of identifying outsiders. But that day is fading.

What makes nowhere somewhere? What grants space a name?

The dangerous element. The drifter that hops a fence, carrying a shotgun in a tote bag. Violence gave us O.K. Corral. Violence gave us Waco. Historians get nostalgic for those last breaths of innocence. The quiet. The storm. The dead quiet.

IV.

It's March and not a single senior has died.
So when she hears the front door open
around 2 a.m., Suzann isn't surprised.
She doesn't think it's ego that's made
her believe it'd be her to die--but it is.

She hears the fridge door open.
Cabinets open.
Cabinets close.
She hears ice drop into
the glass. Liquid poured.

She clicks her tongue in
her dry mouth. She puts
a hand to her chest. Her
heart beats slow.
She rests her head on
the pillow. It's heavy
yet empty, yet full--
not of thoughts.

She can't remember the name
of any shooting victims.
She remembers the shooters.
Jared Lee Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho,
James Eagan Holmes, Adam Lanza.
No victims.

She hears the intruder set the glass on the counter.
He doesn't walk into the living room.
He starts up the stairs. His steps are
soft, deliberate. What does he want?
Her death. She knows this. He is only a vehicle.
Nameless until. Has he done this before?
Fast or slow?

He's just outside her room, and she doesn't
remember a single victim's name. She hears
a bag unzip. She hears a click.

If he shoots her, Suzann Dunken, there's
no way the newspaper will get her name
right. Her name may or may not scroll
across CNN's marquee for a day or two.
If it does, it won't be spelled correctly.
This makes her move. Wrapping
her comforter around her body, she
tip-toes to the wall next to her door.

She hears a doorknob turn.
It's not hers.

He's going into her parents' bedroom.
They're both heavy sleepers.
She opens her own door slowly.
She steps into the hall. She sees the man.
The man does not see her.
She see the man and grabs a family
portrait. The man does not see her,
and he creeps closer to her parents.
She sees the man standing then she
sees the man falling after she strikes him
with the corner of the family portrait.
The man sees her as he scrambles to get
his bearing. She strikes him, again with
the corner. This time she connects with his eye.
A light comes on. "Suzann," her mother says.
He tries to aim the gun. Again she strikes.
He screams. He reaches for his eyes with
his left hand. Now with the broad side she
swings. She connects. She connects again.
The man shoves her off, stumbles to his feet.
By this time, her dad reaches her side.
One strong push and the man crashes into
the wall outside the room, putting a hole
in the drywall.

He recovers and retreats down the stairs
and out the door into blackness.

Her mother phones the police.
She pants more than speaks
into the receiver.

"Suzann," her dad says. "Sweetheart."

Suzann looks at the portrait, taken at JC Penny when
she was in the sixth grade. The glass is cracked.
She removes the back. She pulls out the photo.

"Did you get a good look at him?"

This photo. Her mother let her do anything
she wanted to her hair before they took it.
So she, of course, dyed it purple.

"That's right," her mother says.
"It's about half a mile east of the
3500 and 1250 intersection. Uh-huh."

Her dad sits down next to her.

"How long do you think it'll take them
to find us?"

There's a shift at the corners of her mouth,
and she nods, just nods.

There are places you exist
in a flowing green dress
that kneads against your body
with every passing breeze
and sand nips at your heels
as you curt by tonned blocks
of cement that smother grass
just off the sidewalk.
They nuzzle киоск stand,
and long to lift self up
to a sea-blue, backdrop dream
that dissolves for years (and years)
and erodes to sewers beneath
with every Charlotte rain
and crumble once again;
a gray-eyed contrast true
of beauty vining through
a city that snuffs roots.

You, and there you go.

I was sitting at the computer
trying to think of a way
to describe a woman's
*** as anything other
than a woman's ***
and there were
marlboro black
cigarettes on my
creaking desk
and I had a fifth
of whiskey on the
windowsill and
I rubbed my forehead
and thought of fruits--
apples and oranges--
no, no that's overdone
and I thought of animals--
elephants and horses--
but, again, no, I'd
come across as one of
those sick ******* that
go to the zoo in  
stained trench coats
and rub themselves against
the chain link
and Eve would walk in
beautiful girl with short
hair and a sharp mind
she'd ask what I was
writing about and
I'd say women
but the women were
never her, she pointed out
and I'd say I don't want to
jinx this, what we have,
you know? and she'd say okay,
okay

I'd get lit up every evening and
I'd text other women
I'd tell them about the shapes
of their ***** and the sizes
of their brains and they'd
usually say uh huh yeah
but I was fishing, always
fishing for that compliment
that sliver of hope, that
unsatisfied wife
when you're trying to be
Bukowski you'll throw
yourself under the bus
again
and
again
for what?
a story, trivial and base,
and that good woman,
that best woman, that Eve,
one day while making breakfast
she'll say to the eggs in the skillet
I can't take this **** anymore
and you'll say so don't
and she'll say fine
and she'll walk out the front door
wearing your t-shirt
you'll feel free for a week
and alone for two years.

Poured into the tight pants,
the grey ones with the zipper
that's afraid of heights, and
guess what? They're really
wrinkled or very wrinkled
or **** wrinkled--but they're
the tight grey ones, assumed
the thighs and calves would
handle the ironing.
Ten minutes late,
usually more. The clock
in the car, the red beat-up
'02 Cavalier, is not behind
or ahead an hour, no it's
set to some vague time
because lateness has
replaced time so why
even worry. Blood pressure, etc.
Spray on the cologne kept
in the car. Could look
up ingredients in cologne
to describe the smell
but that would take
away a little something.
So say: it smells really good
or very good or **** good--
and move on.
Walk inside, unbathed and
sun burnt--well not completely
unbathed. Washed the hair
because it's a puffy, erratic
downer otherwise.
It's all about appearance,
the bosslady said when
she made the hire.
Slipped a little.
Big woop.
Cold called the Southside
Veterinary Clinic.
They'll allow a visit.
Pack it all in the bag,
the mouse pads,
the koozies, the actual
thing to be sold:
SHEENY PUPPY, some
really heavy or very heavy
or **** heavy duty
coat treatment for canines.
The first one is on me, is said
as the package is handed over.
The vet wouldn't buy. Not then.
Probably not ever.
Ate an eighty-calorie bag of cookies.
Drank some coffee.
Stopped at the gas station, the
Conoco on 15th and Kelly,
and couldn't decide between
the fun size or the party size.
This is called the spectrum of grief.
Bought a pack of cigarettes.
Smoked three really quick
or very quick or **** quick,
like Mom might show up any
second and then tossed the pack
and the lighter.
Done with those. Forever.
This time. Or that time.
There was $20.89 in the
checking account and
a fresh girlfriend reminding
that today is one month.
Dinner. Dinner and wine.
$20.89.
You can sell only if you believe in the product.
Be really blunt or very blunt or **** blunt.
Stress is an art.
Create FUD (Fear, uncertainty and doubt).
It’s all about the presentation.
She's fresh and funny and so
self-conscious when she eats
spaghetti. Can't get
by with spaghetti
for the one-month.
No. No. No.
Be on fire and inspiring.
If you don’t know the answer, ask a question.
Answer inquiries concisely and loudly.
Humor is ****.
You can always be better. You can never be worse.
Call Mom, donate plasma or take the Xbox back.
Is this one forever?
Does forever mean dinner and wine
are necessary?
Or does forever mean that
the spectacle is frivolous?
In the cabinet at work
someone left blueberry bagels.
There's a microwave and a tub
of margarine that only
recently expired.