Don’t Die Alone in a Nuclear Holocaust, Bitter Flower

The most embarrassing position to die in during a nuclear holocaust:
eating a bag of Bugles alone, long after everyone else has left the office. Go home
musty skeleton. Leave the scattered staples and toner cartridges to the husk of a cleaning crew incinerated
in the entryway. Ruan Center drapes its worries over a bar district
named for felons. I used to take women to these rooftops. My limbs grew staunch
without learning much except there’s little mystery about the ways things work.
What’s incredible is that fermented yeast plus a measure of dopamine
overwhelmingly governs much of the rest of your life sometimes.
Or sometimes making the cover of a magazine meant to document shame
might not turn you up Mr. Let’s-Do-It-On-A-Laundry-Machine. Correction:
the worst position to die in is in your single mom’s basement in the closet
with Jenny Holden, seventh grade, who was too homely for me anyway.
The worst is wishing for anything other than what you had at the end
where my sister and I watch coral sky scoot to the edge of vision and pass.
And Muffin the cocker spaniel, and these single living cookbooks, this minestrone soup,
earth and heaven will pass away, but these words will never pass away.


Love Song in the Style of Ramona

You render the landscapes of the dead long enough, and eventually,
the guys come crawling. I used to love the way you would stack your victims
in photo albums. I used to love the simpering masses who loved you.
You squeezed my skeletal thigh. They have no decency, you said.
I want black cats to blanket us, I said. Even a breeze could have evicted us
from our bodies back then. Flashbacks to the blur of purple sand
at Big Sur clotted my dreams. I wanted to call you from the beach.
Then I did, a raisin speck against an eternity of sea cliffs.
Imagine flying a holding pattern over your own body
as you do in dreams of death. You looked so silly with that black-blue hair dye
spotting your pillow with violets. I used to dream of translating these flowers
into a language at some later juncture. Then your art electrified the undead
community with its sexual intensity—Abraham Lincoln begging to rip off your blouse
with its gold buttons, and with your feathers for eyes, you appeared
the clear goddess of timeless erotica. Of course you were Russian. Of course
the dead don’t discuss such things, you said. No, I admitted,
the dead have no word for intimate, and a thousand words for blind.


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