Snipping the clause of sperm gave rebirth to simple thoughts and sentences. Wombs impregnated with selfies…mountain man, fisherman, working man, mama’s boy, man’s man, boy toy, bachelor, shit man, fuck man, goddamn man…narrate voice into a perfect tense between what we will be and what we were. The exclusive sneak peek of time and place into the glitch mill of memory steal those scenes to plot, write, and never act upon. The film cut, the times end, and serendipity endure the infamy of trauma triggers that I squeeze from the inside out. The cat purrs.

Dams on rivers generate controlled environments of uncontrollable passion. Loves of life narrow into instincts. That food, clothing, and shelter lose their composure in the presence of obsession should be read not the night before the quest but amidst the droning organ of love and death. The cat scratches.

The father wants to eat the son and the son wants to eat the father. Somewhere above and beyond like God is the mother. Against their gut feelings, the men develop a bond of love and respect. The mother explores the underworld. Moments are missed…birthdays, graduations, lives, deaths…moments become years, decades, half a life. The father questions the son and the son answers the father. I love you and fuck you. The cat climbs.

I became a father three days after turning the age of nineteen. At different points between his birth and my current age of forty six, I have felt like my son’s father, brother, son, grandpa, and long lost uncle. Maturity fluctuates with economy, intimacy, and health. High levels indicate comfort zones best described as mid. Low levels read horoscopes as they take a shit. The cat perches.

Unplanned intoxications, not children, are to be blamed for my unwanted thoughts, feelings, and things. Never had a mini-van. I drove one, left the e-brake on and burnt it up. I do not like the smell of everybody going somewhere at the same time. If your family was big enough and poor enough, you had to stay home with dad and the dogs while the rest of us went about our pilgrimage. The cat pounces.

Failure in fatherhood is a given but no less fatal than the self inflicted wounds of absent assholes and fallen angels. Taken with too much talk, the prophet clams up. Vengeance becomes sevenfold. I ask myself, do you speak your name before the oracle? The cat naps.

Survival of words depends on the twist of the tongue. Woken to the tones of black and white keys, I left the door locked and walked through the walls to the broken piano. Found myself at the crossroads of sound and sense. Discovered the devil was not all despair and deals. Takes a trickster to trick one. The cat meows.

Met a girl inside the mountain outside my river of never being the same twice. Always imagined but never believe in this salvation of self love. Soon, sooner than soon, her cat met me. He has transformed me into a scratching post. My body is allergic. I want her heart to stop mine. My words are read in a parallel universe. I need to let go of myself, I want to hang on. My son travels the same river I traveled, and arrives at a different time and place.

Introduced myself to a family of trees falling over each other. Deforestation encrypts a circle that can be squared. The cat only looks at me when I need something. Around my childhood home I stared into the evergreens until their shadows were cut down and lifted away. Told the cat to check my head to see where the forest went, told the cat that I love him, told the cat that he’s a pain in my fucking ass, that I want to write something, that I need to write something about my mom dead, something about my dad dead, something about my son alive.

Similarities between the cat and me do not stop at our affection for the fine combs used to massage theoretical dispositions. Egos set aside, we come to the agreement known as the treaty of verisimilitude…belief for the sake of belief. We often find ourselves at the window and wondering of sirens and seagulls and the soothing of shadows. Entertainment of ripples, with and without, how and why, the cinema of mimicry where the mask is worn underneath expression. My son remembers some joy beneath my face…some old daylight.

Catlike qualities include cunning, intimacy, and claws. That purring can precede the flaying of skin leaves the universe vulnerable if not endless with possibility and corruption. Development of danger…hands on the head…hands on the keyboard…hands inside the head. Artistic qualities resist luck, lotteries, and leisure. That writing can abide self-inflicted words. That writing cannot abide the words I want to write for tribute and vengeance. My son tells me a story of a man who became a boy.

Loss of hair does not affect the cat’s preening or my own. Audacity in the twilight begins a phrase that writes recipes for death and denies any measures taken. Naming of the cats after the beasts after the genesis after the trip after the fall after the bread after the wine after the murder and before resurrection is rapture. The cat cleans his asshole. I clean my asshole. Assholes clean their assholes. My son told me no one is above and beyond.

The cat hunts birds and I hunt bird brains. Eyes capture but do not kill. Words surround me but do not always speak. Blue sky, evergreens, and pavement, crows on the eaves, voices melted into the friction, songs sung at the laden, cats pad the curbs, writers ink their fingers, fathers forgive ghosts, sons survive the wolf by becoming the wolf

.

                                            	 
I state that on 6/22/02 while exercising my duties as a law enforcement officer in the Western District of Washington.
 
On 06\22\02 at approximately 1800 hours I observed a white Ford Station wagon driving erratically on the Horseshoe Cove Road. It was driving in a serpentine manner in an area near the Launch Ramp, driving from one side of the road to the other. There were many pedestrians walking around the Launch Ramp area. I stopped that vehicle and identified the driver as Pierre. Pierre told me he did not have insurance for the vehicle. I observed an open Rainier beer can in the rear of the vehicle. Pierre admitted to me that he had drunk a beer or two and that he had smoked some marijuana that afternoon. As I walked around the vehicle I observed an open bottle of Icehouse beer. One of the passengers admitted it was his beer. I performed a search of the vehicle for additional open containers. I found an open bottle of Jim Beam in a backpack next to the front passenger seat. It was half-empty. The next day (6/23/02) the campground host told me that after I left she was informed that Pierre and his passengers threw out the open containers that I had found in Pierre’s vehicle. They threw them on the roadway. I immediately identified them as the same containers I had seen in Pierre’s vehicle. I also recognized the plastic bag that they were in as one that was in Pierre’s vehicle.    
              	
The foregoing statement is based upon
X my personal observation                           	X my personal investigation
	
   Information provided from fellow officer observation
 
   Other (explain above) or below
 
I declare under the penalty of perjury that the information which I have set forth above and on the face of this violation notice is true and correct to the best of my knowledge.
 
Executed on 6\22\02
 
 
 
 
one fifth Jim Beam one eighth Maryjane  one eighth Indian 
   fourteen Rainiers fourteen mountains
I’ll piss anywhere when the car stops
 grandma in green government haz mat suit…camp cop
  	“Are you crazy?”
 
a bathroom ten feet away
I apologize   I am crazy
 started when I was born
I’m Pierre and I piss anywhere
 
x-rayed by Jim Beam when I was twelve when
I was told
Pierre, yes Jim? You have a terminal disease
 
swim with girls…pink bikinis blue lake…and drink Kentucky bourbon
     one has her baby but she cradle the jug
and she think bad about me
 
  get back to the sixty-eight Ford Fairlane
 	now deranged then aimless   piss on the same tree
again	granny catch me 
again	no more questions please   she knows
crazy
 
  my best friend Cocaine dives zero gravity out the car
  and writes, “We were fucking born here” in the sky
 
grandma rolls cookie dough lips into the radio  
 	They were fucking born here

 

Improv of heartbeats. Where to die, how to die, and what life to live. Covet not the spittle of wind...your hand upon my own. Wire the temples. We need to see and hear the white noise.

“Adam, Adam, we’re here.” Tighten your jaw, “You’ll be alright.” Shoulders sag. “Everyone has been calling, they want to know, Lord, we all want to know.” Watch your posture, Mother.

The names, the dates, the suspects, the detectives, assume sequential disassociation…happy, sad, happier, sadder. Of course, consider the circumstance of death…spill your milk, drink your water, save your soul. Of course, a victim hopeless with suspicion…makes a wish. What did you wish? A death wish.

Swear the statement…no I did not and I have not harmed myself and I never have loved myself like I love myself now. Of course a criminal contemplates…steal scenes, taint evidence, fix books. Of course there are corrections…me to myself and I to you.

Believe in art, the power of art, how it solves the most hideous of crimes…self love amidst self destruction. If composition is anything, it is this. Sky on a valley, a boy like driftwood on the river, a ripple like a skull on a rock.

They must understand. How many times have guns been put to a head for this same reason that reverence observes emptiness.

“Those that have a voice...they...they say, the doctors, they say that you should wake the fuck up anytime.” Cup the hand on my forehead. Checking for a fever. “We won’t know, only the Lord knows, we don’t know until then.” Coffee with cream and sugar and cigarettes, and she sighs and digs those steel toes into the tiles. “We’ll take you, Adam. We’ll take you however God delivers you, stuffed crust, thin crust, just come back. Come back to us. Goddamn it I’m hungry.” Eat, please Mother, eat.

“Time for a check up.” The nurse inspects me with her shadow. “How is he doing?”

“I saw his lips tremble.” She brushes my hair back. “I can see it in him. He wants to talk. I know that he wants to talk.”

You saw my lips lifeless.

“I saw his lips tremble.” Put my words into your mouth, Mother.

“Doc says that he should wake up. We’ll do this last check-up, and Doc Rattleman will come on in, and I think they will wake him.” The shadows play charades.

“What can we expect?”

“Who?” Her shadow inspects me like a dog.

“Me and my son, what can we expect to happen when Doc Rattleman...wakes him the fuck up?” Mother, nibble at the nicotine on your fingernails.

“It will be like his first day of school.”

“He hated school.” Mother, please, Mother, stop. “They threw him off the merry-go round on his first day.” Stop, Mother. “That goddamn school.”

The nurse writes her shadow a note, “you know, your son looks just like spiderman, he looks tough…kinda cute.”

“He’s always been sensitive.” Go outside and smoke your two and half packs of Marlboro Lights, Mother, please go smoke.

“Just like Peter Parker.”

Mother, do not respond, “Is he the president?”

“Spiderman.” The nurse beams and her shadow slips behind the curtains, “spiderman when people need him and Peter Parker when he just wants to be a good boy.”

“That’s very nice of you to share with me, thank you.” Grind your teeth, Mother. “When I look at my son, when I see him,” no, Mother, no, “I don’t see anything. He’s my son, and I look at him and nothing comes to mind. I’m sitting and praying, and not a goddamn thing.”

Footsteps reluctant for martyrs, dance for tragedy. They pitter patter after coffee, cream and sugar and cigarettes. Should she talk me to death…what would she say then, how much would it change her voice from deep, saturated tones to the simpleness of greed. We love him. We need him now, more than ever, we want him back, we need him back.

Doc Rattleman, three two one, lift the curtains, hold the eyelids. He’ll save your fucking life even if you shoot yourself in the head, Doc Rattleman.

“Give him to me.” He reads the chart. “The kid bit his goddamn tongue off.” Doc Rattleman, man, he knows the dance and the jam…the improvisation of breath with ventilators and tubes and blow bags.

“Can he walk?” Cross your eyes, Mother, “he’s not paralyzed, is he?” Focus on the tip of your nose not the iceberg, Mother.

“We have reason to believe that a spiritual movement occurred.” Doc Rattleman has jugs of dopamine. “Our main concern is how his dream of death affects our way of life.”

“What happened?”

Of course I know. Someone finally got the gut and come round and got me. Of course I know. Death at its most ironic degree. They planned it. Lord, I planned it, lord. Someone try to kill me and they almost...almost did. It was a plan, my plan.

“Blunt trauma. Basilar skull fracture...closed head injury. Swelling in the front and rear hemispheres on the right side of his brain where the impact occurred, and also some swelling in the rear of the left hemisphere.” Doc Rattleman knows a banger when he hears one. “Consistent with baseball bats, rocks, and dashboards.”

“Where should I go?” Take his hand, Mother, say yes.

Doc Rattleman contemplates…moneymakers. “From a medical standpoint, we wait and see.” Extend the stage, crowd the exits, make people touch each other. “We believe in your son. His spirit is old, his body is young, and the brain, I have come to despise, the brain...controls every impulse, almost every molecule in the body, and until the swelling recedes, there will be deficiencies in his spiritual abilities.”

“His eyes are open. His eyes are open.”

Doc Rattleman skates across the floor and looks right through me.

“Adam...Adam.” Chew a stick of spearmint, Mother. “I’m here, I’m everywhere.” Close my eyes, Mother, cover my mouth. “It’s a miracle. His eyes are open.”

“We think that your son is in a temporal state. He shouldn’t be here.” Doc Rattleman circles the bed. “He should be in heaven or hell. Perhaps purgatory.”

The town she raised me in, and my ole dad, and my ole dad, drink to him. Everything jazzy and aloof, from the ceiling to the white walls, the man behind the curtain next to me, think of him and his Yo MTV Raps, and now my ole dad cuts into the room like a DJ. It took a long time to find him hidden behind the black mass of my mother. God...god...God, I can read her mind.

“Adam...Adam, I’m here honey.” Don’t do it, Mother. Widen the crack in my skull, “he loves to hike...and to fish.” Lift my hand up. “Hiked all the way across the state last summer. All the way. I can’t tell you how much…” Do not cry, Mother, “how much he loves the mountains.” Mother, goddamn it. “He lives for ‘em.” God fucking dammit.

Faces closed. Mouth open. Jim Beam and cocaine...that last night…the last night of my life, but it has not stopped, just a jump out of here, a roll off the bed, and on my feet. Again to the rivers, again to the mountains, again to the river of rocks, again to the decomposition of time and place. They will come with their gold and silver, their Jim Beam and my cocaine…they will celebrate my life.

Mother, you shall sleep tonight. Dream of your children. Love your children. Run round and round on a wheel, Mother. Work, eat, sleep, work, eat, death.

White rats squeak and white boys howl. Mother, speak of the ground up souls who built the devil’s tower with their crooked backs and stiff legs, speak of their hungry children and speak of their hungry parish, speak of my fall from you, down the drain between heaven and hell.

“He squeezed my goddamn hand.” Let go, Mother, let go of me. “I felt it.” Let go. “He can hear us, and God heard my prayers. Heard all of our prayers.” Sell my soul, Mother. Buy yourself some time. “You have help all over. People have written prayers and placed them in the basket from Vancouver to Arizona...” the price is paid, “all the way back in the Mid-West, people have been praying for you, Adam. We all have been praying.” No, Mother, no.

Same room, same floor, same tiles, same view into the cracks in my skull. All those people who built the devil’s tower, all those people in the factories of dust and doubt that twist their hearts in two for some idea that they can be a slave and feel free at the same time...where did the ideas come from, is this the natural world, where did it all come from? Nothing to hide. Tell me, Mother, with your praying and living on coffee and cream and sugar and two and half packs of cigarettes a day...you owe yourself answers, Mother. Waste of time and place, television in front of their face, Peter Parker please explain my sensitivity to light and prayer. Not even my friends who sleep on the streets outside, who wait for me believe in my resurrection or their own.

“Your friends,” Feel my face, Mother, and where are the scars? “So many, asking...and praying, Adam. So many.” Dig a cigarette out of your purse. “You have more friends than any of us ever thought.” Light that goddamn cigarette, Mother. “I just think, Adam, honey, I just think...I’m glad that your brother is alright.” Light the cigarette. “If I lost you, I would still have him.”

“No smoking! Put that out. We have a designated area for smoking just outside the building.” The nurse and her shadow…Judge Judy, prepare to attack.

Drop my hand and spit it out, Mother. “Do you have a designated place where mothers can watch over their son while they go back and forth between heaven and hell? Do you have something like that?” Tell her and that shadow another joke, Mother.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you cannot smoke inside of the hospital.”

“What did the cigarette say to the landlord?” I love you, Mother, always.

“I don’t know.” The nurse’s hands are considered deadly weapons.

“Don’t put me out on the street.” Haha, Mother.

“You cannot smoke in here.” The nurse’s feet are considered arthritic.

“When will he talk?” Never again, Mother. I bit my tongue off.

“I don’t know, but soon we hope.”

“Adam…Adam, can you hear me? Can you hear me?” Listen, Mother, my friends will tear these fucking walls apart. “His eyes are open. His eyes are open.” Close them, Mother, please, and cover my mouth.

Doc Rattleman breezes into the room. “Any words on the existence of God?”

“What do you want to hear from my son?” He wants to hear of my travels, Mother.

“Is He dead.”

“Who?” You know who, Mother.

“Is God dead?” This is the foundation of jazz.

“They grow up and they know every secret to life. Just snap their fingers and here comes the cure to cancer, you know...” Put your hands in your pockets, Mother. “And look at him, all that he’s been through.” Mother, do not touch Doc Rattleman. “He’ll be strong for it...won’t he?” Please don’t touch the doctor, Mother, please.

He extends his hand. “He’s a fighter.”

“Mom.” Touch him again, Mother, I dare you, Mother. “That was the first word that he ever said.”

“Not mommy?” Doc Rattleman has sugar plums dancing in his head.

“He calls me mom.” You are not my mom, you are my mother. “Do you believe in the greater good?”

“I have faith in the good ideas, but not in their brains.”

“His friends called me,” sit down, Mother. “They did not call me the moment it happened, they did not call me twenty six minutes after it happened,” stir the coffee in the Styrofoam cup, “they called me the next day. After they had got home, crawled into their beds, slept, dreamed, and maybe had a bowl of Trix. They called me then.” Then leave, Mother, then leave me the fuck alone. “I remember that I was sitting in my chair. The television was on. My husband and I were watching the news. They were talking about...on the news, they were talking about whether or not...the president,” shake that head, Mother, “whether or not our president cherry picked intelligence so that he could start that war.” Put the Styrofoam cup against your lips, Mother. “The phone rang, and one of his friends introduced himself as if he had not known us for the last sixteen years. Last night, he said, last night, he said, Adam got hurt. Said he fell through a hole. That he’s in the hospital.” Put the fucking Styrofoam cup down, Mother. “It is empty... I’m drinking an empty cup of coffee.”

“Would you like another?” Doc Rattleman had bacon for breakfast.

“He said that Adam and all his friends were camping and partying up at this old cement factory–where they used to mine limestone and make cement. All closed down now, but when it used to run, it would make the river gray...all the dust covered every roof in town like snow.” Do not speak, Mother, do not breathe, Mother. “I’m from the Mid-west, came over here when I met my husband. I was not around then, but my husband...Adam’s dad, was.” Point him out, Mother, he’s sitting on the ceiling watching the game. “You know kids, they like to go to places that we all just want to forget. I’m told that this old factory has been vandalized, spray painted, nooses have been made from the cables and hung from the ceilings...a mock electric chair has been set up. On the walls there are these terrible proverbs and warnings…graffiti, go back or die. Satan knows you. Don’t take one step closer. The stature of liburty is a slut.” Sit the fuck down, Mother. “Said Adam and all of his friends were camping, partying...there. And Adam fell through one of them holes. Hit his head. I’ve heard, Doc. Rattleman, I’ve heard that when the factory ran, it turned everything and everybody gray like a clock by three in the afternoon. You couldn’t even wash it off because the water was gray, and just like we took all the names...the ancient names, the rightful names, the names people lived and meditated and suffered and died to learn for the land they lived on, all of our kids renamed this factory. They gave it their own name. Whether it’s right or wrong, they gave it their own name.” Throw him out the window, Mother.

“What did they call it?” Doc Rattleman believes that ideation is the wisdom man took from God. “What did they call it?” .

“They call it the Devils Tower.”

***

“As soon as I turn the television off, you close your eyes.” Take the cigarette from your lips, Mother. “I turn it back on, you open them back up.” Strike a match. “Maybe I should rent you some movies. But we don’t like the same stories.” Bite on the butt of the cigarette until the tobacco is loose, Mother. “I guess that I must be getting old, my son has gone to the other side,” then light the cigarette, “and came back...already.” Then light the goddamn cigarette, Mother.

“No smoking!” Judge Judy returns.

“He loves to watch television. It’s like he’s seeing it for the first time again.” Keep smoking, Mother. “You know, we grew up without television. My boys never had a TV growing up, it was all coloring books and drawing and storytelling.”

The nurse fans the window. “You cannot smoke...you have to put that out and finish it outside in our designated smoking area.”

Snuff it out on the floor and put the butt into your pocket, Mother. “If you could have seen the some of the things he came up with,” please do not explain my life, Mother, “one time he called me a bitch.” Why wink at me, Mother?

The nurse studies the monitor. “He looks better and better every time I see him. Your son is a fighter.”

“Do you know what it’s like to sit here, next to my son, and watch him fight for his life,” try to catch her shadow, Mother, “watch him open his eyes...his friend told me, his friend told me that Adam got hurt bad, that he was not sure what was going to happen.” Surround her shadow with cigarette smoke, Mother, “all I could say, was, ‘who hit him?’” Why hold my hand, Mother? Grab her shadow. “He said that Adam fell, that it was an accident, but I know better, I said...who hit him?” Do not let go, Mother, “and his friend said it again…Adam got hurt, that it was an accident.”

 


Picnic in a war zone
Accommodate separate assimilate 
Main street small town but not so small
No one knows my name except the mechanic

American purgatory
My demons serve me and I serve my demons
Us and them  
 
A barbershop but I’m bald  
Every sign is bilingual
Except one 

When I read it and ground the words up
Iglesia Apostolica Fuente de Misericordia
I tasted misery 
But it’s mercy

A fountain of mercy

“We’re taking a smoke break, boss.” The waitress cursed with the cook under her breath. “The cook can still smoke, but he’s not sure about cooking.”

“Where there’s smoke there can be cooking.” Not that the quip shared any inklings of solidarity with needless cliches of meal preparation, but they entertained them for the confidence of the crew. “Where there’s cooking there can be calm.”

“You sent him to the wrong school this time, Feathers.” The waitress spit out the cigarette. “He’s a culinary artist now.”

“We mandate safety training for all employees regardless of make and model.” Ebachaneezer Feathers might have said too much, perhaps the quip revealed their legal strategy when the cook undoubtedly sued their employer for workplace harassment past, present, and future. “Our cooks here at the North Cascade Inn have resources to succeed in the workplace and the homeplace. We offer silver spoons to employees and customers.”

“He sleeps in a cot in the corner, Feathers.” Cyd the cyborg leaned into her cigarette and took deep drags as she was wont to do when talking shop.

“There’s something, if not many things, to be said for nostalgia.” Ebachaneezer Feathers had their faults and defaults.

“You and your damn nostalgia.” Cyd the cyborg spit the cigarette butt out and lit up another of the cook’s custom cured and rolled cigarettes. “You keep going back to it, boss. How great things used to be.”

“Memories are not idle, Cyd. Throughout the history of the known universe, memories have demonstrated clear movements from one culture to another.” Immortality did not keep a repository of moments, actions, even dreams that constitute memory. Instead an existence that is both lifeless and sort of numb to the extremities of mortal moments need not count back but simply look sideways.

“The hell they ain’t, Feathers.” The cigarette smoke from this newer and more nuanced tobacco that the cook had produced was velvety below the kitchen fan. “I don’t see no memories walking and talking, boss.”

“That’s all they do, Cyd.” Ebachaneezer Feathers orbited now with memories that were separate entities from their source, they were sure of it. The riddle of time was solved by marking the movements of memory. “Your so-called daughter, that little catfish swimming around here like a shark…”

“Watch it, butt breath.” The creature of the dark light pinched her nose shut.

“That’s my daughter, Feathers.” The waitress tracked into the dining room once again locked into battle tank mode.

“She will not remember us as we are. That is impossible.” Ebachaneezer Feathers visualized memories as shooting stars that had at last succumbed to the offering of the abyss. “She will find compartments, boxes of rain, pictures of rainbows, galloping ponies, cupcakes, and birthday candles unlit.

“I’ll never forget you, old fart.” The girl kept her nose pinched.

The waitress leveled a missile launcher on the antimatter orbit. “We are about ready to make some real memories, Feathers.”

“You will remember us, girl, but not for the food or my atmosphere.”

“I’m talking about your farts.” The girl lifted her shirt collar above her nose. “You can call it roses, but I know bullshit when I smell it.”

“What you aim to create, Cyd, and what you will remember, girl, are not memories.” They could not be called dreams either. “They are transformations of energy from one state to another.” A better description for the phenomena that most intelligent life forms believed to be memory was a door that when shut, locked itself.

“Is that how our cook turned into a chef?” Cyd the cyborg decamped into a hard but less threatening disposition…mother hen mode.

“It was the pixie dust.” The girl looked like an outlaw with her shirt collar above her nose. “That old fart has not answered why they got a bag of antimatter in the cleaning closet.”

“Or why they got the cook sleeping on a cot in the corner of the kitchen.” That the waitress jumped on this potato masher of paranoia that would rice the quip was of no surprise to employer, employee or customer.

“We offered him a suite somewhere below, but he’s a creature of comfort zones.” Not the perfect employee, but the cook was close in that he preferred cheap and rustic accommodations without fanfare. The owner and operator of the North Cascade Inn could only take credit for capturing high standards with low wages.

“Throwing him in the bottom of a bag with your pixie dust, you call that comfort?” Again the waitress leaned into her cigarette. She was, after all, talking shop on her smoke break. In most instances, nostalgia is damning. A curdled feeling for times past that in all scientific thought and observation is a cessation of the present moment that resists the future with promise and sometimes threats to charge the past with debts of delusion.

“We have the misfortune of a bureaucratic agenda that infiltrated our business.” Ebachaneezer Feathers thought it strange that antimatter would increase their range of spirit, gas, particles, and quarks before it attempted to consume it. They always pegged it to be a fast eater. “We don’t want to charge the cook for his suite when he sleeps on a cot in the corner of the kitchen, but we have to by the order of 5567 of the unofficial official superficial artificial intelligence guild. Just like we would like to pay all of our employees more than the universal wage.”

“You were paying us less, a lot less before the big blinkers came in here and started blinking, Feathers.” Cyd the cyborg muttered and snickered with the cook in some code that their supervisor could not be bothered to crack. Gibberish founded upon the tips of tongues too toxic to attain sensibility, gibberish was a mutation of language to some and to others like the owner and operator of the North Cascade Inn, gibberish was the slander of the elite and of those wrapped in cocoons of self evident truths.

“We were but a parcel of the markets.” Ebachaneezer Feathers longed for those days of wheeling and dealing without the harnesses of robotic cowboys, the linguistic lassos cast from the cliffs of infrastructures and into the clouds that wrangled the energies of wage, profit, and tax evasion. “The universal wage keeps us all the same.”

The cyborg switched into soldier boy mode and marched into the antimatter orbit. “You know what I did with that extra money I got from the universal wage, Feathers?” Soldier boy mode paired machine guns with pacifiers.

“We know everything, Cyd.” The owner and operator of the North Cascade Inn again retreated into the concept that timing was the enemy of synchronicity. They did not want to disturb nor damage their precious artifacts curated on the ceiling, but they wanted the antimatter orbit to leave as the big blinkers arrived. “We just have to run your diagnostics. We know just about everything besides this sideshow.”

The waitress and the girl both rolled their eyes. Secrets disrupted the swaggers of perpetual motions that the known universe used to expand itself. “I bought my daughter a ticket here, boss, and...”

“I bought my mom a ticket back.” The girl was good.

“Nobody is going anywhere until they pay their tab.” That a cyborg, their cyborg, entertained these ideas of motherhood to the point where they ferried a girl across the known universe to the last post before reaching Hell itself was incredulous and impressive. However well written the story was, quip did not swallow its hook.

4 July   6 rain           3 jade      1 light     2 Sockeye  5 fishing         7 family       9 friends  7 river      
1 rats    9 running   8 triple    6 hooks   3 snagging 5 sparkplugs 4 plunking  2 can        8 crushing       
8 my      2 son          5 my         9 boy       4 slipped    7 undertow   1 choking    6 gripping 3 drowning
5 father 4 hold        8 my         6 hand     7 shed       2 your             3 scales        1 weigh     9 my
9 abyss  1 live          7 die        4 god        3 dog         8 plague        6 pray            2 rabid       5 howling
2 moon  3 foaming 6 salmon 5 seeking 1 scent      9 spawn        8 sniff            7 decay      4 bliss 
9 home  8 exile       1 solstice 2 summer 5 crucible 6 stone         4 water          3 fear         7 faith 
3 float    5 sink        4 angels  7 fall          9  demons 1 drink        2 words         8 scribble   6 bite
6 hook   7 barb        2 wit       3 sharp      8 gill           4 lung          9 grief           5 grace       1 July

From the roots of the hemlock tree the grail was woven and placed at the center of our table. Knuckled in prayer at dawn, at dusk our hands cup the grail. From the heart of the hemlock the grail served its wine. From its cup our mother sought an abyss.

That the hills hear our heart. That the hills ward the wolves from men. That the hills give crypt to children lost from our home. That the hills harden the hunted with the scent of the hunter. That the hills stiffen against our spade.

That the hills, their skin green and their blood black, give one salvation from their wilderness. The hemlock tree split by lightning and hewed in the angles of wisdom and crucifix. That the hills know our exile from Eden delivered us to ravines.

Mother is missing. In my valley glory is rapture. Mother is missing. I do not expect to follow a trail, but gypsy moss and talking trees spring before us. Nor do I imagine that a lust became a love so enraged that a mother, my mother, would abandon home and hearth to howl at the hills.

The mountains have heartbeats. In my valley the river boils the water white. The mountains have heartbeats. Mother is missing. Snowcaps and saddles and peaks, cairns of ridge and scree, I do not expect to find her silhouette in their sky. I imagine her mumbling into their old rhythms that sheer and quake.

In my valley the water is restless, and if one drinks, one corrupts. Mother is missing. At the commandment of glory that a mother shed her second son to root the tree into the hill, many mothers have gathered in restless waters, fastened their necks with rocks, and clouded the current with breath.

In my valley the second son is sacrificed. I will, he will, seek reflection in the grail and then drink the blood of the hemlock. My death is not a destiny strangled from the labors of life. In my valley the first son is blinded. He will not see my ascent. My death is a destiny blessed with resurrection. In my valley the second son is sacrificed. I will find our mother and she, and she shall lose me to the hills. In my valley the first son is muted. He shall not sing of our sorrow.

At the sacrifice, grief wears a mask of glory. We serve it with no words, no book, and no act of worship. At the sacrifice, the second son is sowed into the hills like a seed. They give me the shield. At the sacrifice, our mother is the maker. We give her the sword.

The second son is chosen. I look within. Glory, meet my eyes. The second son is the caretaker of his mother. He alone hears her wail.

The first son was raised to serve the second son. From solitude he learns wilderness. The first son without reflection from the grail, is not given light nor song. He holds himself as dirt holds water. From his silence I learn my voice.

On sacrifice the hemlock bleeds. The second son begat the first son. The second sin stops the first sin. Mother is missing.

No sanctuary is offered to the first son. He must ordain the world without song and light. Some have collapsed, ran off cliffs, stood in fire, some have become civilizations lost to glory and blind in vengeance. Their eyes composed of quartz that we dug from the heart of our hills, that we gave to our own restless hands to rub and squeeze the crystal from shard to orb, their eyes see no light other than glory…dawn on the garden.

Mother is missing. From us she could have run, beat her way through the devils’ club and briar on the bottom, and sunk herself in the land. Mother is missing. From us she would have been torn.

That last meal Mother prepared. Squash roasted in honey and butter. Dandelion greens and nettles gleaned from the lees of the forest, she blanched and stirred with carrots, lard, and lemon. Mother stuffed and fried rainbow trout that the first son and I caught in the mountain creek.

I waited for him to finish his duties for the day. The first son dragged the gourds off the vine. He bent over, hacked them apart, and scooped out the seeds and rinds with his fingers and flicked them back into the loam. He stirred the pumpkin patch and crouched to the garlic thatch. Their ramps tossed with wind, and he plucked them from the till. In a basket woven of fish bone, the first son arranged his harvest. It is a ritual, it is a ceremony, one he feels, one I perform, that I carry the harvest to our mother. Then I filled his hands with our fishing poles, and he smiled, and I led him into the ravine.

We let ourselves fall through the forest. The trees augured the sky, their limbs ladled before us. The first son climbed down to the creek with certain and careful steps. We perched over the whitewater that melted the bedrock into a basin. A waterfall spindled from the evergreens, and needles and cones tumbled in its sweep. We caught rainbow trout from a pool that shushed into meadows and marsh.

Mother threw a cloth woven of pig weed and cattail over the table. Look upon the cloth, look upon me, the second son, and hear our currents, hear the glory, hear the restless water. We hold belief that if we give then glory will not take. Around the grail we set our table. There will be no flood. There will be no drought. There will be no fire. There will be glory.

I am the second son. I am the wool of my shepherds. Mother is missing. I must find her and give myself to her. There will be no locusts, no swarm, no pestilence, but glory.

That last meal before our mother went missing, she sat across the table from me. The grail in the center, the rainbow trout stuffed with garlic ramps and honeysuckles, the squash, and the greens to the sides. The first son at the head of the table, and mother wove her fingers into the grail, raised it, and set it before us.

The tongue, the craft of prose and poem, the tongue of the first son is taken at the birth of the second son. And if he gives anything but his hands to me, the second son, he is struck. No sight seen, no sound said, I am deity to him, and he is dirt and furrow to me. If the first son could speak, could sing, could read poetry to me, then we might find our world without glory. If the second son is not born, the first son’s throat will be cut instead of his tongue. Mother is given the sword. I am given the shield.

That last meal before Mother went missing, she read her story in the grail. Once upon a time shadows from the forest iced our blood. And a mother sat in ritual like our mother, she stared into our heart, and she spoke a song that moved through us like our water, restless. And she cut her tongue out to stop her spell as she cut the first son’s tongue out to stop his rule by the Word, but the story she spoke would not be denied nor forgotten, it is written within us. When this song stopped, words of silence wailed from her mouth.

I speak now, I spoke then, and I will speak again. I am a stone of sacrifice. I am the second son. I am the spring of glory.

Mother set the grail before us.

The first son took the grail from Mother, and the roots tore at his lips. He will not rule with song. The blood of the hemlock rippled on his quartz eyes, and the roots pried at his scars. He will not rule with sight.

What do you see? Mother said to the first son.

He turned to her and upturned his palms as if they held glory.

He cannot speak. I reminded our mother.

He has spoken. I heard him.

I did not.

Give him the grail. She ordered.

The first son set the grail before me.

What of the world did you see? I asked the first son.

He turned to me, and mother struck him until he turned back.

He saw what you shall see.

You do not believe in our glory?

I cannot say.

You must.

I will not.

I imagined the taste of the grail, that I would hear prayers.

What did you see? Our mother asked.

I did not answer her. Instead, I brought the grail to my lips and drank. I saw her become lost in the forest, and she did not remember the names of her children. I saw her swallow the sky, and she did not fly. I saw her climb across the mountains, and she did not pray. And I saw her cradle the hemlock until the roots gripped and gathered her.

I find no path to her. The way to the hemlock on the hill is without touch. I follow the gypsy moss, their locks pale and strewn, our mother, I know, our mother danced through them on her way to the heart. What I should confess, is that the hemlock on the hill, the heart of the forest, the root of the grail, the ward to the children lost in the forest, that the hemlock on the hill gives one passage. With leaf and spirit I must drift.

Climb to the light, and our mother, missing, could be found here at the whispers of dusk. I did not dream, but the wind grated across the ridge.

I fell to the river, and the ripples were frayed with islands. There I sat and contemplated. To whom and what hook shall I cast? Here the salmon swim in the sky. There the fishermen wait like wraiths. Mother, missing, our mother waded into this current, she did not swim. And the river parted at her feet.

Dawn delivered us a sanctuary of shadows. We found the first son at work in the garden. He dragged his hoe and made furrow on the lay of the morning light. And back and forth, side to side, the first son without eyes to behold the world, nor a voice to sing of sorrow, wrote stories on the dirt. A tree grew in one plot even though he had never seen one, but he heard the wind whisper through the grove. The crescent moon crept, stars cascaded, he painted this plot without a constellation, but he heard coyotes tell stories to the carcass.

That the river, that the mountains, that the hills, that the forest, all is a form of glory. Exiled from Eden, we grow our own garden, we mock the snake with our own snake. And I screamed at the first son, and I ran to him and beat upon him, where is she? Where is she?

He drew a map into the dirt.

I will go to the hemlock tree.

I will follow moonlight into the heart of our hills.

When the children lost in the forest remembered my name and wailed, they walked me into the hemlock. My hands held our heart. My bones broke into the wood. My skin crawled into the bark. My face hardened with grain.

…Where Thinkers Tinker…

Projection of doom and the extrapolations of gloom into the time/space continuum excites the pulse of the parallel universe. One can claim to understand the workings of the known universe, in essence, we have charted our space, but as the voids, blind spots, and undercooked baked potatoes of our mystical perspectives gain footholds in our minds and stomachs, we rewrite our maps into recipes.

Pulse of the parallel universe should be considered delusional and occultic. If one has ever said, wrote, or painted their horse(plot vehicle) with the phrase…I just had Deja vu, by all theories and coded communications, then said confession accumulated itself from the parallel universe. The use of Deja vu to send and receive messages from one universe to the other originated in the crash of two trains of thought.

Occultic means gained through the sacrifice of funds supported by rare, precious metals and the foam found at the bottom of glasses once half full, such ethereal infrastructures as steins and beer cans once summoned, cracked, and crushed, sometimes caress our ears but usually tommy knock the inside of our craniums in nefarious attempts to escape the droning chorus of retrospection. Occultic means embodied some intelligent life forms but not all. Consider the story of meatloaf and its subsequent tragedy.

Born in the lab of small combustible kitchens. More oil, lard, and shortening stocked than fruits, vegetables, and nuts squirreled away, these kitchens were armed to the nth with skillets, griddles, woks, dull knives, and dirty dishes. Coffee cups with broken handles used to caffeinate and fuel cooking expeditions often lurked in the soup of dirty dishwater. If the soup is not left to simmer and plug the sink with the fats and acids of bacon grease, coffee grounds, fish bones, and egg shells then the dishwater will drain and a good hearty soup is wasted. More on dishwater soup including recipe, instructions, and how to neutralize cleaning agents and the unofficial official artificial intelligence guild health inspections later…keep reading.

Signs of stagnancy include plastic houseplants overwatered, breakfast skipped and the midday meal forbidden under the bad breath that is brunch, and of course dirty dishwater drained. Too much coffee with too much cream to dissolve too much sugar, such excess of demand thins the supply with familiar flaws of intelligent life-forms like reconnaissance and downtime. Consider this theory: trickster energy separates our universes with a river of magnetism that meanders back and forth. If the trickster energy achieves mass, you get a Salisbury steak on one plate and shit-on-a-shingle on the other, and when the trickster energy floods and mixes a universe expanding with one that is contracting, you get black holes. Meatloaf, like black holes, was formed through the expansion of the known universe against the wards of contraction. Someone somewhere demanded to be supplied with a loaf of bread made of meat. Or someone somewhere supplied a loaf of meat from the scraps of Sunday supper to ease the white knuckles of Monday morning. It is the wait and see nature of meatloaf that disqualifies it for a breakfast item. How does ground beef greet the wilted yellow waif of aged onions secured in plastic containers? With revision or repulsion? Excuse the writer of this dossier for piling a heap of rhetorical scraps, but my theory of meatloaf is more than an awkward contrail of recipes and directions blown out the backside of our motors. The theory of meatloaf as stated by Ebachaneezer Feathers is thus: Four pounds of ground chuck, one to two mammalian eggs, one cup of oatmeal, half a cup of diced and aged waif of onion, (note: the waif of onion, garlic, or any other aromatic herb, vegetable, meat, or adjective is achieved with reckless abandonment or careful curing) tablespoon of garlic, quarter cup of some salty and spanky juice from your birth or adopted umami, dashes of brown sugar, salt, and pepper-all in the middle, then antique and super processed ketchup in plastic bottle for the glaze or if such a rarity cannot be procured for a topping, one can take leftover spaghetti sauce and noodles and blend then glaze, or one can take leftover taco fixings and salsa and blend then glaze, and we will sum up the theory of meatloaf with this, if you’re too good for grease then you don’t deserve butter on your bread. To conclude, the tragedy of meatloaf like all tragedies is that it looks bad, is bad, and tastes good.

Decisions enacted amidst deluded thoughts and feelings locate the mind outside of the body. To paint one’s horse is to separate functions from their forms. Lack of infrastructure abroad produces sirens of selfish acts thought to be selfless like cooking for others but not cleaning up after yourself. The mind without the body, the tree without the roots, the sugar without the salt, whatever your form, the delusion remains that one can exist without the other, yet the universe will travel around a painted horse. One only needs to stay seated with spurs ready and halter in hands and the parallel universe comes to you. If you have stared at the river long enough then you know it is the mountains and the hills that produce the current. To be more accurate, if you stare at a pancake too long then you know it is the temperature and not the taste that slakes your palette. Sugar is only sweet in certain conditions and forms. And so the mind without the body…words written, songs sung, and meals unforgivable for their moment in the time/space continuum, all separate and suspended from their obligations to their material source. As we tighten our grips both of dream and fever on these harbors, the story begins again with a new narrator, one who has no problems editing the rules of the known universe since this new voice has traveled from the unknown universe. Not that meatloaf has been proven to make a particular writer better or worse, but it is a refugee of thought that has found salvation outside of its mind. From one form that aspired to another form…meat to bread to meatloaf…it travels back…meatloaf to meat to bread to meatloaf sandwich. This is how parallel universes coexist.

Herein ideas, movements, and idols like brunch that attempt to bridge what is unknown with what is known oppress all intelligent lifeforms. Lunch, the midday meal, has been chopped with a dull blade from all sovereign states by the brutality of brunch. Let us not disregard what was once a treasure, meatloaf with what is now a simple and insurmountable inconvenience…the meatloaf sandwich. We serve our meatloaf well done and moist halfway to hell, yet loopholes linger like black holes.

(The mother welcomes her daughter into her home with a hug. She sits on the edge of her bed and the daughter stands. Books are stacked into every nook and cranny of the trailer. Words are written on the walls, the counters, the table legs, the doors, the toilet, the mirrors, the linoleum floors, the ceilings. They are written in ink, marker, paint, scars, and blood. The windows are drawn with paisley curtains.)

Jade: Do you see paradise, Em?

Em: You need to open the curtains, Mom.

Jade: I was a daughter before I was your…I was…

Em: I brought pen and paper, coffee, bread, turkey, and dog food.

(The mother scoots off her hideaway bed and folds it into a couch. The trailer shakes. Books fall off the shelves. The mother’s home sits on blocks at the edge of an abandoned lot next to the freeway. It is surrounded by weeds and makeshift shelters.)

Jade: Have a seat, sweetie.

Em: Mom, I’m going to open the curtain. I would like to see.

Jade: I want you to have a seat. You always wanted to see what I see, watch my shows.

Em: I care about you.

Jade: It’s called empathy. A daughter should care about her mother.

(The mother crouches down and lifts her dog from the blanket on the floor.)

Jade: Dumpsters, a mill of some sort with a chimney, the river looks like antifreeze, the freeway hissing and coiling by like a snake.

Em: What about the tents?

Jade: They’re bluer than the river, sweetie. We have to sleep. We need to sleep.

(The daughter sits on the couch, the trailer groans, books fall off the shelves.)

Em: There, can you open the curtain?

Jade: It’s not safe.

(The mother draws the curtain to a crack.)

Em: I can have Robert here with his truck and trailer in one hour, Mom.

Jade: His name is Roberto.

Em: We can park your trailer in the yard. Hook you up.

Jade: You never asked my permission.

Em: Netflix, Hulu, five o clock news, Max, hot dinner.

(The mother turns to the stovetop. She kicks a book into the corner and pets her dog.)

Jade: I don’t like name changes or maxi pads.

Em: My marriage is healthy, Mom. I’m not perfect.

Jade: Children are happy here. They could go live in a home, but they want to stay close to their mom.

Em: We wanted a small wedding. Just me and my soulmate on a mountaintop.

(The mother rattles a pot off the stovetop. She lights the gas burner and holds her hands above it.)

Em: You were writing your memoir.

Jade: I was. I’m almost done.

Em: Our fifteen-year anniversary is next month. I would like to invite you, Mom. Come have a nice dinner with us.

Jade: I’m busy.

Em: You’re writing your memoir.

Jade: I have not made it past the day you were born.

Em: You left the burner on.

Jade: I’m cold.

(The mother sets her dog down and sits across from her daughter)

Jade: And no, I’m not cooking. I don’t believe in brunch.

Em: You don’t believe in brunch?

Jade: I don’t.

Em: Buttermilk waffles, avocados, heirloom tomatoes, organic free-range eggs…scrambled or benny. You don’t believe in brunch, Mom? Tell me it’s not true.

Jade: I don’t.

Em: Fresh fruit, and mimosas…

(The mother squeezes the daughter’s hand.)

Jade: You brought me bread but no wine.

Em: You should not drink.

Jade: You drink.

Em: I’m sorry.

Jade: For what? Don’t be sorry, sweetie.

Em: I summoned your demon.

(The mother reads the words scraped into the wall behind her daughter’s head.)

Jade: Your demon is my muse.

Em: Your disease, Mom. Your disease.

Jade: What would I write? Living in the middle of Roberto’s lawn.

Em: You mean Robert? My husband.

Jade: Traditionally the wife undergoes the name change, not the husband.

Em: My last name is Sanchez.

Jade: I changed my name, but my husband never changed his.

Em: You could write about our garden.

Jade: I have paradise here…behind my curtain.

Em: Tent city?

Jade: Call it tent city again, and I’ll ask you to leave.

Em: What should I call it?

Jade: My home.

Em: I’ve only had one home. The one I own.

Jade: Your husband owns half.

Em: We’re happy, Mom. He can call it his home. I can call it my home. We’re cool.

(The blue ring of flame on the stovetop flickers against the book bindings that fill the trailer. The daughter rubs her hands together and pulls her jacket tight around her. She mouths the words she finds scrawled on the tabletop.)

Em: It feels empty here.

Jade: When are you having children?

Em: I have three children.

Jade: Stepchildren.

Em: You’re trying to run me out of here.

Jade: You feel empty…when are you having children?

Em: I’m not, Mom, my husband is snipped.

Jade: Snipped, is that a noun (she asks her dog) or a verb?

Em: It’s a verb, Mom, it’s a way of saying that he had a vasectomy.

(The mother picks up a pen and lifts the curtain with its tip. She looks through the words she wrote on the window.)

Jade: I know a bad metaphor, I married one.

Em: My father…

Jade: Your father impregnated another woman…a Karen…

Em: My other mom, Kathy.

Jade: I never cared about the infidelity of a man. I expected that. But my daughter...

Em: I can call two women my mother.

Jade: I have one daughter.

Em: Dad fell in love with another woman.

Jade: And you fell in love with another mom.

Em: I don’t deserve that.

Jade: Take it up with your father.

Em: He’s dead.

(Mother and daughter ward each other with silence. The trailer creaks. The books fall from the shelves. They sit across from each other and both mother and daughter read the words scrawled, carved, and stained into the walls. A kitchen table that once folded out from the wall, is propped up by carboards boxes. Paper cups and paper plates fill a small kitchen sink next to the stove. All the curtains are drawn. The blue light from the lit propane stove burner streaks and lays shadows against the floral wallpaper, the book bindings, and raises the words off the walls like spirits. A half empty box of donuts sits on a small kitchen counter. The mother rolls her pen in her fingers. She hunches into her jacket and sits so stiffly that it seems like she and her daughter are in separate rooms. Her eyes are glazed. Her dog lays at her feet. The daughter opens the door to leave. The trailer gasps at the fresh air. Books fall off the shelves.)

Jade: Tell him I said thanks, but no thanks.

Em: I’m not going home, Mom.

Jade: Wherever you’re going, tell them I said thanks, but no thanks.

(The daughter stops in the doorway and turns back to her mother.)

Em: I’m going out to meet your neighbors.

Jade: Don’t knock on their doors.

Em: They don’t have the type of doors you can knock on, Mom.

(The daughter steps out into the neighborhood and the mother scrambles after her)

Jade: I’ll introduce you.

Em: You still care about me.

Jade: They’re not dangerous.

Em: I’m not worried about myself.

Jade: You’re worried about your mother. I’m not homeless and I’m not sick. I’m a freelance writer. I’m happy here.

Em: You don’t have a home.

Jade: This is my home.

(Underneath the trailer beds of cardboard, foam, and newspaper are burrowed. The Mother tucks the box of donuts under her arms and leads her daughter into the neighborhood. Some dogs bark. A person howls god bless America. No one is out and about.)

Em: Do they sleep under your trailer?

Jade: Only the children when it’s cold.

Em: Only the children can sleep under your trailer.

Jade: I’ll dump my tank if I get some crazy pants tweaking under my trailer again.

Em: Is that your neighborhood’s idea of social services? Shit and piss on ‘em.

Jade: No, that’s your neighborhood’s idea.

(This neighborhood has a string of occupied and ran down single wide trailers and RVs parked in and around the tents. Most shelters have tarps strung off them. OSB sheets broken and torn are propped together like misfit puzzle pieces on the shelters. If a microbiologist looked down from the sky, they would recognize this neighborhood as a singled cell organism…an amoeba of poverty.)

Em: Do we just announce ourselves?

Jade: Stay close and don’t talk to strangers.

Gatekeeper #1: Who goes there?

Jade: I have donuts.

Gatekeeper #2: And we have high cholesterol.

Jade: Glazed and jelly.

Gatekeeper #3: Any bars?

Jade: No bars, are you crazy?

Gatekeeper #1: She ate them all.

Gatekeeper #2: She always eats the maple bars.

Gatekeeper #3: All of them.

(The three gatekeepers circle around the mother and daughter, fixated on the half-empty box of donuts. They wear hoodies and flannel coats. Their pants are dirty but have no holes. They drag oversized shoes and boots through the dirt when they move. The mother offers the box of donuts. They open it like a birthday present from a deadbeat dad.)

Jade: You’re welcome.

Gatekeeper #1: Who goes there?

(The daughter follows her mother through some camps and completely around others.)

Jade: I’m going to introduce you to a handsome young man.

Em: I have my diamond ring on.

Jade: Put that in your pocket. You should mind your business here.

Em: I’ll never take it off.

(The mother stops in her tracks and holds her daughter at arm’s length.)

Jade: We don’t care about your marriage. Put the ring in your pocket, please.

Em: You said they were not dangerous.

Jade: They’re not. You are.

(A smokey fire burns. It does not smell or look like woodsmoke. The black and blue smoke can barely lift itself off the ground)

Fire tender: I lost my cat.

Jade: There’s more cats to come.

Fire tender: She was orange.

Jade: They get hungry. They get bored. They run off.

Fire tender: She was orange, warm, cuddly, and sometimes violent.

(The daughter follows the mother through the smoke.)

Jade: Don’t ask, I don’t what he’s smoking.

Em: And this handsome young man?

Jade: I still know how to get your attention.

Em: I care about you. You are my mother.

Jade: Not your only one.

(The mother leads the daughter along shopping carts filled with bottles and cans. Here and there in front or behind the tents, they skirt by stacks of tires. The mother stops at a larger tent and pole structure that has plastic bags for a welcome mat and a front door fashioned out of Walmart tote bags strung together in knots.)

Jade: Knock, knock.

Handsome Young Man: Come in, my muse, come in.

(Mother and daughter duck into the shelter.)

Handsome young man: Welcome home, my muses.

Jade: I’m not moving in until you finish that novel.

Em: I already have a home in the country.

Handsome Young Man: Yes, the country. I remember the country, twenty, no, forty years ago I graduated from college in the country...I think it was called the United States then.

Em: And now?

Handsome Young Man: Murica.

Em: I got my nursing degree there.

Handsome Young Man: I studied poetry there.

Jade: He was a beat poet.

Handsome Young Man: I am a beat poet.

Jade: Ginsburg, Gary Snyder, Kerouac…

Handsome Young Man: Kerouac was no poet!

Jade: And you are no longer young nor handsome.

Handsome Young Man: I write stories. They made me old when I was young.

Jade: And they make us young while we are old.

Em: On the Road…my favorite.

Handsome Young Man: Kerouac was a goddamn writer.

Em: I know a few poets.

Jade: Don’t you dare.

Em: My uncle Mark, he published a book.

Handsome Young Man: That does not mean he wrote it.

Jade: My brother

Em: My uncle

Jade: My brother is addicted to adjectives.

Handsome Young Man: Stage four or five?

Em: He writes a poem a day.

Handsome Young Man: Aw, the Syphian approach.

Jade: His book is basically a bucket list full of holes.

Handsome Young Man: The plague of the modern reader, inflated egos and low interest rates.

Jade: He did pay me to read his book.

Em: You were his editor.

Jade: My brother does not take criticism well.

Em: He has a penis.

Handsome Young Man: They started those whack-a-mole writing workshops in Iowa of course, and my penis and I limped away. You know the ones where the professors sit with a stone face while their students give each other a cancer diagnosis.

Jade: I enjoyed telling young men that they wrote for parental approval. That they made these big, rugged, cowboy protagonists boom with the words of little boys.

Em: Isn’t that part of the process?

Handsome Young Man: Was it Dewey who said that the process that depicts pain is in itself…painless?

Jade: The art and the artist cannot be separated.

Handsome Young Man: Objectivity does not exist?

(The daughter arches her back and stretches. She realizes that she is sitting on a bucket turned upside down. Pinned on the walls of the shelter are paperback book covers of all sorts, from westerns to steamy romance novels. There is a bookshelf without books.)

Em: By the way, I’m Emily, nice to meet you.

(She extends her hand in greeting, but the handsome young man does not take it.)

Handsome Young Man: We have met.

Em: We have?

Handsome Young Man: We were married.

Em: We were married…before or after your penis suffered constructive criticism?

Handsome Young Man: Henry VIII was king. You were consort. I was scribe.

Jade: He was a masochist.

Handsome Young Man: And Harry had his eyes on you.

Em: Did he?

Jade: Dirty Harry first of his shame, eighth of his name.

Handsome Young Man: I took careful notes. You set him ablaze. And you, my muse, and you were metal in his microwave.

Em: What was he cooking?

Jade: Dirty Harry had a penis problem also.

Em: Does he? And this handsome young man…

Handsome Young Man: Alas, the inquisition begins again.

Em: When did we get married? Why?

Handsome Young Man: I stole you away from Henry in the moonlight.

Jade: When Dirty Harry was possessed by his demons of dysfunction.

Em: Yes, certainly, we have met. Oh yes, now I remember, the Tudors!

Jade: If they liked your ideas, they cut your head off and then they listened to you.

Handsome Young Man: Roses have thorns.

Jade: They drove their roots into the pillar of civilization long buried in the name of enlightenment.

Em: Freedom, liberty, justice…

Handsome Young Man: No, no, and no.

Jade: Fear of God.

Handsome Young Man: Wrong, my muses, wrong.

Jade: What is this hidden pillar of civilization?

Handsome Young Man: Charity.

(From outside of the trailer)

Fire tender: Fire! Fire! Get out while you can. Fire!

Handsome Young Man: Big bad Uncle Sam you can huff and puff, but you will not blow my home away.

Gatekeepers: Fire! Fire! Get out!

Handsome Young Man: All smoke and no fire. Allocate fifty million for preventive homelessness, and they spend it all moving us from one gas chamber to another. We hear it sizzle out of their pipes…counseling, drugs, violence, more counseling, but it don’t change the sight of us. Look into the mirror, and you see fear, you see me and you, and you can’t stand the sight of yourself. And this mayor, the city council, blab, blab, blab, a bunch of gas coming out their pipes. They keep moving us, but this time, this time, I’m standing firm. I’m not moving.

Gatekeepers: Fire!

(The daughter seizes her mother by the arm and drags her out of the camp. They run along on the outskirts. They find the mother’s trailer engulfed in flames.)

Em: No, mom, no!

Jade: My books, my manuscript, the memoir.

(The daughter tackles the mother.)

Em: You can’t, you can’t.

Jade: It’s all gone.

Em: Your pup…oh my god…your pup

Jade: My books, my manuscripts, the memoir.

Em: Stop, just stop, it’s gone.

Jade: Let me go, please, let me go.

(Sirens blare. The daughter holds her ears. The mother stumbles a few steps closer to the fire that was her home. She writes her words on the wall of flame.)

Jade: Writing saved my soul. I grew up on the river. It was beautiful. My father built our home with his hands. In its wax, the moon fell into the front door through a skylight. In its wane, Cassiopea sat over my mom’s studio like a song in still life. She painted, weaved, she wrote, and she raised me and my brother up on the river. In the morning she’d take us down to the banks. My brother wanted to fish and throw rocks. I wanted to find beautiful rocks and treasures of drift. My mother said to us, dream, always, dream. My father came home from work with treats for all of us. He gave our mom a gift every day, sometimes it was a rock that I slipped into his pocket, sometimes dahlias, sometimes cakes, sometimes a blue-collar poem of hard work and lust. Then he started to take her out on dates in the daytime. We waited for them to come back home. We could barely see over the truck door when we ran out to greet her. She led us into our home. Then our father helped her in. Then our father carried her into her studio. She’d color with us in our books. She’d quiz us on our crushes. She taught me how to write. She taught me how to dream. Writing saved my soul.

(The mother steps closer to the wall of flame. Her skin glows. Her words weep into the fire.)

Jade: Writing saved my soul. I told my husband that he reminded me of my father. We lived close enough to the river to know when the mayflies hatch, when the little white moths flutter like specters and we could hear the spring chinook salmon thrash into the salvation of their eddies almost at end of their great circle. I imagined it was a creek that rippled in through the maple groves with the harvest moon. My husband gave me rocks that I left in the middle of the driveway. I’m not sure if he ever knew that I was setting him up for romance. He brought home flowers, dark chocolate, wine, wine that was cheap and wine that cost too much. My husband reminded me of my father. We were almost at the end of our circle. We fell out of love in the same way we fell in love…passionately. I wanted to write. He wanted me to work. I was a mother. He was a father. Let the weeds grow. No, he said, I’m killing every last goddamn dandelion. You have a daughter to raise he said. Yes, I do, I said, and I have a book to write. He had an idea to take care of in his head. I was growing up. He was digging his grave. He was like my father. He was empty when he got home from work. He said he would die without our daughter. Writing saved my soul.

stiff green stems wear needles like armor

the bud blossoms violet

violet borealis in the gray sky,

thistles

he spits at ‘em with a hiss,

thistles

his nose touches the tips

the tank of chemicals stoops his spine

drip DDT drip

spinal fluid from his spout

tap and shrivel

hacked down from the inside out

thistles...die thistles...die

and he sang about his barn

the balled-up barbwire the shovels and rakes rusted

the light racked on rotten wood walls

the light he spilled on me

his love

the Sauk River

his pastures

Hemingway and Poe

his purgatory

cottonwood river bottoms

his war

shriveled

and hacked down from the inside out

like his goddamn thistles