New Amsterdam meets Old Amsterdam: EURO GROTESQUE CAMEO

Remembering Toilets

Sitting low among antiques,
reading Golden Books and
turn of the century dairy adverts,
little girls and dogs.
I’ll wash the bottom of these things again in twenty years,
stare at more cold condensation and
post nutritional essence,
learning optimal breath techniques to avoid the voids.
Our house was filled with dust-bowl era potties
Big white milk jugs
Marbled tin
Coats of suspicious rust.
I’m still playing with these things,
and its more than once that I’ll have
worked for a man still in his towel skirt
past noon, for a place to stay.
I’ll get sad and worry that it could be only the existence
of an additional n in my name
that distinguishes me from the cleaning ladies
who’s employers don’t get them high while they scrub.
But then wonder if they do, too.
I mean it did become something of a standard procedure.
The first time was serendipitous, and deer antler velvet or coffee berry extract would commence each day and giggle towards the same Tracy Chapman album playing loudly throughout the home in the early evening.
I felt a delicate concern for that man's dust and as though I were helping my own father who collects and keeps unread religious ephemera for far too long.
My friend and I would sit in the orchid gardens and search for spiders and climb trees in between cleaning bathrooms I wanted so dearly to sparkle.
That next one though,
the first time my bartending landlord made me ride on his chortling Vespa
through cobbled streets, stunk with canal smell,
I placed the fewest possible fingers around his waist to remain on the back
until it broke down, uncomfortable conversations away from his flat.
The second time, he just sat gross and pore-faced in his filthy house
as I spilled mop water into his living room
after handing him back the too much tobacco-ed joint
and tried my best to look as though I’d done this sober before.
Its a smart man who heightens the help’s detail orientation and visual acuity, lending artificial autistic inventory abilities
and espressos to keep her infinitely motivated to:
Get The Job Done and
Listen To All The Stories About Drunk Driving In Australia.
And after he asks if I do massage
and takes his shirt off and requests a sunscreen application
vertigo strikes as I quickly Have To Go out and down his alarmingly Dutch staircase,
twice too narrow for his wide frame, the one cloaked in Axe,
the bottle, I tissued hair from and placed neatly back next to some nail polish,
wincing at the evidence of some woman’s voluntary presence there.

Chia Pet Choir Practice

A structure of valves,
Mouths singing, touching each other somehow
Shuts pink off from gray and shouts are eaten
Like blossoms after the fish dish,
The scent, thank heavens,
one before the other.
Those perfect chords
Trained uselessly and then broken
Are whispered down by their new siren sperm,
To steal their song and make them brittle,
One day puked into holy sinks,
To seep back into baptized babies
And swim in through the firsts of leaky screams.

But sometimes the pretty salted spreading
Of crystalline shaken halos,
Rocked off of their angelic heads
And cast away rusting in a
A grated bin
Gets pecked instead
by things with tails to grow
Protein glowing whiskers
And divine wiggling snouts,
to giggle hymns into profane chambers:
Broken bottles under fingers
Curled like stuck with glue.
Little golden glitter specks may corona the mouth
Of some frozen man too old for it to enter,
crumpled-up and a stranger to the day before.
A driveling dumpster deathbed
Moistened by falsetto
Grows a coffin cushion,
a freed Aztec bush, released from a terracotta cage.
Cauliflowering newsprint would lay comfort down
To tempt the callused kneecaps from the splintery pews

LeSbiaN Kutterz in HIGH SKOOL

shwinggg

HardCopy Tell-All: The Secret Lives of American Girls
with Miranda Bilgrey
An unflinching look at the Vh-1 generation, girls with low self-esteem, an epidemic of Bi-curious malleable young minds getting devil-pregnant outside malls.
Feeling alienated, excluded from the boy-band fanaticism and Britney adulation of their ‘normal’ peers, we wonder: Where are their parents?
What will these girls do when they get mobile phones?
Neighborhood watchdogs need to be on the look-out for kids drinking their parent’s above-the-cabinet booze and listening to influential CD-music.
"Chatrooms" are on their way to becoming a new venue in which to explore sexuality and experiment with identity.
The raw, gritty underbelly of the suburbs, now exposed: this is a tale as old as time
vulnerable youth succumbing to becoming just another witchcraft Statistic.
Do these girls suffer from a lack of God fearing heterosexuality?
or something more sinister

Vermont Cheddar Be-header

LL. Bean went a’hunting
Shot pumpkin at the outlet store
Put her in a quilted coffin,
Lime daisies by Lilly Pultizer

Curbed by pilgrim’s buckle-shoes
Strangled by hand-crayon turkeys,
The leaf peepers could simply not go on;
Auto-asphyxiated in tubs of Burt’s Bees

Cedar Apple Rust

You’ve an alien lien on the poor spring fruit
Your weir catches needles and releases spore
A soft toy from Spencers,
A frog at the bottom of the maple syrup bucket
I touched you and you made my fingers sprout
Out of old green useless knobs
Fungus, your kingdom is closest to mine
Spread closer and grow me another brother
We’ll put him in that dark room out back,
And pull the shades down so we can’t smell the earth
Creep back up from him and make us remember his stump mother
His gold mold shining on the seal of every future dollar

Vivid Dreams Involving Castles

Making vocal audio energy tunnels with our dial tone
mouths on the Appalachian Trail,
Spending an inappropriate amount of time looking for
two dropped joints by the campfire,
after asking him if it was OK to smoke.
And Dad, getting on his knees,
helping his daughter get high in the woods.
"Only nineteen deer" that day.
A stalactite toned organ at the berth of the cavern
played a song to still us at its center,
a place where the geographically inclined wed,
a chapel for those who like less indirect architectural design
from GOD.
A bottle of Frank's hot sauce in my fanny pack
for my sinuses, we ate thousands of calories a day,
passing lean, tanned bodies wearing themselves against the trail,
characters en route to Shackleton's ship
for the last of the dog races off to their doom.
Owls hooted, really, and coyotes howled,
a dog's pant of a ghost flew over our heads.
A blind man once hiked the whole thing?
Picking black and raspberries before the summit,
we held them and our breaths for a mama bear to appear.
My brother smoked cigarettes behind us, heavily breathing
till we emerged, charlie chaplining our way out of the woods,
our legs dissolved now and jointless stork limbs shoved deep into our hip sockets.

Back and Forth

Bumping your head on a thick plastic Tiffany lamp
You ask the waitress to pull the bench seat out-
Its torn in the middle.
Nesty layers of crumby cotton stuffing leak out,
A basketball team mascot knifed in the back.
You sit down but don't open the menu,
A goblet of neon blue syrup arrives,
you let the straw paper fall to the floor.
Under your table crayons, sized Kids, break underfoot,
making waxy rainbows on the soles of your shoes
as you make as many trips to the soup and salad bar.
You check your reflection in the sneeze-guard
and transport the dab of Ranch on your chin
to your tongue.