hand that feeds

Jo Jo Baby was twelve years old when they nabbed her. She’d followed meticulous procedure as usual—man enters room, man takes off all clothes and jewelry, all of man’s clothes and jewelry go inside special zip lock bag, zip lock bag goes inside bathtub, bathroom door is closed. Only this time Jo Jo was distracted by the particular putridity of this man’s stench, and didn’t shut the bathroom door completely. They heard everything via the tiny wire in his gold wrist watch and were outside waiting. Jo Jo Baby was thirteen years old when she gave birth to Nelson, son of the prison guard who stuck his dick in her every afternoon after lunch. Seven years were added to her sentence when she tried to abort him with a number two pencil under the table during indoor recreation. She gave birth with ankles and wrists shackled tight to the metal bed frame and they were only released once they took him away. Three days later she was found in her cell with cut wrists. They took her to the hospital already dead. The day nurse laughed when he saw her rolling in lifeless. I remember that whore, he said, lifting the elastic band of her bloody pants, couldn’t forget a hole as sorry as that one. Jo Jo Baby was already halfway to hell. Or so they said. The last words scratched onto her prison cell’s wall? WHAT MEANS DEATH ON THIS PLANET OF RELENTLESS ASSAULT. They sent the small, empty body to the furnace, took the ashes out with the trash. Sixteen years later to the day Nelson sat on the front lawn looking up at the clouds. Who’s my real mother? He asked them. Upon hearing his words the clouds parted. He thought for a moment he could make out a face in the space between them.Time for dinner! Came the evening call. He went inside and slurped his chicken soup. By the time he cleared his plate, he’d already forgotten about the whole thing. 

—OCT2025

3.8.25

Whimper fashioned as moan

Reach inside and extricate string of stones

Empty all water ever held by ocean onto 7-piece L-shaped sectional dick

In the 2009 sedan, in the slanted driveway, under pancake sky

I tell her with straight lips, I have chosen this

At dusk the world is a single rusted highway

Mired by trees, loose and lifeless

At a stop light I glance over

The pins in your eyes hold centuries

Once she carried a secret in her heart too long

and a cancerous mound grew over it 

2.6.26

Sitting on the sand at my favorite beach in the world, Montaña de Oro, with Star, watching the sun dip into the sea. The waves sizzle like stellar currents as they move back and forth over the shore. Yesterday we drove out to Antelope Valley to watch wildflowers. The entire valley was vacant. I miss the antelopes, I said. Later I read that they had been extirpated from the area since 1900. At night we met up with Fi and walked to the L.A. river, ducked under a fence, and sat under the moon. The night was vast and thin, quiet except for a man who drove his puttering dirt bike back and forth over a nearby pedestrian bridge. Fi opened her bag and revealed tea and teacups, chamomile and moringa, and a bowl of cut apples, blackberries, and cookies. I finished my tea quickly and noticed a small dead spider at the bottom of the cup. I asked Star and Fi what they thought it meant. Before we left Fi presented us each with a stick of incense. Mine was for Amitābha, the Buddha of infinite light. A curious siamese cat hung around us as we said goodbye. Star and I walked to the car and I picked kale from a sidewalk garden, I had no money and I was hungry for the earth. The next morning we left town early and drove north along the sea. The incense had crumbled into pieces in my purse. I burned them on the beach.

the crows

Thousands of crows, crows from all over, gathered after the weather event to strategize. During the night there had been a terrible storm, and when I awoke the sound of rushing winds had been replaced by a different kind of ominous call. I opened my curtains as I did every morning immediately upon waking and saw them, oily black covering every roof, lawn, fence, and power line.

Often when I see an animal, I wonder what it is a sign of. I wondered this now. If this was a symbol, it must be an oceanic one. They spoke to each other all at once, in complex tongues I was too simple to understand. All night I had tumbled through violent, sexual dreams. I awoke multiple times with my fists grasping the headboard, as if in sleep I was afraid of being carried away with the winds that threatened my thin walls.

I picked up my phone and took a photo of the scene. I thought about sending it to someone then remembered I knew no one. How long had I been in this room now? There was no way of being sure. My phone contained no numbers, no texts. I had spent many months, maybe a year, looking out this window, a lone creature in a glass enclosure, occasionally catching glimpses of life outside. Elsewhere life pressed on, but in this room I had barricaded myself so fully inside that even time didn’t dare pass through it.

When I had told Sapphire to leave that day, what I really meant was, if I lose you I will die. She took a long, slow sip of her coffee while gazing out at the passing clouds, then without another word, placed it down on the sill, picked up her jacket, and followed them. There the mug sat, in the exact place she had left it. The coffee had long since evaporated, leaving a sooty film. That residue was the only evidence she had been real. 

I laid back down on the bed now, as I did the day she left. I had laid for a very long time and waited. Today I watched the birds. Their complex web of relationships. I imagined a party with everyone I had ever known in attendance. Sometimes I had dreams like this. All day the black sea outside undulated. The tide never turned. It continued on into the night.

That night in sleep I saw Sapphire’s face gleaming in too-bright sun. I awoke to the sound of my phone, light pressing through the edges of my curtains. I rarely received calls anymore, and when I did, I didn’t pick up. Disoriented from the dream's haze I answered. Sapphire had been in an accident last night. She was dead.

I stood slowly and opened my curtains as I did every morning. The crows were gone. Not a single black feather remained. The entire world outside seemed strangely silent. And the sky—like an eye without an iris. Never in my life had I seen a sky as empty as that one. 

dogs with long claws

After the house burned down

She ran for miles with pencils in her hair

Forgetting the pictures she used draw so vigilantly

Hands with seven fingers, dogs with long claws

Everywhere she went, a trail of old shavings

Now we pass the days luring cats out from under cars

And nights building nests out of tires and sticks

Though the crack in the door I watch her move through dark hallways

Then out into the night, singing:

What once floated

now sinks like a stone 

upon the dead earth

If it weren’t for the man jerking off in the Rite Aid parking lot, I wouldn’t have noticed. He had his hands in it. 

Spare some change for something to eat? Asked the man, eyes rolled back, tongue circling chapped lips. Shoppers came and went, eyes averted.

I rifled through my jacket pocket for my wallet, pulled out some cash, and that’s when I saw them, in a crack in the brick wall behind the drug store—a pair of massive tits, without a body.

What are you—? I asked, just as he was jizzing all over them. Steam rose in the air around his frostbitten flesh, and then dissipated. 

Look, he urged, and I was—at the tits, which were now hardening, toughening, turning into bark, a tree, which blossomed and then sprouted green apples, all in seconds.

He tucked his dick into his pants, tugged at a broken zipper, picked an apple off the tree. 

Well, thanks, he said, taking a bite, before limping out of the parking lot into the street, singing. 

YOU HAVE LIED TO MY BROTHER AND I FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR ABOUT THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS

This was when, I was starting to lose faith in things. Which I will say is not unusual, it can and often does happen even within the span of a day, I’ll wake with a sense of life’s meaning and at some point before nightfall misplace it. I was in the midst of a particularly rough spell, three months had quietly slipped by with little participation or consent on my end. I was, taking a break from loving. I was, a hammered down slab of meat, awaiting my roast over the spit. My problem is that I am always waiting. My problem is that I am always ready. For the sky to open. 

GET IN HERE. COME, BOY! COME! GET IN HERE YOU STUPID FUCKING DOG BEFORE I BEAT YOUR ASS! GET IN HERE! GET IN!

The wind howled through the barren trees lining the parking lot, and the little ration of light that had been allotted by day was now dwindling, and I stood before the crack, a six pack of toilet paper under my arm. 

Hello? Came a voice, from inside the crack. I looked but only saw darkness. Hello? It came again. I walked home briskly.

HI! YOU ARE NOW BEING RECORDED.

And the sky did open. The next day, while walking to a friends house.

I heard the voice again, this time while passing an open sewer vent. Hello?

I knelt down. Hi? I asked, and then I saw her, and then I was inside. 

It was a small farm in some sort of dust bowl. For miles around the little house I could only see flat beige earth. The sun beat down on every surface, and nothing grew. Intermittently the wind would pick up and fill the air with debris, placing the entire world inside a single dirty cloud. It was impossible not to squint. To breathe.

The woman was showing me the house. She was middle aged, wore a tight V neck t-shirt, and had bleached hair that cascaded down each side of her face like rainbows stripped of color. We were standing in the living room. Everything in the house was soft, pastel, and covered in plastic casing—the couch pillows, even.

QUESTION: WOULD YOU SNITCH ON YOUR COWORKERS FOR ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS?

My husband moved us out here, she whispered carefully. Just then a tall teenager walked abruptly out into the hall.

Hughey? The woman called. Hugh, darling? He shut the bathroom door.

The woman cranked back towards me, positioned her face into a smile.

This is it, she said, out back. We stood, looking. Then she wrapped her arms around me, held me snug to her large, firm breasts, which smelled like the mall used to. Over her shoulder I could still see the farmland’s empty sprawl. One hundred shirtless men crawled in neat rows, their necks wrapped in chain, pulling a monstrous metal machine that tilled the earth. As they moved along on hands and knees they deposited seeds. Seeds which would not grow.

Shh, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay, the woman cooed into my ear. Shh, she held onto me, tight. I would have fallen over if it were not for her strong, sad arms. She would have fallen over if she had no one to hold upright. And so we stayed standing, together. 

clean pillow

Back when I was living in Philadelphia, there was this guy, his name was Jacks (yes, plural), he would walk around with his head cracked open. Each morning started out the same, he would wake about 6:30, feed the cats, make a pot of coffee, then sip it on the porch while reading the news, out loud to himself, from his phone. He usually did it after that, that is, he would trudge down into the basement with a hammer and bang it against his skull as hard as he could over the slop sink. Jacks lived off social security checks, was the kind of guy who knew everyone on the block, spent his days either walking up and down the street or tinkering out front with an ever evolving tree-like sculpture with branches made of blood stained PVC pipes which extended from his porch out over the sidewalk. The area was old fashioned like that, that is, people were still eccentric, sat outside, talked to each other. He was well liked, and no one seemed to mind the bleeding much, it was just the way things had always been—Jacks, the guy with the tree sculpture out front, the guy with his head cracked open. He was polite, too—kept rags in his pockets, always made sure to clean up the little pools of blood that were left after a visit to a friend's stoop. By about sundown each evening, after a day spent outdoors, the continental pieces of Jacks’ skull began floating closer together until merging again into a single Pangea, clean pillow, and the next morning would start the same. 

It was August, I had just returned from a two month stint in the woods, and the city was complete purgatory, hot as hell, frustrated, existential, as anticipated. The only place to be was in your bedroom with the window unit on, and that’s where I was, sprawled out catching up with a friend via phone. We were having the same conversation everyone was always having, centering on dissatisfaction, on precarity, on disconnection. This friend was never making their art because they were always working and always depressed and didn’t have the capacity for much else. 

I just, I feel like I need to get out of here for a while, they were saying, but I don’t have the money to, I can’t figure out how to not be working. 

That makes sense, I breathed. 

I’ve been so tunnel visioned, they continued, I need to experience something, I need to have my head cracked open. 

When they said that, I thought of Jacks, and the house I’d lived in in Philly, and all the people I’d loved there, and the person I was at that time, for the first time in a long time, and it all felt like a past life, and it was, the way past lives always are, close as your nose, and also, very far away.