Your clavicle uncovered like a wound floating on the sea. I have the same bone.

I made you
stamped ridge of lip
your rust
smell
your ghost
bone

when will
your tongue
blood
wind
dissolve
into sand

she loved
the house
of limited
memory
tongue
down
spiral
staircase
she split
into five
elements
circulation
underplace of
the heart
that machine

that machine the heart
underplace of
circulation
elements into five
she split staircase spiral
down tongue memory
she loved the house of limited

Is ebb the measure of the flow? She goes,
she lets; she skirts the nervous ocean’s salt
and semi-circle frowning, knowing take
then give again, not sure how much that get
is worth in give. Such oceans make a lake
of her own basement every year, below
ground where her mother lives and wades in worn-
out foam flip-flops. That stubborn water won’t
pull back, as if it knows her mother’s own
sharp knack for asking back exact amounts
she gives. A skill she lacks. And like that flood,
she does not choose those low-laid rooms for rest,
but goes, and goes, and stays. She doesn’t flow
there. No. She ebbs. She ebbs to such excess.

The Gulf gulls’ chants at dusk all sound alike
to me, but symphonies of secret tones
must prove expressiveness beyond the spike
of elegiac grief I hear. I’ve known
only another coast, but the lyrics hold.
One gull might say:This short-lived breeze. This day:
most gray. His brother must intone: I told
this pair of pier-posts crumbling: wait. Matte sky
stays stable perching on these two bad feet.
Here is a Texas singing in a trill
I know. Unbordered world, far from the weight
of my heat-baked adopted land. It’s all
music again, at last beyond the fence
of the inland blue-black grackles’ dissonance.

KY: What was your vision in establishing Lettre Sauvage?

FS: Lettre Sauvage was founded by me and my friend Genevieve Yue. When we knew we wanted to found a press we sat around one afternoon reading graffiti from the Mai 68 rebellions in France. The phrases painted on walls and walks by the communist youth ranged from cryptic to enlightening. The common thread was a juxtaposition of ideas and imagery to cause a shift in perspective. One of the phrases roughly translates to “under this pavement is the beach.” There are so many ways that can be interpreted, but I read in it a statement about looking beyond the utilitarian constructs. There is something else under the city: it’s the earth. There’s something else within the citizen: it’s her soul. If we’re going to lay something down over it and her, it better be right! Also, the path way or road can disappear so that everything once associated with it is no longer a sign post along a trajectory, but a location to get lost in.

We simply wanted to create dialogues in which image and word hashed it out to create new textures. Also, we wanted to emphasize process, chance occurrences, and natural inclinations.

KY: Can you describe the press’ aesthetic or artistic mission?

FS: Our mission flows from our vision. We work where we are with what we have. We print our own work in a very spontaneous process. We’ve happened upon some great material by other writers and artists, always through friends and conversations. We favor photography and abstract imagery and a sparse, austere quality which is inspired in part by ancient Greek aesthetics and minimalism. We use the bare materials found in the press room such as glue, tape, blank linoleum blocks and scraps of plastic to build forms to print from right in the bed of the press. The printing can become more of a fine art process rather than only skilled duplication. In fact, in most of our editions, every copy is slightly or greatly varied.

Recently our circle is expanding through our poetry contest. We’ve met a lot of great poets and consistently print work from the finalists as well as publishing the two winners. In this way our aesthetic will expand organically with new voices.

KY: I recently heard an interview with Margaret Atwood where she commented on the changing nature of big publishing houses and emphasized the need for writers to re-imagine publishing and to take responsibility for this art we care about so much. How do you feel Lettre Sauvage fits in to this new wave of publishing?

FS: There’s a need for authentic community among readers and writers. Some of us shrink from entertainment and formulas for sensation. A small press can have a distinct personality and create an intimate group. Right now Lettre Sauvage connects a very small group of like-minded people from around the world. We’re able to find each other thanks to the internet. The same globalization that makes the mega-monopolies possible also supports our fine (nearly invisible) web.

We’re taking responsibility by putting our physical, intellectual and spiritual energy into the very strenuous and time consuming craft of letterpress. It’s also a sacrifice because we use sustainable and beautiful materials leaving little room for profit to fund our next project. It’s a whole lifestyle shift for me with many positive bi-products. I’ve simplified my life, choosing to homeschool my child, prepare most of my food from whole foods, ride a bike instead of driving my 12 year old vehicle, buy only used products, and have lots of time to be with people and nature and make books slowly.

KY: What have been some of your favorite projects at the press?

My favorite thing is how different every project is. If you line up all our stuff on a table it doesn’t look like a “brand” at all. This pretty much bars us from traditional retail.

We did a little collection of poems called the Forest Drive recently. I enjoyed working on it because I gave myself plenty of time and space to work on the cover. I must have put three days of hard labor running the Vandercook cylinder press just printing this little 5×9 cover. Placing the word “drive” upside down brought the whole thing together somehow. It turned out exactly the way I wanted it to be even though I started with no end in mind.

I scrub my face and pack lunches
the same bird is on the wire
He eats something I can’t see.

The nightmare was of food, clothing and incantations.

The body changes, needs a rubber sheath
sewn to leather with ash
from a cold fire pit.

The view from the kitchen window
amazes me again. Oak, palm and fir
lean their arms south like brothers.

Adjusted for the low, low sky and impatience.

I’m in my place and I know what to do.
I drop a handful of leaves into
boiling water and we all drink.

A bowl between mountains, space
to call one another by names
watching our own hands,
flesh pulsing under the straps.

Sorted with certainty from the morning air.

2.
My girlfriend is an atheist and I am an agnostic, which means that neither of us believes in God, but when we argue about God’s existence we both think that the other is being intellectually dishonest.

3.
When I get to Jeremy and Alicia’s apartment, Alicia is wearing brown, fake-leather sandals. The nails on her toes are painted blue. Her hair is died an intentionally fake looking shade of black and cut short. She is wearing a t-shirt that says, “boys are mean—throw rocks at them,” and a pair of knee-length, cut off shorts, and when she answers the door she has a gin and tonic, for me, in her hand. She hugs me, takes me by the wrist, and pulls me into the apartment where Jeremy is sitting on the couch playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on their playstation

What I like about GTA: San Andreas, what I like about all the Rockstar titles, is that you can talk to a hooker without sounding like a Junior High School geek who still thinks that Madonna is hot. You can talk with a prostitute—be in control—and if, at the end of the conversation, you don’t like her fake smile, you can pull out a tire-iron and smash her over and over in the head until she stops moving.

The woman sitting across from Jeremy is my date. Her name is Julie, she works with Alicia, she reads science fiction, and she watches Stargate Atlantis. Alicia thinks we are perfect for each other. I imagine that she is an idiot—my blind date, not Alicia—she does, after all, watch Stargate Atlantis, and we sit and talk about Dick and Heinlein and Pournelle and all the other obvious writers that every pre-teen geek in the world knows, and I wish that I was playing video games instead of Jeremy, and I start to imagine in my mind what Julie would look like naked, and I hope that she will sleep with me after the movie, and I hope that we will never see each other again.

4.
Okay, this is the premise: Peter is in the courtyard—in my mind the courtyard is dry and dusty like the central square in Comiso, Sicily where old Italians used to walk drinking dark coffee, talking, and wishing that we American servicemen were far away. In my mind I can see Peter sitting with his back to a stone building, watching the sun rise in the Jerusalem sky. A servant girl walks by, in Grand Theft Auto she would be wearing a short skirt and a blouse so tiny it showed half her stomach. The servant girl asks Peter if he is one of the men with Jesus—if he knows Jesus—and Peter says no. In my mind I can see Peter say no, I watch him as he takes a tire-iron from behind his back, beats the servant girl over the head until she stops moving, and says, “no—I don’t know his name.”

5.
I dated an Italian girl when I was stationed in Sicily. Her name was Lucia and she was beautiful in a way that Alicia never was and never could be. Beautiful is one of those words that is meaningless—that says less than almost any other word. When I say that Lucia was beautiful what I mean is that she was fifteen years old, and Catholic, and that she wore long dresses, no makeup, and plain white bras, and that she never slept with me, and that her ears were not pierced, and that I was twenty-two, and that she laughed at my Italian, and that I could see the veins in her wrist, and that the cross around her neck was made of volcanic rock from Mount Etna, and that her parents did not want me to date their daughter, and that in the summer she made picnics that we took to the beach, and that she went to high school, and that she thought I was a man, and that she believed in God, and that she liked me.

I want to imagine that she is a nun now, but she probably has two kids and is sleeping with some Italian guy.

6.
Okay, this is the reality: we never did the stupid egg experiment when I was in Junior High School. My niece had to do it last year, and she claimed to hate it every bit as much as I would have claimed to hate it. Jeremy and I both knew Alicia, sort of casually, from youth group and school, but they had not yet had the bowling alley moment where they did not realize they fell in love, the moment when Jeremy emptied an entire bottle of ketchup on to the fries that we had bought her so she wouldn’t be bored while we played video games, the moment when she said he was a dork and then kissed him, so seventh grade was the perfect moment for a lame Junior High School assignment, but it never happened.

7.
There are three problems with this story—because what is a story if not an equation to be solved—the first is the inherent misogyny, the second is the pre-occupation with girls several years younger than me, and the third is Alicia. Another way of looking at this story is that there is only one problem—Alicia.

8.
About the same time that Alicia presses another gin and tonic into my hand, I throw Murakami at Julie. She comes back with Wild Sheep Chase, and there is a shift in the conversation. She knows Murakami and Calvino and Saramago. She has seen Silent Star, Crash of the Moons, and Howl’s Moving Castle. We both went, alone, to the first showing of the newly restored Phantom of The Opera at the Universal Amphitheater and were overwhelmed by the full orchestra, live, playing the score. She knows that Ray Harryhousen killed two baby ducks and used their soft downy skins to create the two-headed, baby Roc in The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. She was sad when Joel left Mystery Science Theater 3000. She understands how bad the acting in the first Star Wars movie was. When she was fourteen she stole a package of pop rocks from Safeway and she still wishes she could take it back. She used to sneak looks at the copies of Penthouse that her brother had hidden under his bed, but she didn’t have sex until she was 23. She feels guilty that she no longer believes in God. She tells people that she was in love with Parker Stevenson when she was twelve, but she was really in love with Shaun Cassidy. She turns out not to be just another Buffy, X-Files, Stargate clone. Stories where writers drop the names of other writers, to show how much they read, suck—so, I won’t do it any more than I already have, but Julie reads a lot. By the time Alicia puts the third gin and tonic into my hand the movie we had planned to see at the Laemmele is already half over and we decide to walk across the street to Marco’s and have vegetarian lasagna and red wine instead. I still want to sleep with Julie, but the reason I never want to see her again is entirely different.

9.
There is only one unforgivable sin. Peter can deny that he knows the name of Christ from now until the end of time and Jesus will still forgive him. Peter can drive through Jerusalem with a shotgun on the seat next to him, he can shoot police, prostitutes, old women, and good Samaritans. He can crash his car through the front window of a jewelry store, stab the man behind the counter, and steal candy from little children. He can return library books three days after they were due, download movies from the internet, and vote for a democrat. And, Jesus will still forgive him.

There is only one sin that Jesus will not forgive.
. . . it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt.
–Hebrews 6.4-7

10.
Jeremy and Alicia are not dating when we get married. Alicia does not know who Jeremy is, and she thinks video games are for geeks, and she has never used a computer, and she wears hiking boots to school, and she does not understand that 1024 and 1000 are not the same thing, and I never asked her to dance at a Saint Gregory’s youth group dance, and her brother would kick my ass if he knew I masturbated while picturing her in my mind, and at our first communion I cannot taste her lip-gloss on the rim of the chalice when I drink the blood of Jesus after her, and she never wears a bikini when she swims at the gravel pit, and when Jeremy and I talk about her we both pretend that we think she is weird and that we don’t like to imagine what she would look like naked, and she plays volleyball, has muscles in her arms, and her short hair makes her look like a boy.

When the health instructor joins us in holy matrimony, Alicia looks at me and says, “You’re that kid from youth group, right? Your uncle owns a gas station?”

I’ll spare you the rest of the conversation—the only point of conversation in fiction is to give insight into character, and all I am trying to show is that Alicia was polite and that our conversations at 12 were painful. You really learned everything you need to know about Alicia when I told you she wore hiking boots, had short hair, and played volleyball—none of that is true, but it describes other things about Alicia that are true.

11.
If you have never played Grand Theft Auto on a 100 inch screen, then you have never really played Grand Theft Auto. It is a full body, totally immersive experience. It is kind of like those lame holo deck episodes on The Next Generation, but without aging androids, bad acting, Bragga and Berman, or a twenty-fourth-century-moral at the end.

Anyone with a jig-saw, $100, and a free weekend can have a 100 inch television. Pick up one of those old high-school overhead projectors and a used LCD screen on eBay, rip the back off the screen and attach it to the overhead projector, mount 80 mm fans, offset, on either side, and enclose the whole thing in a box made out of particle board painted black. Aim it at a white wall and you can watch full size porn, a bootleg copy of the original Star Wars, where Han Solo still shoots first, or a kick-ass game of GTA: San Andreas, and it is all larger than life.

12.
The next time they came for Peter, Jesus was already bound and in chains. If Mel Gibson were writing this story then Jesus would have been dressed in leather, bound with handcuffs, have a spiked cock ring from The Pleasure Chest around his dick, and be down on his knees in front of the entire Jewish nation–but Mel Gibson is one crazy, anti-semitic fuck. All the Gospel according to John tells us is that Jesus was sent, bound, to Caiaphas.

The crowd gathers around Peter and starts pushing. They ask him if he is one of the disciples, and when he says that he is not I can tell that they don’t believe him. I can tell that they don’t care. I can tell that they hate him.

I watch as Peter pulls an AK-47 out of his robes, puts it to Caiaphas’s head, and pulls the trigger. I watch the blood explode from the other side of the high-priest’s skull, and I see Peter whirl faster than any eye can follow and empty the AK-47 into the gathering mob.

13.
My girlfriend is Jewish, which means that her mom and my mom both think we have turned our backs on the truth, for exactly the same reasons.

14.
I met Lucia when she was fourteen, but we did not start dating until she was fifteen, and, as I wrote earlier, we never slept together. We dated for over a year, but I don’t know what kind of movies she watched, and I don’t know what kind of music she listened to. I don’t know what she read, or what she believed, or what she thought. We drove all over Sicily in my 1978 Lancia. She smiled at me and looked pretty in photographs. We walked among the ruins at Agrigento and I actually touched the columns of a temple that was over 600 years old on the day that Christ was born.

15.
I built a 100 inch television for Jeremy and Alicia before Episode II came out, so we could have a retro-Star Wars movie night at their apartment on the day of the premiere. We had already seen all the good Clone battle scenes via bit-torrent downloads, and had determined that the rest of the movie was not worth watching—I still haven’t seen it.

Alicia made margaritas, Jeremy made pizza, and I rented a VHS copy of the original movie from vidiots and copied it to DVD so we would not have to watch the Jurassic Park version. We sat on their couch, the three of us sat on their couch, and watched all three movies from start to finish. We saw the epic battle between darkness and light, we saw Luke kiss his sister and try to kill his father, we saw the lame dancing teddy bears at the end of Jedi, and we saw Han Solo kill Greedo the bounty hunter.

When the movies were over I walked back to my apartment and Alicia and Jeremy had sex while Jeremy pictured Princess Leia, chained to Jabba the Hut, in his mind.

16.
The egg-child that I claimed to father at the start of the story is very much like the baby Jesus in that it was conceived not through the physical act of sex, but through the miracle of divine intervention. Metaphors in fiction are really a stand-in for serious thought, and as such are useless, but if I push this metaphor further, that kind of makes me into Joseph, the only man in the history of the world to be cuckold by God himself—and it kind of makes Alicia into Mary. But, if I push the metaphor further that also makes my health teacher into God, which causes problems when you realize that he was asked to leave the school after having sex with the star forward of the girls soccer team.

17.
The third time they came for Peter they had witnesses. When Peter was in the garden of Gesthsemene, with Jesus, and the soldiers came, Peter was carrying a knife. While the soldiers were dragging Jesus away, Peter slashed out wildly with his switch blade, and he cut off the ear of one of the soldiers. When they came for Peter the third time they had witnesses. There was a slave who was cousin to the man with the missing ear, and the slave told them that Peter was a follower of Jesus.

When they came for Peter the third time Peter said, “no, I never knew him,” and the crowd believed Peter, and they walked away, and Peter didn’t know why they listened to his lie. He came to realize, in later years, after he became the unshakable rock upon which the church was founded, that Jesus was with him on that day, and that Jesus meant for him to lie, but Peter never wrote about the moment, so if you want to believe that the crowds were just ignorant hicks who would believe anything that Peter told them, that is okay too.

18.
Non-geeks never understand the significance of Han Solo shooting the bounty hunter first. In the original movie, the bounty hunter, Greedo, came for Han, threatened him, and threatened to bring him to Jabba the Hut, dead. While they talked Han, quietly, underneath the table, pulled out his blaster. He aimed it at the bounty hunter, and he pulled the trigger.
Han Solo, the original Han Solo, would rock at Grand Theft Auto.

19.
The unofficial motto at Comiso Air Station, Sicily was “Glick-em till they glow, and then shoot ‘em in the dark.” Glick-em is how we pronounced GLCM, which is short for Ground Launched Cruise Missile. A Ground Launched Cruise Missile is a huge cock shaped nuclear weapon mounted on a trailer and pulled by a big truck. We had a lot of them at Comiso. We didn’t have any airplanes, but we had a lot of Ground Launched Cruise Missiles. We could, however, neither confirm nor deny that they were atomic weapons designed to kill millions of people.

Every three months or so we had military exercises. We pretended that we were at war with the Soviet Union. We got into our trucks and drove to all corners of the island. We pretended to fire our Ground Launched Cruise Missiles at vast cities filled with millions of pretend citizens going about their pretend lives. We lived in the dust or the mud, depending on the season, we ate MREs, and we talked about how we would get drunk at the NCO club when the exercise was over, and maybe visit one of the prostitutes at the third bridge in Ragusa. You don’t really need me to describe any of the military scenes—if you have seen even one war movie just picture the received image in your head. It was pretty much like that but without the fake bullets.

Lucia did not live in Vittoria, which was designated a non-nuclear zone by its communist mayor, and which we had to drive around whenever we had the exercises where we pretended that the U.S. was at war with the U.S.S.R and we had to get our contribution to the destruction of the world into the air before we were incinerated along with the rest of the island upon which we lived.

Lucia did not live in Vittoria, and her parents were not communists.

20.
According to tradition the Gospel according to John was written by the unnamed disciple known only as “the one whom Jesus loved.” We know that Peter was not the disciple whom Jesus loved, because in John 21.7 the disciple whom Jesus loved tells Peter that the man on the shore, the man they can see from their boat, the man who told them where to set their nets—the man that Peter did not recognize—was Jesus. After the disciple whom Jesus loved told Peter that the man on the shore was Jesus, Peter, who had been fishing naked, put on clothes, jumped in the water, and swam to shore.

But, we also know that Peter was not the writer of the Gospel according to John because Peter was crucified, upside down, on Vatican hill in Rome long before the Gospel according to John was ever written. And, we know that Peter was crucified on Vatican hill because he would not deny that he knew Jesus’ name because that is what tradition tells us.

21.
After the priest joins us in holy matrimony I ask Alicia if she wants to have a Coke with me and Jeremy after school and she tells me that she has homework and I tell her that it sucks that she has homework and she agrees that it does suck and I take the egg home for the first night because I don’t think she will take care of it and I want her to get an A on the assignment and my brother tells me that the egg will rot before the end of the week and I watch Battlestar Galactica on television and my little sister tells me that Alicia kissed one of the Ethan brothers at the haunted barn on Halloween night and my dad drinks a six pack of Rainer and my mom asks if I have done my homework and Starbuck and Apollo shoot cold metal Cylons out of the sky and I go up to my bedroom and imagine that I have Dirk Benedict hair and that Cassiopia is giving me a blowjob and when I masturbate I don’t think of Alicia.

22.
I never went to the third bridge in Ragusa. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t know how. I wrote about it once—I wrote about the third bridge once. In a story called Waking Up in Sicily I wrote that the women lived in flat, gray, concrete buildings, and that they were middle-aged. I wrote that they pretended they could not speak English, and I tried to make it sound as if the men who visited them were sad and pathetic married men who did not love their wives.

But, in that story Alicia did not exist, and Jeremy and I were both stationed in Sicily.

22.
We know from the Gospel according to Matthew that Peter was the rock upon which the Christian church was founded. We know because Jesus told Peter, “Blessed are you Simon son of Johan! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” We know that Peter was the rock upon which the church was founded because all we can really know about the life of Jesus comes from the gospels and everything else is the work of man. Sola Scriptura. We know that Peter was the rock upon which the church was founded because Jesus himself said so, but Jesus also said that he was the son of God, and that he died for our sins.

23.
Of course, I do see Julie again. She is the Jewish, atheist woman who drinks mimosa and coffee with Jeremy, Alicia, and me at Hugo’s on Sunday mornings while my mother is in church. She is the woman who plays Halo 2 with me for hours on xBox live, and who kicks ass on Unreal Two. She is the woman who doesn’t mind walking two miles down Fairfax Avenue to spend the afternoon in the Japanese pavilion at LACMA. She is the woman who went to the King Tut exhibition with me and agrees that it sucked. She is the woman who doesn’t mind that I have the dialog from every episode of Danger Mouse ever made memorized, and that I quote it at inappropriate times. She plays Bridge with Alicia, Jeremy, and me on Saturday nights, and keeps my houseplants alive. She knows how to count cards and thinks that people who gamble in Vegas are idiots. She is learning to speak Yiddish because she was raised in a non-religious house, and she wants to know more about her heritage.

When she finally moves in to my apartment we have to build bookcases because she owns more books than I do and neither of us is willing to give up our own personal copy of The Violent Bear it Away.

Alicia says that we are perfect for each other.

24.
This is the first story I have written in a long time where Jeremy has not played a major role in the surface story, and I am not sure I understand why. The surface of a story, of course, is unimportant, but I still don’t understand. Alicia thinks I love Jeremy like a brother, and Julie thinks I love Jeremy like Jesus loved the unnamed disciple, and they both think that I should start to write about something else. When I showed an early draft of this story to Julie, she asked why I called her Julie in the story, and then she said that she loved my Jeremy stories, but she was glad I was moving on to write about something else, and I asked her what she was talking about.

When I showed Julie the preceding paragraph she asked me what I wanted her to say, and I asked her what she meant, and she told me that she loved me, and I said that I just wanted her opinion on the story, and she said that she believed me, and then we talked about how much it sucked that Farscape was canceled.

25.
When I was fifteen, Jeremy, Alicia, and I went to a Billy Graham rally at the King Dome in Seattle. We walked up to the stage and asked Jesus to come in to our lives. We knelt on the floor of the King Dome and prayed that God would use us to do his will. We sang songs and lifted our arms into the air; we praised Jesus, and told each other that we could feel the holy spirit entering our bodies.

When I was fifteen, I went to the King Dome and Billy Graham gave me a copy of the Gospel according to Saint John and I read it over and over until the pages fell apart. And, I believed that Jesus was the son of God.

26.
In the George Lucas remake of Star Wars, Han Solo waits for Greedo to shoot at him before he kills him. Han sits three feet away from Greedo, he aims his blaster at the bounty hunter, and then he waits for the bounty hunter to kill him. After Greedo misses, Han Solo shoots him down and walks out of the Cantina.

27.
When all the disciples made it to shore they saw that Jesus had built a fire, and he asked them for the fish they had caught and for some bread. After he made a dozen fish sandwiches he gave them to the disciples and said, “take, eat, this is the fish of the new covenant which is grilled for you and for many. Whenever you eat it, do so in the remembrance of me.”

It was the third time that Jesus had appeared to the disciples after his death, and, after they had eaten their fish sandwiches, Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved him, and each time Peter answered that he did.

28.
When I said, before, that I never slept with Lucia, I lied. On the night that she turned sixteen I took her to the NCO club on base, and we danced, and my friends thought she was pretty, and we talked, and we laughed, and I bought her a glass of wine that she didn’t drink, and she came back to my room, and we had sex. She didn’t want to and I didn’t want to, but we did it anyway. When it was over she put her head on my chest and told me that she loved me, and I told her the same thing.

I don’t sleep. From my friend’s phone, I call the Apple Store, Flagship, 24-Hour angels of mercy and the man on the other end of the ‘line’ tells me they can begin activating at 7:00 AM. To the Flagship, I arrive, still dry-eyed, at 7:15. I’ve reported the missing phone, called the missing phone. It never occurs to me once that someone will return it. I cry a little in the cab I grab on 50th street when I realize I have 12 blocks to walk. No sleep, cold hands. The cab driver is so sweet. He tells me, “it’s all going to be okay.” He calls me darling. I pull myself together as I enter the giant glass cube and descend the stairs. Men in suits guard the door. They don’t even look at me.

I approach Sharmeen, one of the specialists standing at the ready to rescue self pitying iPhone losers like me. In this moment, I have no idea what I am about to share with her, the fight for my life that is about to ensue, the insane weather of fear that is about to swallow me in a violent eddy of tearful insanity. It is not something to play with, this name calling of insane. But that’s what I am. Insane. Repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result. In my case, it’s called living life without a pause button. I have been trying to install this apparatus, but the wiring is tricky. Even when I think I am waiting, I am not waiting. I am usually just calculating my next willful act. How can I explain I am not crying about the phone, but near the phone and in its absence, only. The ocean, I am thinking about the poor massive ocean slicked by the thick indulgence of my obscure wit. One nation under God. Something bad is happening to me. I have to call Shane for his social security number. The last four digits. They are on the old phone. I am convinced someone is stealing his identity. It will be all my fault. And the random inappropriate text messages from my high-school flame, all jokes, but taken out of context—very wrong, indeed. I think. I am one fragmented fried chicken wing of a hanging thing. This dread. A pervasive something I can’t name. And the ocean. The autocrats, the lame-ass democrats. Sharmeen tells me no one is really that interested in me. She tells me this, and recoils for a minute, expecting I will rage. Instead, I change. And the self I was breaks.

One day in Vermont a few years ago I told my poem school professor that I didn’t go in for confessional poetry. I was an abstract enthusiast, I told her. Now the arrogance of that discussion stings me in certain moments when I realize that in my former dislike for confession, I was confessing my disapproval of my own humanity. What I was saying is that I didn’t care for the truth or that I preferred an abstract version of it where square pegs fit round holes and where there is only grey. I didn’t know it then, but I thought my will was my will and willed it, so foolishly, to be done. Now don’t get me wrong, in grey I trust, no black and white world for me, please, and no this or that, but to truth, I also say yes, and I can admit to the plain, undeniable fact that I am addicted to a certain version of myself that keeps me in a cycle of garden variety madness. It is to money, to fossil fuels, to the exchange of soulless energy. The clothes on my back. The food in my refrigerator. It’s not enough. But so much more than enough.

Here is a confession: I lost my fucking mind this weekend, and it was the best and worst feeling I have ever had. Once the storm had passed and the nasty bits of awareness had undressed themselves to shine inside the sheer light of self-obsession, it made me kind of high to lose this mind inhabiting the self who is so concerned with perfection and people pleasing that she suffered a psychic breakthrough of non-attachment to her own identity in an Apple Store. She bought a new phone, but I carry it and we both love it. Something new. Less than twelve hours after my initial slip down the rabbit hole, a Danish woman who lives in Queens, called around to find my friend (she’d found the phone!) who drove my car (gas-guzzling shit-box-of-a-machine) to pick it up just as I was finally laughing with Sharmeen about how the world doesn’t always work but how it feels so good to live, even in the broken moments. She loves computers. She is also pretty with dark eyes the shape of almonds and thick black hair. Born in Bangladesh. When I ask how she got here, what she wants to do, she tells me she went through nine rounds of interviews before Apple hired her. Maybe to make me feel better she tells me a lot of people trip over technology, “lose their marbles.” “You saw it here,” I say, pointing to myself. We both laugh. She is hooked and wired and I am full of desire for so much from one single life. I tell her I will like to buy a new Mac in the fall and be trained on it by her. I am suddenly all business, you know. I have the audacity to hand her my card. Ha. After all the tears. She’s taking me seriously, though. I laugh, say, “how can you?” She smiles as she cleans the keyboard of my computer with the nail of her forefinger, digging for dirt like it’s gold. I say, “I mean, I can do this.” “No, I like cleaning. And we’ll wait for this phone to sync.”

As she makes my computer look like new, we chatter about nothing; my eyes are puffy and my lips are dry. My mouth is a figure made as minor sounds come out. The store is getting crowded now and people are ringing cow bells to celebrate participants in an AIDS Walk. I would usually be thrilled by the mass bliss unfolding, but my nerves, grown at least a foot longer than my body, are singed by the electricity of so much clanging through the Plexiglas atmosphere.

After the meltdown I walk the three long blocks to Central Park South, in time to make my facial appointment with Stella. One of the pleasures of my petroleum world. It’s been five years since I’ve seen her and nothing about my life is the same. But when she sees me, she remembers my skin. She tells me it’s all okay, “Not going to be okay. Is.” Her hands are twin feathers that dance across my face plucking and pealing all these winters and their swollen outer layers, as she seals this new skin, still addicted to the pure pleasure of sensation, against future perpetrations by the wind.

ii. The Baltic
It depends on when you first were in a bar.
Back in the old days,
when a five-year-old could be sent round the corner
to buy a pack of cigarettes for his Dad,
you’d see the old Russian sailors on their stools,
steaming with frost and rain,
their white teeth strong in brown faces,
grinning like retired heavyweights.
Their broad chests, when they hove in air to sing,
swelled like a mid-ocean surge
to crash upon the ear like a tsunami —
Ochi chornye or Khristos voskres.
Even their soft heels thundered on the sandy floor
when the balalaika trilled suddenly.
They never got drunk.
But they tried.
When the door would open at the same time
the lunch whistle hooted down at Lerro’s factory,
or the bell at St. Mary’s rang for vespers,
their breath would rush in whistling
like a sudden gale sets the troubled tackle humming
and their eyes turn a grey or olive green.
The swart-limbed matrosy with their weather-beaten hands.

iii. The Indian
I know that this will be misunderstood, but
Hurrah for the young Somali pirates.
Only kids armed to the teeth
charging freighters in leaky tubs
in this late day of glowing grids and satellite navigation
can redeem the ocean for what she should be.

If not for them, each tanker that I watch
sleek past Point Loma and the Silver Strand
with its dozing sunbathers
would hum along on a belt as monotonous
as the interstate that carries those on shore leave
southward to depredations and gonorrhea.

A titan flinging whorls of surf
round the Cape of Good Hope,
Scylla marshalling giant squid and narwhals,
Giggling Nausikaa buoying one-eyed Camoes
(and dunking him from time to time)
as he swims ashore at Macau
muttering prayers and cussing like a parson
between gobs of brine,
paddling with one hand,
keeping the damp Lusiads above the slapping wavelets
with the other.

iv. The Susquehanna
As befits the oldest river in the world,
she is clever, foresightful.
Made herself long and broad, she did, but shallow—
the longest un-navigable river in the country.
No city of note or grace has grown up on her banks.
As if she saw us coming, and shrugged.
What are two hundred years to her?
When the coal barons set their poor navvies
to poke a bit too familiar round her bed,
she pushed a lazy toe down through the covers
and put an end to that.
They tipped whole boxcars into the whirlpool and couldn’t plug it,
whole trains of boxcars, and still couldn’t plug it.
She kept on calmly gliding down
from Lake Oswego to Havre-de-grace
over the detritus of flesh and iron.

She suffers the slim blue heron in the spring,
the ring-neck geese in summer
and the clammy mists of autumn.
She gathers ice floes in January round her shallow islets
into razor-sharp Matterhorns.
But she will have none of us.

When she swells with anger,
whole armies push at her sides with sandbags
but can’t keep her in.
With spade and fingernail they fill the sandbags
but they can’t keep her in.
Sooner or later they have to scurry away
in glum caravans, behind humid panes,
up the hillocks as she nips at their heels,
spilling into their ugly towns.

Those towns they smell of mud when she retreats.
The transit authorities run their buses for free,
and kids drink potable water from beercans.

v. The Pacific
She always remains the same as when you saw her first:
Brown as the murky swells beneath the fishing pier
near Crissy Field, so that when the harbor seal
glides up to gaze at you with his doglike mug,
his quiet snout, before it breaks the water’s skin
is pasty and indistinct,
like the face of the departed on the double-exposed
sepia daguerreotypes pedaled by old psychic frauds.

Or such a brilliant cyan, bleeding into cobalt,
with creamy froth ringing the black rocks,
that when the old Navajo smith
at his table near the dry latrines in Arizona
shows you a turquoise pendant set in silver,
her eye flashes at you from across the dusty miles.

Star of the Sea, pray for us.

In a flash felt the absence of this
Future, the songlessness of our slogans
On the promenade atop the water.

Pushing through the savanna’s grasslands
Their legs comfortably forward moving
Not as a joke anymore nor propelled

By surprise, they must have seen the distant
Trees turn into slithering reflections
Then turned to lumber back under the blue

In slightly less meandering patterns
Letting echo, “No. This is time enough.”

I am damaged microfiche. Plans snapped with
Haste and panache hurriedly traded down
The blind alley despite the burns and blurs.
Negatives crackling in the fireplace.

In the park normal people apparently
Free afternoons sit on benches and
Speak into invisible microphones
Our private desires later transposed.

Almost everyone will turn to sirens.
The emergency is the diversion.
Sit down apparently and in free will.

In the damaged afternoons everyone
Almost normal desires nice suits, panache,
Private plans filled with the fireplace. Exchange
In haste the negative blurs of this

Homeless, microfiche metropolis–
Crackling gangsters and snapped briefcases.
Despite the bankers, park on benches and
Turn into invisible blind people.

Speak in transposed microphones to sirens
And with the others of the traded later:
“I am, and our alley hurriedly burns.”
Anonymous heart, you are the secret.

Nearing home, a flock of wild turkeys; I count quickly, eight or nine, as they spread across the pasture of the abandoned farm.

What I make of this in retrospect: My brother, named for our maternal grandfather, a name already held in place by generations of hard scrabbling; my brother, as gone from this world as the archaic deity whose name he bore, made full by research – Gwynn, god of the hunt, ruler of the underworld, king of elves and master of three mystical hounds.

As though summoned by some enchantment I cannot see – geese, deer, and turkeys appear – as though to say: We know the reason for your journey; be at peace; the departed will not walk this world in sorrow again. This is your journey as well, traveler, through a landscape beautiful beyond imagining, clothes dampened with tears.

than when they came in. Faces warmed by amber
liquid, slivers of red and green neon trickle
through an opening door, as a trout leaps
from roof sign to bar stained with last calls.

In the long mirror, reflections of smudged mascara,
crooked smiles trying too hard. A man in cowboy shirt
crisp from the box sits next to the mechanic
with grease tattoos, together they watch the women

with big hair, teased and sprayed to a volume
that rivals the music, circle the dance floor in search
of a final round. The band plays Buck and Waylon,
all regret and redemption, a sentiment almost

worth the going home. Down Chester Avenue,
the night shift settles in at the Chevron Refinery,
truckers pull off Highway 99, turning into
the Friendly Cafe for one more cup.

Trout’s door swings wide and you’re invited,
welcomed inside for that last hour
of unfolding when love or pure luck – call it
what you will – can strike the weakest line.

It was harder to cut parallel to the vein
than I’d expected. Instead, I scratched out
shallow, perpendicular cuts I knew
were ineffective. It was harder than I thought

to take enough pills, or the right kind,
calibrated excess, though my brother had managed to,
dying off-stage like that, while I was safe at school.
In the furnace of that first July weekend,

our mother refused to let anyone else attend
the funeral and the gravediggers refused
to lower him into the ground until
the fireworks were over.

Harder to die even when I wanted to, harder
than being the one awake at sunrise. The razor, the pills,
the wishing I could change places – none of it worked.
How had the others managed it? The ones who

taped up the kitchen windows and wouldn’t budge
even when the delivery boy rang the doorbell.
Or kept the car locked as it filled with fog
and the radio played Mood Indigo. For them,

was it harder to turn back from the bridge railing
or to jump into darkness? I just kept on inhaling,
exhaling, could only hold my breath so long
until I gave in to the habit all over again.

Most significant for me is that Hour of Unfolding is my first book. Something I’ve dreamed about for a long time, as many do. Less significant for the world, perhaps, but I’m happy to join the great sea of poetry.

What was your process in finding a publisher? How long did it take? Did you primarily send your manuscript to first-book contests?

Once I decided the ms. was ready to submit, I studied various book contests. My breakdown was about 85% first-book contests, 15% free-for-all. I was quite methodical. Each week I set aside time to check out publishers’ catalogs and philosophies on their websites. I made sure several contest entries were out at a time so each rejection didn’t sting as much. In all, the process of sending out the ms. took one year before Briery Creek Press at Longwood University selected it as the winner of the 2010 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry.

How did your manuscript change during this process (if it did, in fact, change)? Did you rework the focus, change the title, reorder poems?

The ms. went through much evolution before I started submitting it, at least three restructurings. Also some pruning and revision. The title changed during this pre-submission period, when I discovered my first title was shared by a literary journal. Once I started sending it out, I took the advice David St. John gives to all–to allow that one ms. to be tested over time.

Partway through the year, I added a couple of poems because I was near the minimum page count desired in most contests. Basically, the ms. I began sending out was the one chosen.

For some of your poems, you work in a narrative mode. In these heavily lyric times, what draws you to the narrative?

I enjoy the lyric narrative; there’s a sense of story, albeit a fractured one. It’s not A happens then B then C. The poems are meditations with moments of deepening, going into the lyric, supported by a loose narrative framework. With exceptions, of course. Always exceptions.

Are your poems based on real-world events?

Some are, but only as a point of departure. All reality is up for grabs. I’m more interested in emotional truth than factual.

grills giving up blue smoke to blue mountains
blocks away an avenue of orange-gemmed trees

near the Colonial Garden, the Willow Glen, the Capri,
apartments where migrants waited Monday mornings

for pickups to take them to a field where the last
orchard of Orchard Road was newly bulldozed

the men’s straw cowboy hats at park tables on Sundays
blue ice shadows dropping from eucalyptus

nearby, usually, a girl with hand on hip, tight t-shirt
shot with glitter, at her throat a tiny gold cross

arms filled with pastel spume of infant
blankets as up and up the hills new houses climbed

in bony whiteness, skinny palms leaning hard
as night drew on and with it small birds tweeting

with joy, I said, some footsteps
overhead and a radio’s astringent song

reflections like fireflies ricocheting off smooth water that was both
brown and green

like a mirror in a dark room that the headlights of turning cars
ply with light

the shivering of my yellow skirt in warm, still air

whatever it was I was waiting for. How palm fronds and banana leaves

shone slickly like swords. She was remembering when not yet twenty
she lost her job and her tears and her brother saying go dress up

taking her to a hotel roof garden where a dance band played
and there was a little breeze

a paste of talcum between her breasts and thighs, an ice cube
she ran across her throat, across the back of her neck.

the child’s deliberate crayon stroking, hard pressed
opaque blue, shining.

Bright hot chrome of rickrack waves serially repeating

scrape of metal on cement, a table moved to the shade.

Squinting, you think you see a pattern. The sun,
that godlet

finally lays down its metal shield. I don’t know
what to say about the child.

like a low horizon filled
with mounding clouds

their suggestion of
somewhere else

capable of stirring longing
while teaching distance

so much is vapor
a high wind can shift

movement darkly insubstantial
above flat land where scrub
mesquite claws

the thing waited for
skin prickling under a cloud’s

cool and imperceptible
journeying, rain’s
concluding arrows

I saw you
your red heels slicing night
on the Ave. next to Johnny’s pastrami stand

I saw you
struttin’ over slick pavement
your white dress faded
threads running down its side

and you soared under the street lights
rising above Crenshaw
them beams got you on spotlight Muh
your arms held high and open
as if you were waiting for some knight to swoop you up

help you flow to a time
where you sat innocent in front of a television chewing on buttered popcorn
all the while giggling
your tight ponytail at rest between your shoulder blades

but this image fades
my dream cuts back to night
where you are sprawled out on some dirty motel bed
a drug dealer’s prize

Muh
I saw you walking the Ave.
tell me I’m dreaming

wake me
won’t you
wake me

letting her nakedness
intoxicate the sick

her slender arched feet
give me the blues

inside this strip club
along sunset boulevard

where Van Gogh’s ghost
is hunched over my trembling back

and we lonely married men
yearn for young ripe flesh

while tupac’s california dreamin’
booms above our heads

and the image of Van Gogh’s print hanging on my daughter’s wall
blinks in front of my eyes

as the girl dances like the wild cypresses
swaying above the yellow wheat fields

swirls of blue and white colliding
on the end of Van Gogh’s brush

before she climbs the gold pole
i smell the meat of her white thighs as they go snug, like a vice, around the coolness of the pole

i reach in my pocket for mo-green
to keep feeding her crisp dollars because she is the free cypress

she is the knife grazing my neck
she is the what if . . .

Winter harbors banished doses of sunlight
And when the rare rains come, like a distraction,
The earth laps up the downpours,
The residents dance in a wet frenzy.

Though the sunlight is piercing, luminous
Its people prefer the unlettered neon lights
Out of which deception mounts and spirals
To extinction
In the insatiable lightlessness of the sky.

In the ephemeral papers, in the immortal books
When the city burns
They call it God’s judgment,
Reckoning and fulfillment.

But those who live here
Incessantly paying high taxes to the flesh
Know it as belonging—
The construction of monuments of pleasure
From the architecture of ashes and lust.

I hear you
Because you are everywhere
Even in the subdivided silence.

The autumn leaves are fallen of gold
Marred with green seasons turned
Overripe with the sun’s golden tarnishings.
The sunlight on this
November day is golden too, gilding the air
With displaced richness.

I could almost believe you, here
Walking in the shadow of my inescapable age;
I can almost believe you
Are this very light, the leaves
Piled in front yards, overrunning the driveways,
Heaped in slushy puddles,
Your soul here in the Modesto traffic, the standardized streets,
The supermarkets, Thrift shops, canneries and factories,
Car washes, mini malls,
Assembly lines of tract houses;

I could almost believe this is all you
My unease, also yours.

the   gloves and nosegay,   each in its own red prayer, laid out, all
fighting for   simple sorrows   or call it what you will, part and part of

         a child-god,   Let me see…

I know all the things I use to know

in custody and under sentence

of not knowing enough, if summer was more than five kinds of bees
in their waxy church accountant’s window-honeycomb, the madness
loose in happiness or   quite a commotion,

pool of tears   taken from some larger body of water where
I can’t swim, — then, then

I’d keep   one foot up the chimney,   one hand a foot beneath the interior
mole-earth,   three gardeners   guarding

because   I’m sure I’m not Gertrude,   in another country. I’m not
one old magpie,   its song placed

into the body of another, hers,   violently beating her with its wings
like broken-off tree limbs, full leaves swung

in genesis motion— I’m more like hunger,

its mouth close to her ear   when it should be mine, here to sing motherlap
songs (There was nothing more to be said)

when, who cares really,    the words,
(each to his own language),

             did not sound the same as they used to,

crushing the tallest grass in the grassfire heart, knee-deep
in their own dark singe until

            silence all around:

if it Please your Majesty!

who sits unjust as dusk in her pale gown-lace,

        swallowing down her anger

so she can be witness to this memory, this retreating display,

        no fit company for you…

you, who are part of this human, inhuman story,

no, dear, no,
the King’s kitchen is still on fire
as so many blackbirds darken the closed windows,

                the only way they know out.

I went to bed but did not blow out the candle
        because I knew he was there, in the dark hold
without any counterpart
but me.   So I opened one eye,    considering my years and sorrows,   to see

what I could, anything realized,    bound around with rope to avoid falling,
as in flying from, as if the entire room was   beds of feathers
and each breath fell,

thrushes and blackbirds; and then pirates —
downed windless, and
sometimes a snipe ended black with ants in the bottom of a gully

and I ended white
        with nothing left to say, but

seized the branch above him, climbed it, moved into the leafiest part

parting my legs as if
to see me was to see her, the one he really loved, as if
seeing was knowing and then

he knew her and so himself

who thought she had been swallowed up by the earth

but no,   it hurts the eye to look out   so long to vantage a point on the room’s horizon,
to language a hover   of starry seeds
that he left, really,
to be planted in every night’s sleep, crop-dusted, weeded and dragged
with    a last senseless clutter of words
        not for him or for me, but for something far
more pronounced lasting: that

the galloping horse carried off the surname,

her name, her name…

Bedlam fair, a far cry from–

An alarm of silence behind it. How the future retreating into a painting
is part. Against your will.

        Eyes closed.
        Eyes opened under water.

Though it is something you see, you feel it inside
your mouth, earth-flavored,
and your lungs’ motion exactly like waves, filled with water light.

He who hath drunk the mixture called “Doctor”,
milk, nutmeg, water & rum, to cure the King’s Evil…

He who couldn’t care crushed bugs in the meadow…

        Where Aspen trees offer winter’s first coin.
        Where the maps printed lily-outlay, saw the high ground in blood.
        Where the unmoved moon covet in full-face snow, like sleeptalk.
        Where you can locate a glass bead, the size of his thumb, drawn

butterflies, inside the larynx, the voice-box singing and singing for you,
in mourn & celebration, awe’s act of only air, less alone by the minute.

Such ascent between music & mathematics
        at the sky’s all-ache helm blue…

Therefore, godly hour.
Therefore, overgrown & undone.
Everything, if by love, is imperfect.

        Shining indecipherable, we are at that moment.

        To unfurl and flower, as if

saying farewell.

1
Silent hands
that build
a garden
one stone
placed next
to another
then one more
until the eye
is no different
from stone

2
Smooth hands
with the milky dew
of brand new skin
just big enough
to hold a giant sun-
weathered finger
so small
they startle open
in nascent
dream

3
Empty hands
to measure
seasons
by spoons
and needles
brushes
and pens
hands that don’t
wait to be
filled

Ambrosia’s very nice
and can give you the strength to help you fight
the thrush that’s grown on your tongue and throat –
a side effect of the drugs they fed
to zap the infection deep in your chest.

This is all I can do for you.
Facing death with half-price desserts,
a Kleenex bib to catch all the drips.
This is what you did for me.
Hazy time-filled years, a breath.
It all comes back to where it begins.

Nine soft swallows, then you are done.
Did that feel good? You nod, smile,
strap the noisy mask to your face,
return your head to its pillow dent.
You tell us you’re ready to rest for a while.

beige grasses lean, parched
and weighted with unseen heat;

elm, chestnut, and willows weep,
all bowed in the same direction.

Fine brown silt collects
in all the windowsills

(the wives weep frustration
trying to keep ahead of the dust)

the raven’s constant cah, cah,
caveat: attempts to crowd out desert,
either madness or folly.

Even the iconic tumbleweeds
themselves rolled in
from the Russian tundra
on another famed migration.

What bares the seeds
of our great suburban discontent?
the relentless wind?
or the shallow-rootedness
which brought us to this place?

We come,
searching entrance
to the well.

Drivers in traffic lonelying along in the radio-narrated dark
and craving you, with your know-nothing
New breath–

Come closer.

We are denizens of a privileged geography–
and we are starving. You are the youngest year,
the only lucky thing left in the cupboard.

It’s almost time. The clock ticks us closer together.
Swoon our steps toward spring. Shine the blooms until
words flower in our mouths. Help us remember that
there is still the whole sky to swallow. Tell
the full moon to sing the wolves in our throats.

I want to be entered. What’s so carnal
about rising on falls? The ripping of back

on nylon red smell as I struggle
to breathe/collapse under the weight

Of his pelvis; His bicep pulse; His syllables
carve; “Trust me. It was you or him.”

So if someone had to will to die to try
to sway tempt ledge eat pins and tent,

grind teeth, me, as flesh breathes-
He melts down my neck yes- rolled-

swirled herds of cranberries which cure
memories as time fumes brine coaxing out

what little tears I could hold in-
He pulls nylon from the butter of throat

His eyes no longer scrape and hiss His nails
no longer cover lips or lenses in

“It’s not your fault. It was you or him.”
I turn over pull up my pants open my eyes

blank, squeezing strap my tongue / bed
look what we have here Look! At the dying of boy

the travail of conduction; a causeway on the mountain
where breath blurts for someone to take it back.

There are no constellations as I watch him die slowly
My __other was safer when he couldn’t hear.

“Yeah, I seen that before. You know these batteries is all ancient, like fifteen twenty some years, right?” Billy cracks his neck then continues swapping from his station.  Like most swappers, he’s still too small to see completely over the console and relies on an array of mirrors to manipulate the truck.  He rotates his reach halfway to the north wall, then lowers the forks down to the stockpile of locomotive fuel cells, slides them in, lifts, and pulls back again.  He spins the reach around again precisely, lifts the forks high, and slides the cell into the train.  “There’s a pallet jack in the hothouse,” he calls over to Vero, “call Jimmy bring it by ‘fore your meter goes off.  Let him know you’re out. Why don’t you snap them electrodes up top while you wait?”

Vero makes a call on the radio to Jimmy, the Alto Section Foreman.  She puts in a request for a replacement truck battery, but he’s busy helping another kid.  Vero is forced to walk there herself for the pallet jack, so she lets Billy know what’s happened and abandons her truck.  This is fine; she’d rather stroll over to the hothouse than climb up the train any day.

The corridor leading up is flanked on either side by inoperable windows that stand between the turbine fields of the Chamuscado Mountains to the south, and those of the Agridulces to the north.  The railway cuts through both ranges, the flatlands that lead away to the city, and continues on to the desert’s eastern interior.  All tracks converge at this station.  The hothouse itself is the central electric fuel cell recharging plant for this, the primary station of Acton Trains.

Jimmy’s the mastermind who rearranged it to house the larger Alto Train cells along the bottom stretch of outlets, with the smaller Baja Train cells stacked tight to line the upper compartments.  Before Jimmy’s plan came along, the kids stuck them anywhere they’d fit, and often that resulted in a backload of depleted cells that were too heavy to be supported by the upper divides.  Now everyone recognizes his new way as an obvious, simple arrangement that anyone could’ve come up with, but it was all Jimmy.  It earned him his big promotion.  Today his face is sullen.  When Vero arrives, he’s only just finished helping one of the older girls load a batch of cell replenishments.  The girl starts the cart and as she pulls off on delivery, he begins to scrub the tread from the concrete.

“Jims, I’m down.  Need a pallet jack and recovery pronto.”  Vero walks directly toward the only available jack, and removes a clipboard from the wall.  As she signs the unit out to herself, she glances back over at the foreman.  “Mark me off twenty minutes, wouldja? Hey.  Hey, cabron, you awake? You even hear me dude?”

Jimmy continues to scrub the floor.  He doesn’t look up at her, but through his teeth tells her quietly and with only a slight movement of his lips, “You and Billy meet me off the tracks after shift, canya?  Don’t say nothin’.  Bring me some oil if you got it. I’ll pay. I’m good for it.”  He scrubs and scrubs.

Something like panic fertilizes Vero’s body.  She feels it energize her limbs and push against her fingers.  She opens them wide then makes a fist, then spreads them out like brittle sticks and leaves them like that for a moment.  Jimmy’s the saint of his crew, and rarely misses a chance to extol the meaty benefits of living oil-free.  She uses the pallet jack to retrieve a fresh cell in silence.  When she’s loaded and ready to return to her station, Vero offers, “See you round.” She drives off, alit with concern.

After removing the old battery and as the new one mounts itself, she waves Billy down from his task.  He lowers his truck.  When he’s within speaking range she tells him, “Jims asked me for oil.  He didn’t look so good.  I don’t know what to think.  You seen him today?”

Billy looks surprised, shakes his head and replies, “I ain’t seen him since Monday.”  He squints, “Last time I seen Jimmy shoot, his ama had her head off by the cutters.  No.  He either sneakeen’ real good or ‘bout to blow some ugly out. God I hope it’s the shootin. That culo’s lotsa things, but he ain’t oily.  He just ain’t.”

Vero’s hand opens and closes again.  “He wants to meet us both after work.  Call in the crew, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, alright.  God I hope he’s just shootin. Aw, shit.” Billy pulls up on his reach and slides the last of the cells from his work order into the Alto Train.  When he finishes, he lowers his truck again and shuts it down, then punches a code into his monitor.  “I’ll come help you clamp them electers after you finish swapping.  Gonna just break.  I’ll call ‘em ri’now.  Gimme a sec. I know that fool ain’t oily. I know that fool.  Aw hell, I bet he gonna blow out.”

Billy leaves his truck and enters the nearest break room.  It’s lined with long, cheap tables and framed prints of overaged youths.  Billy picks up a courtesy phone, the gaze of his blue eyes coming to rest blankly on a framed youth’s lapel.  He dials Cole, Watch Boss over the Fixers, a team that has the toughest job around, but for the best pay.  They clean and repair the railroad tracks, and though it’s hot and rough, sometimes the tracks provide their own reward.  Cole makes enough money to keep his own room at The Stump.  He lives there with his two brothers.

Today, the tracks have born fruit; not one but two birds were found dismembered near to them.  Incredibly, each bird still possessed its oil sac, and Cole has spent the better part of the morning extracting the oil.  All he needs, he tells Billy, is something to cook it in, and some starch with which to cut it.  Billy promises the tools, and Cole agrees to get the rest of the crew together off the tracks, at the graveyard, after shift.

As soon as the closing bell rings, Vero and Billy head together to the locker room.  Like many street kids, they slip from matching work uniforms to matching crew colors.  Theirs are bristling blue sashes crisscrossed upon bare chests.  The ends of the sashes drift down almost to the backs of their knees.  Beneath the cloth, they are a mass of skinny bodies in jeans.  They wear knives tied to their legs, and huaraches to their feet. Like every day, today Billy has to tie Vero’s sash for her.

“I wonder what’s happened,” she muses and stands straight, facing her open locker.  “Is Cole bringing the oil?”

“Yeah. He got lots.”

“Good, ‘cause I’m out and need to get my brain offa Jims.  Starting to sweat.  Feel pretty bad.” She inhales deeply, then holds her breath briefly before blowing it out.

“Lean forward.  Good thing y’ain’t got no tits yet.  Goddamnit, lean forward.” He tugs on the sash, pulling it taut.  He’s fixed it for her dozens of times, but today his hands are clumsy.  He cracks his neck then tugs again, repositions the sash, and tucks it beneath the inside wrappings, letting the ends hang down.

“I could have.”  She fastens her knives to both sides of each leg with thin twine that loops through twin sheaths.  She’s decorated the twine with quail beaks. “I could,” she repeats.

“Come on,” he says as he buttons up his jeans and flips his own sash around his slender, pale body without effort.  “I gotta know what he done.”

Normally, Billy would be overjoyed about the dead birds and free oil.  The idea that he would soon inject a larger than average amount of purer than average stuff into his arm would normally be enough to send him dashing down the tracks with Vero, belting out throaty anticipation chants.  Oil has taken on almost superhuman characteristics for many street kids, Billy included.  He’s not addicted to it yet, unlike her, but he’d rob for it anyway.  Vero doses on each break at work, all day, every day.  It’s why she’s smaller than normal.  This evening, Billy’s thoughts orbit around one central fact: Jimmy wants the oil.  This frightens him.  It affects his mood so distinctly that he doesn’t speak a word to Vero along the way to the graveyard, and doesn’t even notice that she’s trailed behind, also lost in thought.  Eventually, the two youths reach the path that leads off the tracks and on to the railcar graveyard.

Vero calls up, “Billy, what do you think’s happened?”

He shrugs without turning around.  He stops a moment to grab a fistful of rocks, and throws them at one of the dead cars that they’ve approached.  The rocks clatter down the side of it, and somebody hollers from inside.  “Dunno.  Maybe they cut up his other mother,” he laughs.  “Maybe he been shootin’ all this time and jus kep it low.  Dunno.”  Soon they approach their car—it is theirs, Vero and the Fixers tagged it a month ago—and push the door open.

The rest of the crew is already inside, even Jims.  Their railcar is from the old days.  It’s even made of steel, or at least the frame is.  The door’s newer, a castoff from work, where Vero’s much lower in rank than either Jimmy or Cole.  Here, though, she leads them.  This is her crew. Born and bred, hers.

“Evening, Rats.” says Vero as she climbs up into the car.  The small crowd returns a mumbled chorus of hellos to her.  “Jims, do you mind all this?” She steadies herself and indicates the others with her free hand.

“No.” He looks down and is abashed.  “Thank you.”

Vero nods.  She helps Billy climb into the car, and he slams the cobalt door shut, keeping only the top vents open. Someone’s already lit a pinyon fire and though the sun hasn’t set yet, the youthful faces inside of the car glow from the warm light of the fire and sun.  A small pijuro climbs on his brother’s shoulder to open a slider window, letting in still more light and air.  The car smells of sweat and smoke.  Most of the seventeen Desert Rat members are railway or turbine employees, but a few are still just streetkids that steal or trick for food.  The pijuros of the crew are easy to spot: the boys wear azure lipstick and false, turquoise-colored lashes.  The girls shave their heads and paint their faces and stomachs with blue clay.  Every Actonian loves androgyny. Every Rat wears blue.

“Are you using or are you gonna blowout?” Vero stands before Jimmy.  Her stance is wide, her arms crossed against her sash-tied chest. Her thin body casts an imposing shadow over the boy.

“I’m a blowout.  And tonight I’m using.  I’m a blowout.  Oh, we’re fucked.  We’re so fucked,” he moans.  Jims’ tawny head droops between his knees.  “I’m sorry, fellas, I am.“  His face contorts and he suddenly appears younger than the fourteen years he owns.

Vero turns to the boy Cole and insists, “Where’s the oil? Give him a needle already.”

Cole is slung low over a molcajete, into which he squishes a few juniper berries to mix with the oil.  He glances up and responds, “Billy said he’d bring the cookin’.  I need starch if we gonna shoot.  Gotta cook it, you know.” He turns to Billy.  “You got it? You got my potato, culo?”

Billy’s forgotten to bring the tools, he was so afraid of what this meeting would entail.  He offers to run to town to buy them, but Vero interjects.

“I’ll go.  Billy, next time remember your promises.”

“I will,” says Billy. Oh god, he thinks, now we’re all cold for crows, “I was locked, you know, on Jimmy.”

“Well, I’ll get the fucking potato and some heat.  Jims, don’t you say a word till I get back.  Billy,” she turns again to her coworker, “prep the needle while I’m gone.”

Vero slides the car door open again, exposing the seventeen small Rat-faces to the twilit landscape for a moment, then slams it.  She walks out past the graveyard and follows the path, then the tracks, directly into town.

Central Acton is a mass of street hawkers.  It’s full of the wealthy and the soon-to-be, or at least the wannabes.  Vero’s been a regular customer here since she was a small girl, and knows where to get the best produce.  Today she doesn’t want the best.  She wants the cheapest.  For this, she runs to Yucca Boulevard, where the service people shop.  This is where her own mother shopped before her head was off by the police.  She has this tragedy in common with Jims.  Both heads off, both arms pierced.  On Yucca Boulevard, Kyle’s Kornucopia sells the cheapest and rankest produce.  Vero intends to buy a potato full of eyes, but realizes that she’s left her card at work again. She can’t buy anything without it.

She looks around for anyone she might know to spot her some change, but sees only the grocer, who’s arguing with somebody over the price of wilted alfalfa sprouts.  Vero absentmindedly strokes the beaks that adorn her knives.  One potato is enough to cut tonight’s shoot and the next, and the next.  One potato is twenty cents.  She has a lot more than twenty cents on her card.  Twenty cents is nothing.  One potato is nothing.  She takes the potato with the most eyes and stuffs it in her pants.  She’s moving it into position when the grocer glances over from his conversation and spots her with her hand down her pants.

Vero’s hand, along with the lump in her pants, is completely conspicuous. The grocer rushes over from the sprouts to grasp the girl by the shoulders, “That’s it!” he yells into the Friday evening crowd, “that’s it! I’m not taking any more losses from you gutter shits! Police!” he cried out, “Police! I have a goddamned thief! I have a thief,“ he cries. Vero has never been caught stealing.  This is her crew’s job.  She’s never had a direct hand in this, at least not since bringing the kids together.  The girl shrugs.  She pulls the potato from her pants.  As she lowers it back to the produce shelf, the potato is intercepted by a third hand.

“My boy is ornery, isn’t he? Tell me,” asks the man connected to the hand, “how much for this potato and a pound of yellow squash?”

“This little fucker’s going to prison, old man. I don’t care who he is.” The grocer hasn’t released his grip on Vero’s shoulders.  She stands between the two of them, calm but interested in what’s happening.

“This boy belongs to me, and I believe you won’t feel a loss today.”  He pulls a card from his waistband and offers, “I’ll give you fifty dollars for the squash and that potato.  Do you still want the potato, boy?”

“Yes sir,” replies the girl, “I need it.”  She wouldn’t call the man kindly, exactly.  But his pale, nearly translucent silk suit proves his wealth.  That wealth is enough to compel Vero to behave for a moment.

The grocer licks his lips, and loosens his grip on Vero. “Give it, then.  Come on pal,” he says to the man.

The man punches something in on his card then hands it to the grocer.  His skin is smooth and dark in some places, light in others.  Vero considers the man’s lean frame, the outline of which she can easily trace through his suit.  He has poor posture, she observes, and leather shoes.  When the transaction concludes, the man thanks the grocer, taking the bag of produce in one hand, and Vero’s hand in the other.  He begins to walk eastward.

“Where are you taking me?”

“I thought we’d have dinner together, child.  What do you call yourself?”

“Vero.”

“Well, Veto, we’re going to have a fine time, you and I.  We’re going to have a fiesta.” His damp grip on her hand tightens somewhat.  She decides not to correct him, but is suspicious.

“Thanks. I’m awfully poor, sir.  That potato was gonna be my only meal in two days.  Two days, sir.” She blinks as she looks up at him.

“Yes, you are slight, aren’t you? Quite helpless.”

“Would you help me out? Would you spare a bit? Just a few bucks maybe?”

“I’d be happy to fill your belly, Veto.  You must help me with something in the meantime. Do not ask me for money again.”

Vero believes that she’s met men like this before, and decides to disappear. “Thanks for helping me out sir, but I’ve really got to get going.  I was just on my way—“

“I think your plans can wait awhile, don’t you? After all, if it weren’t for me, you’d be in handcuffs and unable to go anyplace, isn’t that right?” The man looks down at her and smiles.  “I’d hate to have to make a phone call.”

“Yessir.”

“Good boy,” the old man smiles down at Vero, “that’s a good boy.” The two turn onto Prim Avenue, one of the wealthiest residential streets in Acton.

The man, known as Hicks Jaybourne by his peers, lives on a middling lot lined with cherrywood trees.  He may live on Prim, but the driveway leading to his house is only large enough to fit an electric bike.  Vero scuffs her feet on the darkened dirt pathway and thinks, he ain’t rich enough to have a goddamned car. She eyes him again as they walk.  This prick’s a fraud, she thinks. I gotta get the hell out of here. I gotta go shoot, I gotta go shoot.

“How long have you lived on Prim, sir?”

He answers her quickly, without returning her gaze, “All my life.  My father built this house.”

This keeps her quiet, and he pulls her along the grounds toward the house.  Along the way, she eyes his gardens.  He may not have a car, but he’s got a vast network of imported flora that requires imported water, as well.  His hands are sweaty.  Vero slides free from the grasp and runs in the opposite direction as quickly as she can.  Her huaraches slap against the dirt.  She begins to turn once again onto Prim Avenue when a searing pain shoots through her calf.  She drops to the ground, clutching at her leg.

Sr. Jaybourne stands over her with a longshot taser held tightly in his fist. “And now you ask me to carry you inside, boy.  What a shame.”  He draws Vero up into his wet arms; she is too surprised to fight him.

“You shot me.”

“If one behaves as a jackrabbit, one will be treated as one.  Do not try to leave again. You may leave when I am ready.  Understand?”

She doesn’t answer.  She looks at the approaching house and tries not to feel his body against hers.  She begins to plot her escape and all the time she knows that she must shoot within a couple of hours.  Sr. Jaybourne calls out for someone named Ario.  This turns out to be a thin, gopher-faced woman.

“Ario, this child has fallen and may have hurt himself.  Please clean him up and set him with dinner at the table, thank you.”  He looks down into Vero’s face and asks, “Can you walk with Ario’s help?”

“Let’s find out.” she glares at him.

Jaybourne lowers Vero to the ground and the Ario woman helps to steady her.  The man says, “…and Ario, this is a street child.  He is a liar and a thief.  I have been witness to both behaviors in the short time that I’ve known him.  Rather than allow him to go to prison, I believe that he might be improved by some good, honest work. Watch your pockets.  Close your ears.  I will change for dinner. Quickly, please.” He then turns and walks inside the house, without another word or glance.  Vero shakes her head.

“He just shot me with a taser.”

“Sure enough.  Name is?”

“Vero. Jesus, is he crazy?”

“You oughtta be thankful. Shut that mouth, Veto.”

“Vero.  Not Veto.”

“Vero ain’t no boy’s name.  Venga, now.” The woman helps her limp into a bathroom, and draws a bath for her.  “Mister Jaybourne eats clean. You show him respect and wash.”  Vero sits on a wicker chair as the woman collects items for the bath.  “He’s a good man,” continues Ario.  She lifts herself onto her toes and reaches into a deep cabinet.  She retrieves a dark green pair of drawstring work pants, and a matching t-shirt.  “These might fit.” She stands before Vero, evaluating the girl.  She nods, as if she’s decided something. “Now peel off and go have a bath, be sure to soak that leg.  Call out when you’re clean, and I know clean.”

“Just let me go, lady. This is kidnapping. This is crazy.  You people are crazy!”

“What’s crazy is your mouth.  You ungrateful boy.  You just call out when you’ve finished.” The woman leaves the room and closes the door.  By the time she’s finished bathing and dressed in the wrong colored boys’ clothes, Vero’s leg is fine, but her body has begun to tremble.  Her withdrawal will only get worse from here.

She is frightened of the man’s taser, and the stuffed quail and cactus pear look delicious, so she resigns herself to eat with the old man at his long table.  He makes her uncomfortable, talking about her boyish arms and big appetite.  She is afraid to tell him that she’s not a boy.  She’s frightened of lots of things, but even her fear lessens with the weight of her desire for oil.

When they finish eating, he coaxes her out to his backyard, placing his patchwork hands upon her shoulders to walk behind as if to direct her.  She feels exposed and unhappy. She feels his breath bearing down upon her.

“Why are you making me stay here? What are you doing? I need to go.”

“You will pay your debt and then you may leave.  And if you like, I will tutor you another day.”

“Horse shit, you’ll never see me again.”

“So you say.” He pats her on her lower back.  “Right over there, Veto.” The man points at a pinyon stump with an axe buried within it.  There are several sections of cut trees beside it. “I need you to chop that wood.”

“It’s night time!” She protests. “I can’t chop wood at night!”

“You can, and you will.  It’s hardly dusk, and there will be plenty of starlight.  Now go.”

The old man settles himself into an oversized rocking chair.  He sways back and forth, watching the dimly lit Vero walk glumly to the stump.  She hasn’t quite figured out how to get out of this mess.  He’s got the taser in his breast pocket; she saw its outline.  The backyard is fenced in with adobe and too high to scale.  She can cut through it with the axe or try to cut off his leg, but knows she would be caught.  But they think I’m a boy, she thinks, I could probably get away with anything.

She picks up a section of wood and rests it on the stump.  Next she grips the axe; it’s heavy.  She isn’t very sure if she can use it to chop wood, much less to kill him.  She swings it high over her head and brings it down as hard as she can, missing the section completely.  The axe head is buried deep in the tree stump.  She jostles it until it comes free, and tries again.  This time she succeeds, and the wood splits clean through. Vero turns behind her in triumph, and Mr. Jaybourne grins at her from the lit porch, raising a fist in her direction.

This will, Vero decides, keep her mind from the oil.  The oil, the oil, the oil.  The sooner she finishes, the sooner she can shoot.  She brings the axe up and throws it down.  The wood splinters.  She pulls up, and heaves down.  She brings another wood section to the stump and begins to chop that one.  Her arms weaken after only two sections.  If she was a boy she’d probably barely have broken a sweat—but she continues anyway; the quicker done, the quicker to shoot. She chops as hard as she can, and when her arms are so weak that she cannot lift the axe anymore, she’s only finished four sections.

Vero tosses the axe down near her feet and leans over the stump to catch her breath.  She hears the man approaching and turns around to complain, but he grips her from behind and pushes her face-first against the stump, hard. Her breath comes out.

The man leans in with his mouth against her ear and whispers, “There are no free tickets in life, Veto.” She tries to free herself, but fails.  Hicks Jaybourne brings his hand around to the front of Vero’s body and clutches at the air between her legs, then quickly jerks back and shoves her away from him.  She falls to the ground.

“Where is it?” the man demands, “What’s happened to you?”

“Where is what, you sick fuck?” Vero is terrified and confused. Her hand clenches tight and then opens wide and free.  Then it clenches again.

“Your cock boy, where’s your cock?” He knocks a fist against his leg, his face disfigured.

“I don’t have one.” She smooths her pants with her hand. “I don’t have one,” she repeats.

“That’s impossible!”

Vero laughs and draws herself up.  “Look pal, I just ain’t got no tits yet from the oil.  Let me scoot on out of here and dose and I won’t tell no one what you done. I don’t have what you want so just let me go.”

“You’re a drug addict? You’re just a child!”

“But old enough to fuck, huh sir? That right sir? Piss it.”

Hicks opens his mouth to speak, but closes it again, turns, and walks quickly back to the house.  Vero remains where she stands.  The sky has deepened and become pockmarked with stars.  She looks up at them, grows dizzy, and straightens her clothes again.  Her fists clench.  Sr. Jaybourne opens the back door, enters the house, and closes the door again behind him.  Vero turns to survey the adobe fence.  She turns back to observe the house.  She looks up one final time, and sucks in her breath before she begins to move her body toward the house again.

She grips the door handle and she turns it, opens the door, and holds the jam for support as she steps inside.  The old man isn’t immediately visible, but Vero hears a conversation coming from the next room.  It is an audible knot, thick with moans and hisses. Then the house goes silent but for footsteps approaching her.

Ario appears and crosses the room to touch Vero’s face.  “I got a daughter myself.  She got took from me and put in the Cué.  I ain’t seen her in three years.”

Vero meets the woman’s gaze and tells her flatly, “I don’t care.”

The woman nods and says, “Mister Jaybourne says you got a will that’s good for general labor.  He’ll pay, a wage and a roof. You really a shooter?” She reaches to take Vero’s arm and check, but the girl snatches it away again.

“Lady, I got a crew to take care of. And I already got a job.  Unless you got a way to fix my boys and me up real good, I don’t see why any of my business is yours.” Vero is neither defiant nor desperate.  She is only lightheaded.  She is composed and in charge.

“Yes,” Ario replies, sticking her fat tooth out from behind her lips, “Yes, well. Mister Jaybourne says you stay the night without them drugs.  You’ll get three hundred dollars.  That’s a week, every week.  You make that at the turbines?”

“I don’t work at the turbines.”

“It’s the railway then? You didn’t hear the wire tonight, didja?”

“I guess I was too busy getting attacked by your patrón to watch the wire.  Do ya think I’ve missed the novellas, too?”

Ario either doesn’t hear or understand what Vero’s told her.  She doesn’t even blink, but instead informs the girl that, “Acton Railways is complying.”

Vero vision whirls.  Complying.  That means she’s out of work.  Everyone’s out of work.  Legally, children under the age of fifteen can’t work anywhere, but it’s an ancient law that isn’t a bit practical, and hasn’t been enforced for centuries.  The new mayor’s incited some new wave of activism among the people with houses, but Vero had no idea their protests would actually influence anybody.  If Acton Railway goes legal, it means the turbines will too, and no doubt the trashmen will follow.  If Acton Railway goes legal, all the children will become pijuros or thieves.  No more kids. Oh Santos this is Jimmy’s blowout.  Oh Madre what about the Rats. She says nothing, but a rush of heat fills her face and she feels sick for the future and the oil. Her stomach roils.

Ario continues without much pause, “Well, sleep on it.  I’ll take you to your room. We have pastillas to help you in the night.”

“I bet you do,” says Vero. “Now go,” she commands before turning to vomit on a mandala-woven rug.

The girl cannot keep the pills down.  She finds that if she sits upright in the bed they’ve made for her, and neither turns her head nor moves her eyes, she is fine.  But if any part of her body moves, she vomits again.  If she tries to sip water, she vomits.  If she breathes too deeply she vomits.  Hicks doesn’t appear during the night, but sends a doctor to inspect her with beeping meters and activated cloths.

“She will not die,” he concludes from another room, but Vero disagrees.  His muffled voice sounds stupid to her.  “She has no fever, she isn’t convulsing.  Her symptoms are mild.  This is no worse than the hangover we shared in Valencia, eh old man?” She hears laughter.  Within fourteen hours, Vero throws up thirty-two times, and at the end of it she sleeps and is weakened.  She is thirsty.  She first peers into, and then empties the plastic cup they’ve left for her.  Her grounded room smells of vinegar and oranges, not vomit nor sweat.  Ario cleaned even while the girl was sick, and the possibility that this contributed to her nausea doesn’t escape Vero’s notice.

Hicks appears in her bedroom the next morning supporting a tray with coffee and a bowl of menudo.  He asks her to sit up.  She complies, and the man straddles the tray against her stretched-out legs.

“I hope you’ll stay,” he tells the girl.  “I hope as well that you’ll forgive an old man his savagery.” He touches his forefinger to his chin, nods, and reaches into his jacket pocket.  He retrieves three hundred dollar bills and lays them on the tray beside the food.  “You’ve spent one night but expended a week’s energy.  Your first week’s wage, then.” He waits for her to meet his gaze before continuing, “Should you decide to stay, you’ll receive another three hundred by next Wednesday.  You’ll help Ario around the house, and keep the lawn.  You’re to stay here and off the streets, and if I see any narcotics, even a hint of them, you may return to your hovel without pay.  We’ll not speak of the incident again.  Clean yourself by lunch,” he adds, then turns around and strolls out the door, latching it behind him, humming an ugly tune.

Vero leans in to hover over the steaming food. Her eyes are closed.  The soup’s steam slickens her face.  She thinks of Billy and the other kids.  She imagines a crashing of glass, and a woman’s scream.  Many angry children shout a cacophonic Vero, Vero, Vero. The Desert Rats hurl rocks through Hicks Jaybourne’s windows, front and back.  The Rats have billy clubs and jackknives, all with her own quail beaks.  Billy lags behind the others to lift Vero through the bedroom window and out to safety.  The others rush the dining room where Hicks eats his poached egg with soft cheese and fall upon the man.  The Rats beat the old man senseless with their weapons, and finally to death. One of the youngest boys in the crew, a pijuro, giggles and smears the blood from his club across his cheekbone with a pinky finger. Mr. Jaybourne’s face no longer makes sense.

“We got nothin’ to lose!” Jims is animated, full of oil and bloodlust. He drives his knife across the dead man’s guts to pull out his intestines. “We all fucked now,” he repeats.

“All I want is some goddamned oil,” Vero sighs, lifts her dampened face up, and leans back to sip the black coffee.  She will stay in this house and work for the man’s money, and she will send every penny home to her boys.  The window beside her bed opens to the gardens of Hicks Jaybourne, where birds of paradise grow up from below the windowsill, their bright orange flowers indifferently gazing into the room where she lies.

        in a forest, a museum. Everyone wants
to cause a scene at a funeral, to yell at
        everyone, no exceptions; even people
who can fight back. Everyone wants their mother

        to cause a scene at a funeral, to yell at.
The heart wants to rip out the heart.
        Who can fight back? Everyone wants their mother;
everyone wants a bed with a lid.

        The heart wants to rip out the heart:
blood and noise and quiet and dust.
        Everyone wants a bed with a lid
and time and television and lovers and

        blood and noise and quiet and dust.
Wanting gets the heart to beat itself
        and time and television and lovers and…
The list of what we want burns as we write it.

        Wanting gets the heart to beat itself,
to barge through a door marked Private.
        The list of what we want burns as we write it;
everyone starts to want a huge fire.