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| Dear Honored Guest, Presently you will be shown the process by which my people have learned to call a hive a hive, which is to say, a spade a spade. This ravaged hillside-cum-strip mall was once home to our native possum, mascot of our All-County team, several members of which have gone on to become great things: One a banker, one a notable actor of pornographic B-films. This is the road to the abandoned Tampax factory, along which you may pick up the SuperCombo of your choice from the pock-faced boy at the drive-through. So what are your thoughts on the Effort. Do you drink. Do you ever, like me, harbor cravings to throttle our vast and beleaguered kind. True, we’ve had no town hall since 1978, but many folks to consult on the matter of your personal salvation. This is the tavern where, before she was called by the church, Mary Ann Doyle swore she’d die over the taps refilling pints on Two-fer-Tuesdays. That’s what she said; she was “called.” Me, I’d hold up to light our supernumerary betrayals like I’d stand up at just anyone’s shotgun wedding. These are the saplings put up for the downtown revival whose roots refused to take, ditto the séance business Mrs. Peters ran out of her house—the dead, deployed elsewhere, preferring to stay dead. Give me your tired, your bloated, your dispossessed owners of gun racks and bad teeth, the remorseless genealogy of your old scabrous dreams, the time is close at hand for the uglification of your mortal soul. Signs in the window: Live Bait. WIC Vouchers Accepted Here. This is the corner where Reverend Wally Floyd and his buck-toothed congregation petitioned the clinic going in at the light. Said they were going to burn out all the whores and abortionists of this world. Here is the parking lot of the Fascination Basin Roller Rink and Video Arcade where several generations of our Homecoming court have gotten knocked up or down; this is the disused sugar orchard where the church holds its annual maple-syrup- on-snow suppers; here are the urinous alleys, doorways, restroom stalls with no locks for your trysts and adulterous fumblings above which the all-night Denny’s marquee continues its ceaseless and revelatory burning. No, we never gave much thought to the manner in which the soul is joined to the body; we were too busy keeping the toddlers out of the street. On my epitaph, I’d like it to say, “Wanted to live forever. Died trying.” The W. C. is thataway, should you require a change of clothes. Just follow the signs to the reckoning from whence all things harken and stir. CAN’T SLEEP? TRY COUNTING YOUR BLESSINGS DARTH TATER SAYS, MAY THE FORCE BE WITH Y’ALL ELOPEMENT
SPECIAL:
INCLUDES CEREMONY, BRIDAL BOUQUET, AND BOUTINERRE (RICE NOT INCLUDED) WEEKEND PARKING SPECIAL: 24 HOUR IN- AND -OUT PRIVILEDGES WE BUY UGLY HOUSES POOR MAN’S BANK PAWN AND GUN SHOP JESUS IS COMING, AND BOY, IS HE PISSED SLOPPY SAM’S GENUINE BBQ PIT YEAH, I’M LAZY, DRUNK, STONED AND IRRESPONSIBLE…BUT I’M NOT BORING! FOR HE WHO HARMS MY BROTHER, HARMS ME TOO
DEAR JILTED BRIDE, in one of my former lives, the psychic told me, I danced the can-can by the name of Yvette. If you think time’s winged Rent-A-Wreck’s done a hatchet job on my face, you should see the like s of my immortal soul. Did you know the octopus is smart, as far as invertebrates go. Using a laptop will nuke your sperm, a mini-Chernobyl in your pants. I worked at the local Vet’s before it was raided for its stock of ketamine. Long Long ago. Lotta acid rain under the bridge. My first time, I’d compare to being reamed out with a pickaxe. How’s that for posterity. What do Christmas trees and Keith Richards have in common. They both dry out and leave needles everywhere. Ha-ha. You see, in my own way, I possess a certain, how do you say, joie de vivre. When I die, scatter my ashes in the wind by the Three Sheets Coin-Op. That way, I’ll be three sheets to the wind. What comes to mind when I think of love is its likeness to my horse, being they’re both huge, trusting, and can kill you. SKAGGS COUNTY, DEPARTMENT OF FAMILY AND SOCIAL SERVICES Would you believe, the mud of our shores was once renowned for its curative powers. Like anyone short of a nun at a dogfight, my past contains actual bones. I don’t type. “Other” is the box I check from the list of occupations though I once went door-to-door in the summer of ’85 spreading the gospel of depilation through my little corner of the Free world. For Halloween, I always wanted to go as the Holy Ghost. I think of the distance from my past lives to where you find me now as that of the prairie vole, who mates for life, from the meadow vole, who does not. If I won big at the O.T.B. I’d stay in bed for weeks. Buy up all the pabulum and jarred plums I could haul. I don’t smoke. I studied accounting by correspondence. What I hate is sleeping in the day: Everything festering, dream-bogged, hazed. I know the Lord Jesus Christ is my Savior although He’s never told me so personally. My girl won’t eat wax beans. She’s got my eyes. For her I’d walk barefoot into a snake pit or lie down with the dead, if they’d have me. Dear Potential Third Party Candidate, Let go your dead, your deserted, the blackened parabolas of your young airlifted hopes, the face in the smoke-stained mirror and motel rooms paid for in cash, all night fisticuffs of the knock-down, drag-out, blood-on-the-ice variety, call off your hexes, pending checks and impending dooms, remedies for styes, shit luck and impotence, call off the swaybacked goslings crossing the penitentiary road past The Right Stuff Taxidermy and Memorial Preservation, let go your poxed and gap-toothed progenitors, your Monster Trucks and squalls, this here’s a liquidation sale and Everything Must Go…
TRUE VINE CHURCH OF CHRIST: IT’S A GOD THING MARY’S CURL-UP AND DYE HOUSE OF BEAUTY AND HAIR DESIGN ASK ME ABOUT MY ETERNAL SALVATION! NEXT LEFT, BOY SCOUTS RABIES CLINIC AND BAKE SALE JESUS LOVES YOU: EVEYRONE ELSE THINKS YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE VALENTINE’ES DAY SPECIAL: DIVORCES 50% OFF! FORBIDDEN FRUITS MAKE MANY JAMS STRAIGHT AHEAD, NRA MEETING AND PRAYER BREAKFAST LAST SUPPER CAFE: I’MMA KEEP A PLATE WARM FOR YA JESUS ON THE STOVE DEAR EMANCIPATED MINOR, I will not attempt to sway you herein from your big rancorous dreams of working the Hooter’s off the interstate or the BK two towns over any more than I’d turn myself in or jump in the sack with a True Believer. Enter botched dye jobs, cruelty, the unrepentant fuselage of your small-town romance, the years bought on layaway from that Rent-A-Center in the sky. Like many of you, I’m waiting for the day when monkeys fly out of my butt but until then, let it be said that I’ve made the slagheap my own. When I’m gone, batten your hatches and pat your nearest and dearest down. Accept this gift of my exoneration and remorse. DEAR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GHOST WRITER, The short version is thus because these words won’t pay themselves, the past a hoarded spoil akin to a promise ring kept in a Skoal tin. I learned to cook exclusively from the back of Kraft boxes, my life one long extended stag trip to the prom. There are worse things, I know--I never could keep the beat. Someone has yet to accuse my father of stealing the stars from the skies and putting them in my eyes. Craziest way to go: Hypnotremia, actual death by water. Myself, I’ll wind up alone in a bungalow at the edge of the sinkhole bemoaning the extinction of the spiral perm. I don’t want for much—just someone to talk at, keep warm, ask me how I like my eggs. POSTCARDS For if you follow me, my brethren, and let my eyes be as yours all will henceforth be revealed: your extortionary lust and places they never say “cuisine”: Car parts in the river, hypergraphia (foams at the mouth) the burned-out carcass of the waste-management plant: winters with actual teeth: the old sugar orchard due west of the mill with its carpet of blunts, used condoms and six-pack rings: places they’ve still got rotary phones: our famous Old Home Day Parade with its line of antique cars and preschoolers toting posters of disembodied fetal limbs: fiery, ineluctable: auguries of wood smoke, auguries of cloud: snow chains next five miles: Imma come for you some sad day. Dear Beloved Amnesiac, I have nothing new to say about the lilies, rain, God’s Ambidextrous hand, the unremitting spooge parade of our Blessed procreation, being familiar with love and cruelty as you are With the care and feeding of your well-coiffed aspirations beyond The evisceration plant. Sometimes I can glean The mummified corpse of what I’d call my formative years, Somewhere between the death of the push-mower and the advent Of the touch-tone phone. I mean to sally forth Toward the damp and unalloyed muzzle of the very ends of things, The all-abiding hinterlands of our collective desolation where the Almighty Appears at the checkout a used-up woman with visible roots. My soul on furlough From the Afterlife or slumming it in purgatory, or does it fall Away from the body like skin from a rotted peach. When I think of Eternity, I get a case of the heebie-jeebies. I know love’s both a many-fractured thing And a man in a cut-rate suit. In the next life, I’ll be first in line To that freeway in the sky, gripping the raised and souped-up handlebars Of the neighbor’s custom Hog. Wait for me there between the dirt And the night sky’s painted-on face. I’ll be the one in the crown of thorns, Yours, Approximately Nowhere |
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robyn art's work has appeared in
Conduit, Slope, The Hat, The New Delta Review, Gulf Coast, La Petite Zine,
Segue, Tarpaulin Sky, and
canwehaveourballback.com. She has received four nominations for the
Pushcart Prize and was a
Finalist for the award in 2003. She is the author of the chapbooks Degrees of Being There
(Boneworld Press 2003) and No Longer A Blonde (forthcoming from Boneworld
Press in 2005.) Her full-length poetry manuscript, The Stunt Double In
Winter, was recently selected as a Finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the
Kore Press First Book Award.
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