[PANK]

We had a great run but everything got fucked up and flooded, and you know that. There wasn’t any place to go so we sailed, you and I. I said, I love you. Baby, we’re the last people on earth. I smiled a big, unshaking hands smile and I said, I can really see us repopulating the earth. I am in love with you and we can go anywhere. Here we go to it now. I lowered a serious voice and eyebrows from thick hand over hand cables hanging like clothes from dresser drawers, loafing from our hoisted sail made from bags of chips that spent all day firing back light at the sun like they were both pretend outlaws who needed to go to bed soon, and said, we’re going to have to make all the doomsday TV shows we ever loved if we’re going to be entertained right. Our boat was like a couch facing the right direction. Baby, I said, I am so in love with you. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel the same way about you, you said. I struck the water with my palm. The gravity circled nodding around the little time we were spending on earth. Candy wrappers floated by. Books broke the surface like waking hands of the sickly, then spread like unwatered tan plants reaching for the sun out of reach in my old apartment when I lived somewhere. The water threw up colors. Dishwater milk white foam. Wooden kitchen counter cayenne pepper dust orange red. Black plastics from broken road tools from the shadow snuggles of unlit car trunks we emptied together. The colors of the water were just measures of ourselves we dumped into it. But when we aren’t together, don’t you get that feeling, I said, where there is a sinkhole inside your stomach and everything drops into it and you listen for a sound and don’t get one? People know people by hearing if they’re there. Don’t you feel like there’s this big no-zone and you can’t see into it and you can’t fill it? I do, you said, but I feel that way about someone else. Are you crazy? I yelled. Are you fucking stupid? The cables lowered again: it is so pathetic to hear you talk like this. What are you thinking? I was crying, then you were. We made more water to offer to the water. There was a very long pause that was many phases of the moon, and we weren’t the water, we were just on it, not invited, not given. I’m sorry, I said. I’m really sorry about that. It’s just that I really like you, and also that we’re the last people on earth.

The Boys of the Midwest 1

The Boys of the Midwest grow up dirty, covered in earth like recently dug up root vegetables. They don’t have eyes until they reach 12 years of age, and even so they run the cul-de-sacs of their neighborhoods in groups of twenty like blind puppies. They are covered in hundreds of fine cilia. Their boyhood is porous and lunglike, branched and gooey, tender to the touch. On weekends after church they disappear into uncultivated strips of prairie to tend their silent wounds. To inflict still more wounds upon each other. They call this happiness. At dusk they file back home to their mothers’ Cloroxed hands, their fathers’ too-small polo shirts. The charcoal briquettes are ashy gray in the grill and the trampoline is the most treacherous fun their homes are capable of. So they fling themselves onto it, again and again until they have forgotten what it means to be a boy. And again, until they are winged creatures. And still more, until they are planets in space. The lucky ones hang there, in orbit. The unlucky ones must always come back down for dinner and submit themselves to questioning. They call this another kind of happiness.

The Boys of the Midwest 2

The Boys of the Midwest prefer to move about the house underneath the carpets. They move as fluid furry mounds. They call this mode of transportation the Rug Node. It is a form of protection, though it is not without its own kind of danger. On chore days their mothers’ Cloroxed hands push the vacuum cleaner through the house. The Boys of the Midwest tell a story of a boy who once got caught by the vacuum as he ran his circuit on the Rug Node. His delicate fur came off first, then his cilia, then his flesh like fine wet silk. How was the mother supposed to know, her boy a warm secret under the rug. The Boys of the Midwest tell this story each year in a secret meeting out in the strip of prairie behind the golf course. It is a cautionary tale, complete with ritual weeping. Secretly, some have lost faith that the story is true. An alternate story springs up, in whispers, with a happy ending. In it, the mother’s hands come upon the true, uncarpeted Boy just in time. In it, the mother discovers her hands had forgotten to turn the vacuum on all along. That her hands led the mute vacuum through the house silently. The Boys of the Midwest call this a great joke. The two factions of Boys, the believers and the unbelievers, become contentious. They take to the prairie with sticks to decide, once and for all, which story is true.

…

Leo’s wife Margaret noticed that the only self-portrait he’d given her was the one of himself as a woman. Why? She wanted to know. Why that one? He assured her that it was the only one of himself as a woman so far. For her best friend, a banker, Leo had created a self-portrait called “Self-portrait from Collage of Dollar Bills.” The banker had returned it because it was a federal offense to defile paper currency. Leo’s collection of self-portraits stacked almost 100 deep against one wall in his studio, formerly their daughter Bettina’s bedroom. In the two years during which he produced his “art,” he had painted, drawn, pastelled, gessoed, charcoaled, color-penciled, and non-traditionally multi-mediated nothing but self-portraits. “It is as though,” Bettina, a college student at Binghamton posited, “he is trying to find himself.” Every weekend when she came home, Leo asked her to choose a portrait and discuss it with him over tea. Then he would commemorate the experience by sketching a portrait of himself drinking tea: pencil on napkin, pen on scrap of envelope, or smudge of jelly strategically blurred with drops of brown tea on cafe receipt. Leo collected these review-propelled self-portraits over many months to create a self-portrait from them titled, “Self-portrait Created from Self-portraits Generated During Critique of Self-portraits.” He used the information his daughter presented him about himself, his art, his self-art to inform subsequent self-portraits, and the work of his project grew more interior, retracted, self-absorbed, until he decided that his best portrait of self would necessitate Leo himself becoming the portrait. He retreated to his studio and shut himself in, out, and off while he meditated on how to make himself into himself. “Your father is unbelievable,” Margaret complained. “He won’t come out of the room. Can you tell him, Bettina, that he is already himself?” The phone buzzed between them, Margaret’s voice traveling through space to Bettina in Binghamton, Bettina’s words reaching back invisibly to Margaret’s ear, both of them confident they knew who they were speaking to and about.

[PANK]’s April 2013 issue is live! Check it! 

Wear latex gloves. All day, all night, one week. To Rainbow Grocery, the Amnesia Bar. White, too pure, preferably. Let them believe that your hands, if outed, would suppurate yellow sores. It’s 1995. San Francisco. You ridiculed the plans for your neighbor’s helicopter pad: a bulls-eye or a medcross on the undraining roof. You followed Thom Gunn down the hill each day, his leather jacket growing bigger and bigger. The counter-lady with ribboned pigtails would not touch you. Any change from your banana muffin? A waterfall of nickels. Air as barbed wire, as mason-dixon, as moat.

That evening, the family of possums funneled through the kitty door, ate an entire twelve-pack of butterscotch pudding. You threw rolls of toilet paper; the father did not flinch. Rotten aim, declared your beloved. The gloves clubbed hand into flipper, too clumsy to contour your weapons. With a broomstick, she whisked out the possums, banished. Crashing through the backyard jasmine like a bad breath.

Thanks to your theatricality, said your beloved, the possums know we’re softies. You took a shower. Still you refused to abandon the gloves. Their touch deposited talc on zinc counters, the ceramic frog that cerberused the gourmet cheese shop. Miraculous as barium dye, illuminant of hysteria: a syphilitic noise, a tapeworm writhing on a toilet seat. How to fight history? you asked. Ephemeral markers. Your beloved toweled herself off, curled into the couch. No sex, she said, until she could see your hands.

You stacked bricks over the kitty door. Mopped butterscotch off the linoleum. Why wouldn’t you explain? You wore the gloves for your brother, comatose for years, now dead, whose boy palm print had been imprinted onto clay, spray-painted gold, now framed on your office wall. Perhaps, your relationship nascent, you had summoned your pet gargoyles; had deliberately spilled gas on your boots; had begged for the diaphane-winged mechanisms of her recoil.

Drowsily she stumbled into the kitchen. You set the mop in the sink, unrolled the gloves. Could she suppress the chemicals of impending flight? Yes. She kissed the inflamed pink band of your wrist, the two veins that merged and diverged like tweezers, the jostling bones; that part of your body, after the knee, voted most likely to fail.

You can’t just forgive yourself for the horrible things you do to yourself and the things you do that harm other people, though you might want to, though you wish you could.

I vandalized the parking lot in high school. It was fall, and I scattered dead leaves all over the place. I had several garbage bags full of them, released them out into the parking lot, letting time and nature do the rest of the work for me. Soon leaves were everywhere. Soon it was a parking lot covered in oranges, browns and reds. Then it started to rain, and the rain made the leaves squish under foot. What I had done was unspeakably terrible. I was treated as a pariah, kept apart from my peers, who’d never really been friendly all that much.

And then there was the tragedy at Benghazi, which I had no role in whatsoever but, as an American, as one of many Americans (and I felt I had not been one of many Americans enough when the tragedy befell us) and news of it broke, and we as Americans needed to come together, and as one of many Americans I refused. I could sense people not being ok with my decision to refuse to come together as one of many Americans.

Worst of all was the time I left that sheet on the line in my backyard. I didn’t let it go free into the wind’s clutches myself, personally taking it from its pins and sending it off. But I did nothing as the wind pummeled it, the elements rained down upon it. And eventually the sheet cascaded from the line, away.

Pillow Question
19 messages

From: Fred Sasaki <fredsasaki@gmail.com>
To: orders@mypillow.com
Date: Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 10:15 AM
Subject: Pillow Question

Dear My Pillow,

I have a pillow question about ordering. Can you help me?

Thank you,

Fred Sasaki

*

From: MyPillow Orders <orders@mypillow.com>
To: Fred Sasaki <fredsasaki@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:42 AM
Subject: Call Customer Service

Fred,
Any of our agents can help you with any questions.
Sincerely,
Sue W.
MyPillow, Inc.
Customer Service
952-442-4199/ 800-308-1299

… 

Arcadia

Bodies close, backs in the dirt, safe
behind our zippered door.
I grip your wrist & stare where
the tent beams meet.
We hear the trees cry.

Then we are rustled awake –
my god, you say, someone’s out there.
But I know better, & imagine

a deer, nervous snout buried
in our half-eaten grilled squash.
I know I should step outside, but
cannot. I never want to leave
this tent, I whisper,

so we cower: one question
mark cradling another. We drift
to sleep. Lights race
on the canvas ceiling, comets

in a private sky. I will whisper
my songs in your ear,

tend you like a flock, nervous
on the edge of a grassy cliff. An arm’s length
from what’s beyond, if only

for a night.

… 

I hated my parents. I loved my parents. In the way of teenagers worldwide, though then, since I was a teenager, I strode my capital I self-important/conscious/absorbed down the gritty rubble of Rome Street like the star of my own music video when I had yet to write the song itself.

*

We just called it Rome. It was its own empire. Broken-glass laughter and the cruel whispers of sewer grates. Broken cement of sidewalk square after sidewalk square. We walked in the street instead because we were Romans. Taking names, kicking ass. Forgetting the names. Remembering the ass.

*

There’s me now, tossing a cigarette butt against the curb like I’m tomorrow’s god, thinking I should have taken one or two more puffs. How far to smoke a cigarette down? Not all the way to the filter, but close, right? Fourteen, and full of matches and meanness., puffing out smoke like I was my own factory, practicing for the future I had naively disavowed. Jean jacket and pimples. A girl who said hi to him in the hallways on his mind. On his dick. His mind is his dick, like teenagers worldwide. You can try to ignore that dick, but it has a mind of its own. It’s the cosmic loop of boy puberty—mind, dick, mind, dick.