He says slow down and mouths words like mother and harder. He says sand is a form of torture for children. He claims he is a space invader but to my ears it sounds like I’m a masturbator. We make toe drawings to remember the carved turkey we will never eat.
*
He is bingo tough.
He is wanted by the law.
He is California.
He is the sexiest lizard I’ve seen in my whole life.
He is everything from Dizrythmia onwards.
He is brie.
He is hands down the star of her (or his) own debut.
He is licensed in North & South Carolina.
He is a Muppet.
He is Nordic sex.
He is standing in front of a small orchestra.
He is sketching in a special room with a big table and chairs.
He is certainly not Martina Navratilova.
*
I love wild boars and Bruce Springsteen. I love plausibility and deniability. I should be writing about Meta but I’m tired of death and destruction. I want to move to Sodom with Charo. I am desperate for space.
*
He says: I’m afraid of suspension bridges and needles too. I say fine. He says sorry. I fold his hands.
*
I’m tired of geese and the cherished treasures of the Holy See. I’m tired of elegant metaphors for snow, e.g. tiny geese fluttering in the wind. What’s the possibility of geese fluttering? Of snow in outer space? Of geese used as weapons of mass destruction? I’m tired of random fires and pebbles in my shoes. I’m not bulletproof and neither is he.
*
I won’t tell you how I feel except for this fact: kerosene.
*
Merlot wine reminds me the guy who served me liquor when I was seventeen, who is the same guy who dies at the end of this story, who is also like the cat who dies at the end of Cats, without my permission. It’s funny how the names of the dead go with them. What’s the sign for memory? I almost wrote sing for memory. Warblers love irony. I can’t remember his fucking name.
*
Say something, he says. I say chicken.
Neil de la Flor’s publications include Almost Dorothy (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, Facial Geometry (NeoPepper Press, 2006), co-authored with Maureen Seaton and Kristine Snodgrass, and Sinead O’Connor and her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (Firewheel Editions, forthcoming 2011), co-authored with Maureen Seaton and winner of the Sentence Book Award. His work, both solo and collaborative, has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Barrow Street, Pank, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Hobart Pulp, among other journals. He can be reached at www.neildelaflor.com.