SELECTED WRITINGS
A Job of Spores
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Through the winter nights he sat alone in a lab, squinting into a microscope and drawing plant spores the size of a pin head. It was a part-time job for the university botany department while he went to school. in preparation he’d studied the nineteenth century Ernst Haeckel renderings of bacterium and jellyfish, somehow expecting that his own drawings would have the same precision and symmetry, evoking Victorian machine dreams as much as living organisms. His spores resisted such assured elegance.
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Bloated Gasters
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In the third season of this life, in this three-season porch afternoon, the floorboards, made of hay colored material neither wood nor plastic, (“composite”), stretch beyond in all directions. It must look Sonoran- bleak, arctic-blank, to this ant. But that’s your imagining, something out of The Incredible Shrinking Man. The ant sets out, indifferent to the terrain. Its progress is neither scurry nor march nor meander, a compound of halt and drive, improvisation and plan, straight ahead and double back that recalls your 1960’s High School Social Studies teacher, battling metal illness as he distilled the ant-like hive mind of Marxist philosophy into, “two steps forward, one step back.”
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Giallo Delirium
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Italian director Mario Bava (1914-1980) is often credited as the true creator of the first giallo with the contemporary psycho-killer mysteries The Girl Who Knew Too Much, 1962, and Blood and Black Lace, 1964. But one of his most distinctive films was the giallo-inflected science fiction masterpiece Planet of the Vampires, 1965. The film, (about an expedition to a world of invisible aliens that take possession of the crew’s dead) offers a distillation of giallo’s formal and stylistic elements (baroque design, expressionistic lighting, erotically charged violence) unmoored from earthly crime or psychosis in an entirely artificial, alien setting.
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Jail. House. Rock., excerpt
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Rock. Paper. Scissors. Growing up, this game fascinates me, even as I reel trying to keep up. It goes like this: Three fist pumps. Say ROCK PAPER SCISSORS. Then say SHOOT. With your hands, rock beats scissors. Scissors beat paper. Paper beats rock. If you both do the same, take another turn. Three times and it's a game. Rock Paper Scissors. Utterly confusing. The rock should beat both: smash the scissors, fly through the paper. Or the paper should beat both: cover the scissors, cover the rock. Or the scissors should beat both: hone the blade on the rock, then hammer and vulcanize on the heated rock, then use the hardened metal to stab and shatter the rock into bits.
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Matrimony
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His girlfriend was depressed and jealous and wouldn’t let him out of her sight. She was crazed with the conviction that the two of them were an item no matter what. He married her, then woke up drunk or drugged twenty years later, still smarting from the previous night’s fight, bleak with guilt that he still couldn’t make her, or himself happy, even though he had given up everything to make it happen. Well, almost everything.
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Move
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I can’t go to the meeting because I’m working. In the dark he whips his head around and cringes when cars go by. I had to stand up again because the light sensor in the empty classroom shut off the lights. The active shooter drill in the office is scheduled for Wednesday. He’s from Afghanistan and marked for death. The new apartment buildings are very beautiful.
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Mysteries of English Class #1
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ME THE TEACHER: Do you have a cat?
CHANDRA THE STUDENT: (in his thoughts): (मेरो बिरालो छैन! /
Who cares? Anyway, you know I don’t. The landlord says no pets, even though the city allows it. But landlords for refugees can do what they want. Anyway, why would I want a cat? We have no mice. I don’t want a cat. I don’t want a snake. Feed a cat? What? I don’t want mice just so the cat has something to eat!
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The Bat Man Fan Club Will Now Come To Order, excerpt
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Eight years old in the late 1950's, I hope to find friends by starting a Batman Fan Club. My sister Bridey will assist me. I am obsessed with the Golden Age Batman, before I was born, the Bob Kane original begun in 1939, (THE BAT-MAN), gleaned from an archival collection at the library: a haunted orphan Batman, battling gangsters, twisted villains and Axis agents with hats. Kane's rigid drawing and Bill Finger's pulpy stories carve out jagged, expressionist adventures with a style, as one writer said, more Cabinet of Doctor Caligari than Casablanca. No one I know has the same obsession, but perhaps news of my fan-club, like a bat-darkened sky heralding the end of the world, will beguile other like-minded bat cognoscenti to join. But my Batman is long gone.
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To Be With You
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To Be With You To be with you I melted doubloons And baby booties of bronze I de-dinged chrome, bought bolts at cheap And hawked them hiked. To be with you I block tackled a smuggled MIG 15 and Shammied the nose cone to lard-potash gleam. I book kept creative with Thai cockfight bets, Skidded one Buddha shy of the pink landing lights, Conked thugee dreadlocks with scimitars steamed In the tonic karst geysers of Uzbekistan...
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Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory
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I work at a literacy center. Most of my colleagues are younger women. The neighborhood ice cream truck approaches. We work in cubicles. Many of my students are refugees.
My colleagues practice self-defense moves. Bring them down. Yes. You’ll hear a crunch. Break them. Break them. Outside, Ice Cream Tony pauses.
Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory (1963) was an Austrian-Italian production filmed at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. It was Federico Fellini’s favorite studio. Active Shooter training is today.
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Wonder Spot, excerpt
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When I was eleven, I needed an antenna for a secret machine into the future. I wiggled one end of our TV rabbit ears back and forth until it was hot and soft, and snapped it off. I removed the top bead and glued it back on the main body with Elmers to hide the deed. To make a new beginning, or a new end, so to speak. There would be hell to pay for this, but I it was my last chance.
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