Category: articles

Left behind

A Jimmy Choo
Cinderella shoe.
A Pomsky
dog called Beyoncé.
An ice-cream cart,
a birth chart
and tarot reading.
A pair of six-foot angel wings.

A Roland drum kit,
an Angora rabbit
called Thumper, an Islamic
marriage certificate.
The bride’s pet lovebirds, Will and Kate,
which she was supposed to take
to the ceremony.
A GT V8 Bentley
convertible.
A huge inflatable
unicorn pool float,
a banana boat.
A telescope.

A DJI Phantom drone
and a coin collection started nine decades ago.

(From dogs to drones)

#PinkGlowPineapple

I will always remember the day I first
tasted a borojo in a Costa Rican orchard
near the Panama border. The borojo
tasted like mulled wine and looked like
a baseball that someone had buried underground
for two hundred years; its texture
I can only compare to triple-crème Brie.

I dream of monstera deliciosa:
the fruit that looks like an ogre’s bunion
and smells like strawberry-guava pudding.
Or diospyros nigra, the black sapote,
which tastes like licking date paste off a stone.

This is not a bubblegum pink
nor is it a sultry magenta
or a coy blush. The exact hue
of Del Monte’s pineapple is more
of a peony-cantaloupe blend —
a color I’ve seen on polo shirts
in Cape Cod and on the lips of actresses
in midcentury Douglas Sirk films.
I’d call it Teenage Shrimp.

Each pineapple arrives with a gold-sealed
certificate of authenticity
congratulating the recipient
on obtaining this royal delicacy
and a helpful reminder
to tag #PinkGlowPineapple
and watch the likes pour in.

(From Instagram Fruit)

We are as gods

He has coaxed his skin to produce
a fluorescent protein, ingested
a friend’s poop in a D.I.Y.
fecal-matter transplant, and attempted
to deactivate one of his genes
so that he could grow bigger muscles.

Inside the box, I found an assortment
of lab tools—pipette tips, petri dishes,
disposable gloves—as well as several
vials containing E. coli and all I’d need
to rearrange its genome.

Ants that can’t smell, beagles that put on
superhero-like brawn, pigs that resist
swine fever, macaques that suffer from sleep
disorders, coffee beans that contain no
caffeine, salmon that don’t lay eggs, mice that
don’t get fat, and bacteria whose genes contain,
in code, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series
of photographs showing a horse in motion.

We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it. 
We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. 
We are Saturn, devouring our children.

(From Crispr and the splice to survive)

The gray ribbon

It could be for Diabetes awareness month
maybe brain tumours.
Perhaps the wearer is supporting
increased awareness for borderline personality disorder.
But, most likely nowadays
they’re raising Zombie Awareness

(check for neck beard and/or barbed wire
wrapped baseball bat in their hand).

Confused? Let’s look at November.
Movember, right? Prostate Cancer
and Men’s Health awareness, no?
It’s also Alzheimer’s Awareness month
and No Nut November
promoting abstinence
and COPD Awareness
and National Novel Writing Month.
So plenty to do, along with early
Christmas shopping, Guy Fawkes Night
and your job and family duties.

Just make sure you don a gray ribbon
so that people know you also care
about the inevitable zombie apocalypse
even though that should be done in May.

(From Top 10 awareness campaigns that didn’t work out too well)

America has fallen

There’s a burnt body in front of my office.
Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends.
There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall.
Then I’m at a concert. There’s a long line
for gas. Then I’m at a nightclub.

This is how it happens. Precisely
what you’re feeling now.
The numbing litany of bad news.
The ever rising outrages.
People suffering, dying,
and protesting all around you,
while you think about dinner.

I used to judge those herds of gazelle
when the lion eats one of them alive
and everyone keeps going.

I went to work, I went out, I dated.

We’d pop the trunk for a bomb check.
Turn off our lights for the air raids.
I know people who were beaten, arrested,
and went into exile. But that’s not
what my photostream looks like.

The pain doesn’t go away, it just becomes
a furniture of bones, in a thousand homes.
There’s no launch party for decay.

(From I lived through collapse. America is already there)

How you die

I strip in the doorway when I get home,
stand in the shower too tired to think or cry.
I sing Happy Birthday twice over every
part of my body. At work I can’t eat,
at night I can’t sleep. The dreams I have now
have only three themes: gasping for breath,
wiping things down, somehow, by accident,
being touched by somebody. Did you ever wake
in those last moments, or in your sedation
did you ever dream? I still wake some days
with a small beat like a held breath before
the truth of this new world hits me. Be safe
say the families I call on the phone.
Your name is a poem I’m required to keep
to myself.

This is the day you start to turn.
What we suck up from your lungs turns frothy pink
and then the frank red of blood. There are tests
but no one willing to run them — you are too sick
and you have never cleared the virus. No one
would ever want to be what you are now:
a hazard, a threat, a frightening object
on the edge of death. We try not to touch you.

Stronger together say the screen savers
on every screen in the hospital, the banners
on the sides of the shuttle bus. What I’ll see
is just how much this isn’t true, how so many
of our sickest patients are Black or Brown like you.
I will see a forty-six-year-old Black man,
infected with SARS-CoV-2, die instead
from having a police officer kneel on his neck.
I will see those who protest police brutality,
though masked and mostly peaceful, tear-gassed
and shot with rubber bullets. I will see
your death multiplied by ten thousand,
by a hundred thousand, all those bodies,
mothers and fathers, daughters and sons.

With my arms at my sides, I watch through the glass.
I have never mattered less in my entire life.
And this is how you die, near no one who
ever loved you, a spectacle of futility
and fear. Time is called, and someone calls your
husband, and it isn’t me. I am not the one
who hears him cry out in grief.

(From The New Stability)

Because I have not done any writing

When I wake early I say to myself
Fight, fight.
If I could catch the feeling, I would;
the feeling of the singing of the real world.

Virginia Woolf

In the last weeks I’ve taken up, and put aside,
woodcutting, drawing, German. I’ve cooked
and painted walls and baked. Several weeks in,
I caved and made a sourdough starter (it really
does seem miraculous, the raising of bread).
Watched the lilac, then the climbing rose,
then the honeysuckle bloom. Planted sweet peas
and watched them sprout. I know I am fortunate.
Sat in the small, overlooked garden,
for which I’ve never been more grateful,
with a book unread in my lap, picking up
and putting down my phone, listening
to building works and the radios of neighbours,
staring into this fragrant, sunny, confined
space. I can’t settle to anything.

This is not the time to try Proust again.
I have found brief solaces in Boccaccio’s
Decameron: the people of fourteenth century
Florence spent the plague years holed up and drinking,
or otherwise abstemiously not drinking,
or they lived riotously in the streets,
no longer caring. A group – call it a bubble –
of noblewomen and men retreat to the hills,
to villas decked with broom blossom, and fine wine
for breakfast, and brief, funny, tragic, dirty stories.

I record sudden lapses in time, and languors.
I record the rose, the honeysuckle,
seeing Venus in the sky, at its brightest.
A week passes without my noticing,
and writing the date in the diary I record
my surprise that this has happened. Then
another week passes, and I do the same.

(From I am not reading. I am not writing. This is not normal)