Green Linden Press

Highway 99: Jane Visits My Valley

tiny teeth marks   gnashing a hole 
in a paper fan purchased at the Fresno Fair

boys in the cul-de-sac shooting 
rubber bands and rocks from PVC pipe guns

this is how I remember my childhood: 
a ravenous static    a static explosion 

killer sharks floating belly up
in the sun-bleached fiberglass pool   blood
on the slide the wasp whipping 

the back of a knee the smell 
of a rattlesnake stripped of its skin
the metal barrette        the light socket

when Jane was in the bathroom
and my mother told me to leave Jane, 
go back to the husband in Boston 
because “You are not a lesbian”      I didn’t 

remind my mother of her own infidelity: 
the mother-daughter “shopping trips” 
to meet her lovers in San Francisco

I didn’t say: “I never said I was a lesbian”

there was only rubble, Jane bending
to pick out a scrap of painted shirt as if
it were soiled ivory 

from a grand piano, possessed
of us both, and ruined now

The History of the Escalator

is much like the history of space travel,
looping around on itself as one man
then another steps on the skin 
of the bright combusted universe

and this is why Playboy used escalators 
in all their ads in the 1960s
and why Wyoming has only two
escalators in the entire state—

once just a ride at Coney Island 
now the sterling teeth are sharp 
and inevitable as the U.S. Marine Corp
landing on islands belonging to others

because an esca lader is one who 
escalades. So they say in the Latin:
the successful escaladers opened the gates
to the entire Persian host, the Rocky Mountains,

nuclear warfare—an astronaut’s bones 
rise above the atmosphere, then recede, 
tapering like soda fizz, so that at night 
a truce with Iran or Korea seems certain 

while I am beaten to death by a thug 
in a back bedroom. This is why I take 
your heart and exhale the stale waste
of my last love. Why the Haitians 

arriving in Miami for the first time 
used to run then fall down the moving stairs, 
how seemingly from nowhere
the silver steps appeared.

Frank O’Hara Is Trending

alongside Russia, male rompers,
summer sausage, and Jon Snow

alongside culottes
and kimono trench coats

the evidence is everywhere—

in dish towel designs 
and Don Draper’s last cigarette

in titles
of British novels by women named Emma

in Iceland where painters
recite his poems in former fishing plants

to trend:
to have David Bowie place you in his must-read list
to turn or roll oneself about

to spin infinitely
to make a circuit