Carnal
Trumpet vines overhang aging stucco doorways, creating some cool respite for the bees seeking sweetness in the stamina of the afternoon. Ruby-throated birds, like mosquitoes, sip a Coca-Cola that has spilled and lies evaporating in a sticky pool on the street. Somewhere, children are yelling after a football.
In the shadows, intentions are made. Intentions wrapped in paper and string. Colognes are opened after baths and caramel skin is anointed in Tres Fleurs and Saint Teresa water. An effusion of Bay Rhum and roses floats out a window on an upper floor, and down to the passers-by, acknowledgment that even in this soporific heat, someone stirs.
Cigars, dry, their outer wrappings peeling, are lit and left to smolder as long as they will. Cones of brown sugar are placed on floors, surrounded by feathers and photos. Veves are drawn in chalk and housepaint. Shirts are swapped for beads. Flames flicker in a hundred glass cylinders, making tiny church windows from images of saints and orisha.
In the heat of the afternoon, someone will be uncrossed.
Shell Station Obit.
A man gave you crabs at the gas station.
Pardon.
A man at the gas station rewarded you with a live crab for lending him your scissors, so he could cut open a mesh bag in which to put his crabs. Crabs, as in decapoda. As in, crabs he pulled out of the Bay. Yes. That. (more…)
John Young in the Floating World
- Crewman Optical Alignment Site
You miss the new saints. Those steel-hulled heroes who, not so long ago, were erected to tower over us all, giving us reason to look to the sky and whisper, marveling, “we’ve been there”. You miss the rocket jockeys. Those cocksure, half-mad (though eminently sane), hundred-ton-candle-riding buzz junkies who first inspired you to aspire. (more…)
Dreaming in Inuktitut
Nunavut, Nunavut, Labrador.
You spin the wheel to pick a dream, and this is where it lands. Ice floes and akutaq. Six months in orbit, where night is continually falling, falling.
It suits your mood.
Up there in the North, where the walrus sleep, and the scientists huddle around a Franklin stove ordered from Sears and Roebuck in 1959. Up there in the North, where there are no rude cars to give you vertigo. And up there in the North, where Inuit grandmothers tuck their Inuit grandchildren into thick caribou-fur qipiik blankets and nuzzle little Inuit noses under the light of the North Star.
Grandmother, tell me about Sedna.
Settle down, and I will tell you. (more…)
