Tag Archives: alt lit

Cupcake Windchime

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Her Cam Girl name was Cupcake Windchime, and boy, could she ever dangle. She was a dangler, because she had sex in the woods or else she could chill. She could hang, @petergriffin-studmode69 had put it. And she tells us where to put it, he nodded to his old poodle in the corner.

Her parents had looked at her screaming twisting body and named her Loretta. They thought she would take on the name like a dough, but Loretta never took. Loretta was in a fluorescent kitchen by six am, whipping a cupcake batter into shape. She did not feel like Loretta- she wanted to be the cupcake. At the first opportunity, she was cupcakelover12@hotmail.com. Then, icedcupcake86, semi-professionally. And now, she supposed, her reasons were spiritual.

She never signed off the chat before 4am. That’s when you got the real freaks. She woke up at 2pm every day, without setting any alarms. In her mornings, the soft tinkling of chimes seemed to follow her around the house. Looking down at her ankles, she’d see the circle of thread and the knot. The attached pieces doing the tinkling were just plain-old cutlery.

Cupcake shook her head, bubbling over in a big laugh. Same dick different day, she said to the coffeemaker, and it bleeped its red eye, snarling out a few more drops of decaf. She grabbed the mug, and with it in one hand, and her hairbrush in the other, Cupcake climbed the stairs to her office.

When she walked in the room, a man jumped up from the desk chair. He landed on his feet, cat-like, facing the window. Legs spread apart and tensed. His audible breaths came like popcorn popping and she couldn’t see his right arm. His black leather jacket was turned towards her. Cupcake screamed and flung the mug across the room. It missed the intruder completely, breaking into shards and splashing its contents on the wall and window. The man threw his head back and cried out. She felt his whole body clenching- the sensation rocketing through her seemed both erotic and holy- driving at last into the buried pink nerve heart of each one of her teeth. Cupcake screamed out once more, then fell silent.

The man began lowing like a cow in heat. His bald head ran into a pink folded nape, reddening steadily.

“Spread those butterfly lips for me, chica, how ’bout it?”

How did you get in here? Cupcake asked. She watched in terror as a thin ray of moisture crept up on the air, her tongue ran along her bottom lip without realizing it.

He had said it all without turning around.

“Chica, I bet you’d do it with dirt in your mouth. You wouldn’t refuse me. Even if I sat your ass in a puddle right before.” He laughed- a high aluminum whisking sound that reminded Cupcake of a deli slicer. Her mood darkened, and she pictured pushing a great tube of salami into the path of a blade.

The black leather jacket began to shake, reveling in the bloodpump pleasure of its own lewdness. The right arm was again wrenched out of sight. Before Cupcake could speak, he had zipped his fly and was making a break for it! His legs swung up over the windowsill and in a flurry of chimes he was gone.

It was a long time before Cupcake could move. When she finally did, she walked over to the desk and unplugged the computer. Unplugged the webcam. Maybe she should take the night off. Maybe it was time for a different career altogether. Loretta, her mother wrote on lunchboxes, Loretta, at the top of her papers. Cupcake looked over at the kit, lying open on the desk, and her arms and face began to itch, itch, itch.

She carried the desktop over to the window, and, ever so carefully, pushed it over the edge.

Cracked

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‘bring a lamb to school

see who is the fool’

i laughed. on a dark day

i laughed so my skull

crackahd the plate 

so sweep them 

china dust pieces 

under the grandmother rug

lick it there

leave those rough shapes

in the bulldust.

how my sideways face looks

to the girl on the corner

walk antelope talk

stockings in stock

check-pick

ground in lock-step

what a bad bad girl.

yes

i laughed. and sold my only thing.

yesss

i spun into silence

my womb was the shape of me

see under

those yellow brick lights

under the grandmudder

in a peaked silence

one that abounds. downtown girl

you rise

with fresh madness each night

you sink 

you were unlike the birds

broken thing

i think you could fly.

Real Talk

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These are real, real emotions, man, and we are on our way downtown. Downtown with our fingers on a lipstick cap inside our jean pocket to suggest a knife. Our hood, our hat is pulled low. We got this worm-lipped grimace on our face. We glide past the bus stop and see him with black, glittering eyes. Waiting at the stop, in khakis and a black raincoat and dark glasses, and he is just asking for it. Something like a fuse sparks in our head. He is pathetic. We are furious- not at him and we know it, but we can taste our own fury sitting like blood in our mouth. Our sweat is murmuring and our hand is a sweet fist- one to pump and kiss the sky. We wonder what it would be like to crush his skull under our blind boot, because our eyes have moved to swallow something small and pebbly from the part of our brain which recalls childhood. And the drama of the everyday never shakes down like this on the sidewalk- not without us slamming into it, not until we make it. And he never even saw us coming. No, he was thinking about divorce as a way out and how his whole life has been a lie and there was no way he could have seen us coming after that. No way, not from miles away.

Music Bit My Mouth Open

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The whining cars up on the hill are missing home. They beg, where is our tomb? The answer shudders underground and in my hands are flowers. And beside me is all my family standing in a Domino row.

If I combine the only witness, slump his tongue right under mine…

Afraid to feel without a thudding chest to get the blood out. And. Tastes like clockwork, works like climate change. How? Press a thumb to my lips, taste the hard-won tip of a bee-stung corn. Size of grapefruit. Lanced on my abdomen.

Come up the riverbank, my seasick carp.

Time

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My doctor thought of Time in terms of a green wound,
a sly, leech-lidded reservoir under the skin-

Time was his wireframe glasses and the clock I punched
when he told me the forecast of those old wounds
when my life gathered around me to hug itself through this…
and in my mind I went back as a ghost to
all my future high school reunions

and did not hear my name all night.

THE VIRILE HARVEST

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In town the dust gathers. In skins of yellow dust the people pray.

The chapel wilts all week, dips in the middle. An old host. Chestnuts hit the roof during service and belief thuds into the hearts of men, frightens the women. They fear the Harvest. They know the roots are here to stay.

Paint peels off an old barn in the sun. A new cat every day.

The farmers reach into the ground, dung clung to the heels of their boots.

The sun tips water in their mouths, and something brazen and heavy clatters down the road. A patch of dust swabbed over the elbow, scabbed over the heathen ground.

The people wait for wheat to curl.

They dig up the virile harvest.

The night that

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The night that I turned thirteen was the same night that the old man down the street died and took up skateboarding and was found almost three weeks later, down by the tracks with canary-yellow fingers and a drug habit that maybe he was just experimenting with them at my age.

The night that she locked her daughter out of the house happened to be the same night that the policeman found a loaded gun in the mailbox of the neighbour’s house, which was chaotic and boarded-up during the day and where a thin woman with blue hair lay on a mattress full of wet wounds with her ear to the floor.

The night that my father lit the corner of his apron on the gas stove, threw it on the burner on his way into the fridge for another beer, looking at me and my mother from across the city where he held the people while they shivered, having to face the snarling waste of their lives, and having to resign from the police force and shake hands with the insurance representative all in one day, and having to look himself in the eye and make a promise to still believe that it mattered if you killed a spider, that it mattered if instead you blew it lightly off your palm and out of the window into the night.

Objects In Mirror

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The ambulance in the rear-view that makes you aware of
delicate bones & the crashing moments before flight.

You are too quick to find in there
the part where people grieve you-
you imagine coming to them
inside their heads
while they go to bed
thinking of you dead.

There is heat sliding over the air
there is always energy expelled
when something so large sinks-
when in the rear-view mirror

everything goes to hell.

Musical Chairs

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In fifth grade, our class chewed up and spit out a revolving door of music teachers. Our first victim was Mr. Alexander, a tall Asian man with ruthless expectations. He demanded “tone, tone, semi-tone” until we could hear it no more and locked him in the vault, which happened to be the music office. He got his revenge by leaving kids at the side of the road on a field trip, but by then it was too late- Mrs. Hyde had arrived.

Mrs. Hyde/Jekyll stamped her heels with such enthusiasm that eventually, one flew off and struck a student in the eye. Given our campaign (in progress) to record (in secret) her violence to use against her, the principal had no choice but to introduce Mr. Gilbert.

The old man disappeared on an alleged cross-country motorcycle trip. This, of course, when we had just begun to like him.

Watching out for Birds with Ruin Written on their Wings

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I watched the explosion from my chair outside,
mesmerized by little paws, dancing all along the edge
of a wall
pushed out of hoof-chewed ground-

this is the way our town burns down.

Fire licks and whines along the edges
scarring streets and buildings-
our family home assumes the shape
of some small person
shrouded, crying

next to a house departed as ash.

It is the kind of winged migration
that rides the wind too far, too fast.