Shotgun Style

My man carves belt buckles out of good tin. Folds it over flat and then gouges out the patterns. Says he chalks them designs out on his cell floor all day and lays awake all night thinking of me with his hot hands. I believe it.

Last April he sold eight at the rodeo. Eight buckles sold, eighty dollars for the fund. Says he did out the math and he can have more than two grand when he gets out. I like to think of this and sometimes I don't. I like to think of: my man's work done by his rough hands, hanging over some hood boy's pants, the buckle shining down Elysian Fields on a stolen bike, flying free that way, dirty with oyster grit from the Market that way. I don't like it when I think of: some brat wearing it on St Charles, catching a streetcar, all glowing in the Louisiana night, buckle polished clean. Makes me crazy. I keep an eye out for them buckles that's his but people think I'm looking dirty at them and they cover their crotches, turn away. I would too.

A Man Worthy of Your Attention

Lizard Man

Ahead, a child stands beside the road. Cam slows the truck to a halt and rolls down the window. The girl steps forward. She looks over her shoulder, then back at us. She is barefoot and her face is smeared with dirt. She wears a brown dress and a green bow in her hair. A string is looped around her wrist and from the end of the string floats a blue balloon.

"Hi there," Cam says. He leans out the window, his hand extended, but the child does not take it. Instead, she stares at his arms, the coiled dragons. She takes a step back.

"You're scaring her," I say.

Cam glares at me, but he returns his head to the cab and his hand to the wheel and gives the girl his warmest smile. "Do you know where we could find Cherry Road?" he says.

"Sure," the girl says. She pumps her arm and the balloon bobs in response. "It's that way," she says, pointing in the direction from which we've come.

"About how far?" Cam asks.
"Not the next road but the next. But it's a dead end. There's only one house." She flails her wrist and the balloon thunks against her fist.

Cam glances at the cereal box. "That's the one," he says.

"Oh," the girl says, and for a moment she is silent. "You're going to visit the Lizard Man. I seen him. I seen him once."

Cam looks at me. I shrug. We look at the girl.
"Well, thank you," Cam says. The girl gives the balloon a good shake. Cam turns the truck around and the girl waves goodbye.

"Cute kid," I say. We turn onto Cherry.
"Creepy little fucker," Cam says.

Museé de Zoologie, Lausanne, Switzerland

Past the dusty dioramas of otters and sloths,
of roe bucks tangled in endless antler clash,
past the cases of the pinned iridescence
of Nabokov’s lepidopterae, the jarred hearts
and flensed abdomens of typical human
specimens, beyond taxonomy and belief
are the glass cabinets which contain
the reliquaries of the lesser saints—
some poor mother’s water-headed baby,
and one with a parasitic twin, a limbless
lifeless fetus, and a double-faced kitten,
a six-legged lamb and a cycloptic piglet—
suspended in their dreamy brine
after gathering a few breaths or none,
each having too much or not enough
of some essential thing, which is,
in the end, the source of all suffering.

Corn, caskets & Max.
A few things go horribly wrong. The beginning
becomes the ending &, dear reader,
there is no ending. The people come and go

and then not appear. Most are seen
from far away. Grain bins lean in to listen.
Max stumbles home with a penis
inked onto his forehead.

Ominous belly-growls from deep
forest. A cold wind off many brown rivers.

I am writing this last.

I wasn’t native, and was too young
to adopt the mongrel

brio of polyglot crackers, refugees,
runaways. I didn’t like fritters or chowder,
or any attempt to render the stubborn

elastic gastropod palatable. My embouchure
never developed. Others held the spiral—
sawed off and sanded smooth—to their lips

to signal meals, a change of wind.
I merely spluttered.

But I loved its tender pinks,

the colors of secret human tissue
I had yet to witness, the colors of dawn

and sunset. I wanted to unroll
its brittle circles, to go back to the first
moment its cells knew their purpose: Milk

or Rooster, Hawk-wing or Queen.
I wanted to understand accretion, how long
it took to build a place of refuge.

I wanted to understand why
such beauty spent its life

underwater, gorgeous for no reason.