My felon circumvents
the Nautilus machines—
mindless of the stylish,
wasting muscle queens—
and leans against the rack.
We study him like scholars.
As he removes his sweats,
I offer wadded dollars,
a petty cash advance.
All day he must equate
prosperity with flesh.
There’s limited debate.
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We had no latex love to give
in blighted, half-remembered scenes:
to hollow boys in acid jeans
who asked to lose their will to live.
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Joyless,
devotedly boyless.
Everything,
the way
nothing is.
The point is this:
make
me less
than the lake
in the sheets.
The horizon
just above sex:
my thoughts
and prayers—
spots
and short hairs.
My itch;
my side-stitch.
Every day
can’t
be lament.
An excuse
to lose
my shirt
for charity.
I feel,
if not real,
neon-real.
Sterile as hurt,
or parity.
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In a precisely lighted room, the CFO speaks
of start-to-start dependencies.
Says let me loop back with you.
Says please cascade as appropriate.
It’s that time of morning; we all can smell
the doughnut factory. If scent were white
noise, doughnuts would be that scent.
The factory won’t sell at any price.
The building next to it burns the animals
we experiment on. I have worked
on a few preclinical reports in my time.
The rhesus monkeys become
so desperate that they attempt suicide,
over and over again. I am legally obligated
to spare you the particulars.
How could things be any different?
Here many choice molecules have been born.
Here. This pill will dissolve like sugar.
Your last five months will be good ones.
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When it started, I had been in Gainesville for three days.
They called him the Gainesville Ripper, which sounds comical, all but the ripping.
His name was Danny Harold Rolling. It was August 1990.
Five of them were slaughtered.
I spent evenings huddled in the dorm rooms of my girlfriends.
There were lots of p-words tossed around, don’t be a pussy, say a prayer.
When he was convicted, they sent him to Starke. What a name for a town.
One drove slowly through Starke, a notoriously student-unfriendly place.
Whites were all right to stop there.
Rolling had lobster tail before the injection, an excellent if slightly clichéd choice.
Red Lobster on Newberry Road was relatively fine dining. I spent much of the nineties in Gainesville.
Got two degrees and STDs in Gainesville.
“The nineties sucked,” Marisa Tomei and Mickey Rourke declared in that ragged film The Wrestler.
No shit.
The nineties sucked, for me, in Gainesville.
There was the gay bar, the University Club, where I wore my J-Crew shirt, the Evil Flannel, where I danced and swallowed whatever the fuck.
We dropped Blue Monkey and stood on the balcony in the rainstorm.
I was the shirtless teeth-grinder in the corner with the lizard.
I was the tweaky late-night stroll by the green power plant.
I was the kid in the stacks of Smathers Library falling hopelessly in love with the poems of Donald Justice.
I fell in love, or what felt like love.
With gin.
With Salems. With a boy.
We moved downtown.
We moved into a two-part apartment complex, one blue, one pink.
We had a wedding, in 1993, and my parents came, and they stopped at Publix on the way and got a couple party platters.
The wedding was in our pink apartment.
Michael Hofmann, who lived in the blue, described it as “live-oaks and love-seats, handymen and squirrels, / an electric grille and a siege mentality.”
An alligator crawled out of Lake Alice and ate a little dog on a leash, said the Gainesville Sun.
I walked on Payne’s Prairie with Debora Greger, in winter, and imagined King Payne, the nineteenth-century Seminole Chief, on a white horse.
The egrets were white. The heron was blue.
I narrowly escaped the controlled burn.
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My mother is scared of the world.
She left my father after forty years.
She was like, Happy anniversary, goodbye;
I respect that.
The moon tonight is dazzling, is full
of itself if not quite full.
A man should not love the moon, said Miłosz.
Not exactly. He translated himself
as saying it. A man should not love translation;
there’s so much I can’t know. An hour ago,
marking time with someone I would like to like,
we passed some trees and there were crickets
(crickets!) chirping right off Divisadero.
I touched his hand, and for a cold moment
I was like a child again,
nothing more, nothing less.
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Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
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