STRANGER DADDY (coming soon)

(Glue stick, crayon wax, and magazines, Albuquerque, 2002). Made when the author reached the end of a line, in the extraplanetary desert.

radiatin'

Collared Shirts and the Death of Christ: SHOCKING connections to be revealed!

THE PECULIAR INCIDENCE OF THE INTERSEX CHINCHILLA

"Summer can be a slothful and sinful season....."

Thus begins THE PECULIAR INCIDENCE OF THE INTERSEX CHINCHILLA, the tale of a Victorian family and their unwitting participation in the creation of a mutant race.

Hear Ms. Duva read it on Mystery radio! Check back soon for broadcast.

from POSTWAR

A woman would come. Our boy was in no hurry. He hadn’t lived that story yet. He was living on the land, providing for his family. He was a boy and a man.

There were women who would have him. His boss invited him to fix a leak, and answered her door in a nightie. That leak was sealed with religious attention, and our boy begged no hunger, no thirst: I’m in a hurry! There was the nurse who kneaded his thigh, making way for the bullet that would be his for life. But she was in a hurry, and the whites of the freedom fighter’s eyes still burned into our man’s mind, and rage is no aphrodisiac for a nice guy.

He was a nice guy. He clapped, even hooted a bit when the ice-cream girl called him into her truck and danced down to her bra, but he didn’t touch. He returned to work and pumped the swimming pool clean. He mowed fields around the bombed-out stadium so guys could forget all playing ball. He oversprayed hate graffiti with black blobs...

Assigned FEMALE

STAR PUPIL ............ The Lobotomization of American Education

When you keep a six-year-old in chairs for six hours straight,
with no recess,
with no exercise,

You are psychologically straitjacketing that kid.

Forbidding 15 minutes a day
of fresh air and a little space
is a crime akin to forbidding a child to go to the bathroom.

They complain about children going ballistic
As if it is the children's fault!

I know guests, I'm losing my cool, I tend to pretend to have been dead for 500 years, but this is the year 2007, and I am pissed!

We wonder why our kids don't become scientists and engineers, when everything we learn needs to fit on a piece of paper,
and our tests are on paper,
and we've got to follow the Book.

The military gets all that fat
federal wealth
straight from the source

But for YOUR education you'll have to depend on how much homes "go
for" ($$$)
in your area

Leaving the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free

in the piddly educations

of their tax caste.

take back the SWASTIKA

Swastika is a Sanskrit word which means "well-being."

An ancient symbol used by Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans, Celts, and many other cultures across the globe.

Energy specialists suggest it represents the flow of life force.

Carl Sagan suggested it represents a comet that veered close to the earth many millenia ago.

Take back the swastika!

from WINGS OF A BOY

He makes mother’s milk:
the black-eyed dove has flown.

He mashes nut, apple and soy
strains it through my paisley scarf
pours the spew in a syringe
shakes it to make it warm
pecks my cheek
puts the wilted babies in my palm.

Jelly heads, tiny tapered rumps, and spindly proto-wings want to bloom.
They suck and strive. A black eye bud opens one crack, drunk on a sliver of light.
Their crops balloon, they turn purple and plop, yawning out needle tongues.

.

Rise and Shine

Female Suicide Bomber

Naomi Des Moines
as the Female Suicide Bomber:
"Do I HAVE to
take the twelve virgins?"

George Washington Prays in the Ladies' Room of Lincoln Lanes Bowling

from HOW WE GENTRIFIED LINCOLN PARK

Dad got a vein tied off so they could conceive me. The white population grew by one.

In the privacy of his home Dad liked to talk like he was black. “Look at dem bruthas and sistahs!” he said to my pregnant mother as a group of children swarmed to our window.

“D’jou find your names?” he’d ask the kids, opening the door. “Oh, good!.... no? What’s your name? Precious?! I like that! Okay, honey, I’ll make sure you’re on the list next year.”

In our storefront window – a window that once displayed boxes of rice and beans and detergent – stood a life-size Santa Claus, old white man with the bushy eyebrows. Santa wore spectacles and held a quill pen, and when he was plugged in his hand swept slowly up and down his list of neighborhood children, as if considering.

“You better be good. Santa’s still got time to change his mind.” Our mottled sidewalk was host to all kinds of motherly warnings.

Dad took the list downtown to a calligrapher every December to add the new kids’ names, and watched the list evolve from DeVontes, Josés and Preciouses to Kaitlins, Matthews and Scotts

.

Backbone and Bowlbone

from WINGS OF A BOY

1991 and my legs are fabulously scabbed

I'm wearing some tropical-colored garment that bowls over the bees.

Saddam, you butthole!

My school mates laugh. I run into a pole.

His bunkmates kick him in the teeth.

1991 and he’s never had a woman

But the hands of men have been

inside

his thigh

.

Baby Grandma

Grandma married the postmaster of Dubuque, Iowa at the age of sixteen. They went their separate ways when she gave birth to another man's baby. There would be five more husbands to come.

Her kids would come home from school to ambulances - "My heart! My heart!"

Every time you upset Grandma she'd clutch her chest and say, "My heart!"

But when they sat by her hospital bed watching her organs fail one by one, it was her heart that wouldn't stop. Long after she'd passed out, her turtle heart kept beating.

She said she'd find us parking spaces from beyond the grave, and she really does.

from BLOOD HEAT

It’s a hot, nasty Chicago afternoon. I watch Mom enter the yard through the alley. Crab apples are rotting. Worms are ecstatic. She’s dialoguing with a breeze and she’s clearly pissed at the sun. She’s drunk.

“Oh, honey.” She’s come from a smoky, black-windowed kafana where she learned the barmaid’s son was born with his bladder outside his body, and rushed to America on an emergency visa, where the doctors fixed his bladder but left him with a stub of a penis.

“The kid is fourteen, and he has a girlfriend. All he wants is a penis, God bless him! We’re gonna raise the money. Whaddayou say? We’ll put on a grand gala.”

Ku Klux Klan meets State Trooper

wow

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN ELEVEN YEAR OLD

Hot damn. In fifth grade and already channeling the spirit of Oscar Wilde. The boots were Payless. Jeans: from her mecca, GapKids. Cirque du Soleil was her obsession, and she danced daily to the soundtrack, a shamanic - and very 80s - electrodance odyssey.

Recently the artist did a frenzied West African - style tribute to one of the more percussive numbers of "Nouvelle Experience" in her kitchen, with a baby blanket on her head. The audience was stupefied.

from INTO THE FOG

He proposed under the covers, with a euphoric grin on his face. The engagement lasted two weeks. We had no time to waste. I wore an electric blue minidress to the ceremony, and when we walked out of town hall, gypsies with babies on their hips flung their palms at us, whining, “please! a little something for luck on your big day!” Our honeymoon was spent driving up the coast, sleeping in a tent or borrowing the bedrooms of his teenage cousins, making love amidst plastic fashion dolls and plush monkeys.

AMOR