Phantom Laundry Read online

  Rewriting Persephone

  According to child labor lore, adorable germ factories get to be the sweat shops we buy into, seeing as a mother from earth, not hell, guarantees the northern hemisphere's underweather. Her weaned daughter's so hooked on Pom juice fixed with antioxidants, she can't get out from under, no choice but to divide her fickle year like a bicoastal: fifty Bel Air and fifty Empire building, at Valentine night choke-cherry-red as the pinpoint on a dopefiend's hypodermic.

  Best Wishes of the Flu Season

  Gotta love the laptop commuters on the Allied Double Ark. Two of everyone, 'nough antibody soap to dry up the West Nile. Best wishes of the flu season, overgrown with touch-me-knots landings.

  Bedroom communities, seemingly immune, not to be sneezed at. The chicken pox crossing Abbey Road, Ringo around the Rosie, pocket full of EmergenCee. Viscous, viscous. We all glob now.

  Name-Dropping (2)

  About when Hawke Wins Lit, Titanic crashes into a Goldberg, makes goldmine out of cold drowned pauper and pawed little rich girl. Lazarus begot Krueger and Myers, Voorhees and Leatherface. Queen L. croons I'll Be Seeing You but audiences like you can't see faces the Academy wants remembered. No clips of performance captures either. Starlet Blockbuster thanks secret agent, God. Her Anne Frank's a flower in the attic.

  Prayers for the Global Warmers

  Back to School by the Fourth of July according to the ads, or summer got busted. Time to get wrapped up in some names. The bait and switch of hybrid seizures such as false fall, carnivorous Wintour. At least in the Where's Waldo heaven no planet's unpronounceable, sky crowded out with horny gods's annihilated nymphs. Losers are keepers. Bad hurricane's labels get relegated to some hell of fame.

  First Frost, New York

  Continually, as October weeds out the majority of false Edens, the hollow Eve finds us sweet teeth bobbing for apples. Scratch us so we can start over, so we can turncoat through iron-maiden turnstiles. Crosstown ride where the Lord give uth and take uth away, flasher whose jimson got jammed in slamming doors. We might miss an apocalyptic eclipse, but the river-frontiers burst in the Eerie Canals. House and Garden Reader's headphones corkscrewed as snakes whisper out, get the hell.

  For the Losers in Fairy-Tales

  In the woods that yes-man Simon's yesterday's noose for Hangman. House and home eaten out of, can all the burnt-orange Dorito crumbs still hurry us there? So many wolves proved delusional, the granny's postmortem turning up no outre canines or bodies in the body like nesting dolls. Little men no more snap in half, blood never fills shoes, plots and pockets can grow no further holes. Apple in little parings that won't lodge in the virgin's throat to make her a pretty museum mummy. No rampion to hanker after, no firstborn regifted since the woods went paperless, ungreen. See the omega witch in her high-rise kitchen pining for meat condoned under some former regime? Where there is hexing the substitutes, also thankful for the oven none can heave her into. Her barred balcony over a buxom city isn't, to her soundless mind, female. Among the jackpot of punishing lacks she fingers a thread of ivy feigning a once upon a time braid.

  Valentine

  Yes, My Space is a great antibacterial against viral video invasion, Facebook features are optional, inbox never gets unwrapped, instant massages the ego and sexting sets its own privates policy, but revenge is still a cold best gotten from a kiss.

  Divorce, Mon Amour

  Syndicated sob sisters say no way to calling shared pets after book titles. He's wifeless now, the guy who once owned two tortoiseshells and with his wife named them Kama Sutra. One in the loft, one with the ex, he's stuck with half a guide, as if some saw had severed Holy from Bible. So many hoarders and bibliomancers who use animals and tomes like familiars to make spells that don't work. Everything his wife didn't take he gave away or hocked, is how he closes. Others put on continuity this pair put together. Recollections crabby as lice that have burrowed in all be scalded away by us usurpers of the used. His and hers now ours.

  Without Wings

  With you, hushed pal, in hideous library atrium in winter. Your winter not my hypothermia, your changed-topic hush not my silent treatment, your engine not my station. Thank you, powerless chum, maybe I'm sorry? Only a leather couch we sit on, not the blood ox skinned for it, only the army of bookworms murmuring through metal detectors and not a pack for a lover to cut a rival from. Returned volumes thud in their aluminum bin: not a crypt. No references to leapers from the balcony who've expired on these tiles, weather's our only prophecy. Scrubbed of metaphors, your equable glance tells me zilch about gore absorbed from a floor or face. Ally whose exit never cracked the ticker, no one I know's violence gets stored up to make spring's rising temps, relationship's put out-eyes, lit's scorched Petrarchan martyrs. Pulp bibles and best cellar gods, how will you ward off my fever and braille?

  Have You Checked the Children?

  Oohs and ahhs from a nonparental unit just stoke the seething newborn's inferno. Chubby dukes hailstoning shoulders and jumping jack tootsies trampling the lap, to him I'm milkless as crack-rock or a moo-juice carton cow jumping over the moon. The fever grinds out jewels that even your bandages weep. Virgin territory do not two genetic lonelinesses make: already he's a pro at steamrolling Rockabyes, his bones before words staking their real-estate claim in gum.

  Mirror

  A stone's throw kills mirror's two birds. Prettiest pleaser meets Prince who doesn't give a damn about distinctions, just wants to mount the arsenic-white narcoleptic in her glass capsule. Necessity tweaked by later versions in which Envy of course survives, advancing the plot. Demise in the banishment and furnace shoes. Scaffolding, brick, demolition--paid to the facade. Through twinning engine outing psychos that quiver in a lift’s blind corner, my shot to run like hell, my proviso for the subject and object closer to disappearance. Mind's eye double vision that goes from huff and puff and blow my glass house down and back to permanent object and good on paper.

  Mad

  Dr. Funk comes up with vitamins. Saves the children, starves the cold. In the Bedlam do all want a Bonaparte? Lone fringes lick their fingers after eating Napoleons.

  Surgical Reflections

  Numbers go numb, dumb trumps lonesome, morphine's a damp gown. Scraps for the dingo, gauze bale of beats that screech where the night-owl nurse takes my breath away. AWOL my sterile flynn, MIA my Rasputin who cleaned my revolting body, my revolution body. Who hid the Body when Brain drinks Ether. Tense confusion; remembership drive's a chapter 11. Pulse just sweeps back back in whitecaps like dishwasher water, again in the state of Back, Back—as in count, not come.

  Promissory Note

  I’ll be a good boy, I’ll be a nice boy—one hundred yards at all times between you and me, just one sweet from the day-door of the advent calendar. No extras from central nervous system. Five hundred yards and counting. Five hundred years, if that’s all it takes. No lonelyhearts note, no explosives. And, Leibchen, you’ve been awfully good too, a law unto yourself, at attrition a genius. But I here I go again, speaking ill of the undead when I should just shut the fuck up. Reader, don’t try this at home. Viewer depression advised.) To the letter of the law I’ll listen, I promise, I’ll wash the checks and change my Itunes, in my poems if not in life I’ll burn effigies not exes, so many ways to skin the nice kitty yowling on the fire escape but I won’t try, I’ll keep the babies’ breath safe by not inviting babies. Nice kitty, tuxedo stray, no crone's familiar, what’s a missing ear, what’s a missing squeeze? Goody Jones, Goody Me: how soon the Goody becomes a burnwitch. To the letter of the law listening. I’ll hold my horses; they won’t trample anyone. We don’t call it blood, do we, we call it wisdom, the impacted tooth no fairy wants so swallow it instead.

  Canine Songs

  All the tricks I learned to not be alone: to bitch or not to bitch, retrieve, Mommy's dogs are a barking, play dead, roll over and rove, nip, bad boy no bite. I understand tone. I understand a helluva lot more than tone. Now that I'm wormed and unref
ormed, extract my microchip, full-moon howl the house where I grew eunuch and arthritic while the children remained children. Yawning and stretching into its tatty pickpocket robe, Love blubbered for its own albatrosses—they hung pinned, like professional laundry or old school paparrazi candor shots, from a roped, wobbly horizon—and to give itself a smile every day or so it dangled gristle, begged me to beg. Wishes outlasting bones. Caesar a pack-leader.

  Wireless

  My rollover minutes running out, my nights and weekends not truly unlimited, passcode invalid, underground searches in vain for service or self, please try again then the unit dies, my SIMpleton card gets lost, get the plan upgraded, more minutes, pictures, live aspect ratio autofellatio on audio and video, delete the excess messages of text cuz memory's 100% full, words fall apart, you becomes the letter or the forbidden turn, God forbid now I become an emoticoniclast, let me call u from my land-line while my lifeline still runs long, these voicemails have come faraway for their 21 day save, double fortnight a coach once took delivering epistle, can't we put to death bad-news instant messengers, press star or pound to strike or keep, lock my drunken-dialing keypad, change my ringtone to mimic a species on the endangered list, alter the phone’s wallpaper to the stormy-toned forest and the pixilated city where bad numbers and prank calls, ID restricted, still trickle through.

  Human voices arouse us, flood may blanket my entire contact list, a clone Noah chucking a million handsets from his deck, ravens and doves he’ll keep buzzing till someone says pronto.

  Goth-Rock Youth

  No Memorial Park for defunct gothrock clubs: Voodoo, Eldritch, Necronomicon, all ten years folded. Hitched now and towheaded, the Goth rock fans still wear Dracula black. Only the the Goth from Sunset Park wears navy-blue; she’s somewhere between the extremes. “I’m older now. I wear gray and blue, like a civil warrior.” What’s Sunset Park like, I want to know. She says, “It might be called Park Between Dog and Wolf. Have I taken some terrible pictures." Her theory: black protects mourners. The graveyards were sets; the DJs in the nightclubs experimented like mad scientists with us, pouring one sound into another, frenzying us closer. On the dance floor, we drank vinegar to make ourselves look paler by daylight. Acid and mescaline regressed us; we made churches and congregations with our fingers, like kindergartners. do. In record-breaking July, Carmela the Ultra Goth from Metropolitan Avenue leaked white makeup on the pavement near the Astor Cube, which two diminutive Japanese women were putting their shoulder to. A Bizarro world too much to spin. Talking to Carmela, with my Fire Hydrant Red Insane Stain hair dribbled down my neck like zigzags in an Easter Egg. The bouncers certified our fake ID’s and stamped us like human visas, and Sunday mornings, too late for church, we woke to fading tattoo faces on the roofs of our hands.

  Family Album

  The Mansons tended a community clothing pile at Barker and Spahn. Pick the flowergirls, dig up creepycrawlers, leave something witchy. The air of the City of Angels grew ripe with Tate and Labianca during the unlovable summer of fear. Old Blue Eyes went into hiding, Mia missing in action. In the hall of piggy justice, the family were the superfriends and the legion of doom. Sadie giggled. Katie sketched. Leslie looked bored. Supermanson X'd myself from the world because to him it was Kryptonite. Only Predator-to-Mr.-Nice-Guy Squeaky's free four helter skelters later

  The Descending

  To go to hell, simply swivel back head like Regan McNeil. Peep at vaporized Sodom or the zombie girl on the path, else play strip-poker on Sabbath, or munch certain Winesap or pomegranate. One false move for a token, morally bankrupt treasury of false notes and moves. Must be some precipitation in hell from all that goddamn crying, bring a Totes. But no, only purgatory, an all night launderette, all you can breathe hot air from the spin-dryers never empty, bleached linen restrictions. Here we all get stoned on the worthless drugs of Everlast and Neverend, no conceptions, no immaculates. All this finger to the bone work just for some off-color clothes? Next life I'll be chopped liver, keep my devil's playground pristine, a birthday suit my Sunday best.

  Rooms

  A Brighter, Superior Box

  Handle with Care. Care of. Car-Rt Sort. Return to sender. He learned those terms when he was a kid, getting the mail from his parent’s box. The mailbox was knocked down repeatedly by boys in cars who rode around with baseball bats. Each time, his parents replaced it with something brighter and superior. No matter how dignified or indomitable the box, boys knocked it down, and mail still came for the previous tenant. His parents never moved. They stayed in that cottage throwing that woman’s mail out, buying new mailboxes, refusing to let these setbacks change their plans.

  Grand Prize Winner

  For the twentieth or thirtieth time, he’s turned in the paperwork with the postal service. The latest request hasn’t been honored yet, and no mail has reached him here. If he’d won a fortune and the authorities in charge of fortunes tried to contact him with a congratulatory telegram, he would have no way of knowing it.

  1-800-HANDOUT

  The mail should come to a studio apartment in Long Island City. His friend who rents the apartment is in Bangkok for the entire month with her boyfriend. She wanted to move to New Mexico but settled for Long Island City, which is a version of the desert. Phone-order mattress warehouses, billboards for expensive vehicles, an elevated freeway he can hear and see every waking moment. All his hand-me-down furniture is here, donated from his old places. He thinks that hand-me-down makes it sound somewhat invaded, but sexy. Less sterile than given.

  The Earplugs Make the Man

  Two cats, one vicious, one rambunctious, both functionally infertile, use the furniture as Territory: they hide under it, claw the fabrics, mark table-legs with chin-rubs, claim surprisingly hard desktops for periods of sleep that seem more like narcolepsy than napping. Territory is not property. He knows the difference by now. He thinks giving up everything means he can have even more places in his future, he can keep changing the view, reading the books on other people’s shelves. That’s territory. People have described him as territorial. He likes to invade, but shrinks back from being invaded. Also he’s been called cold. He should come from that place in Canada, not a province, not a place-name, not an oxymoron place-name, like Long Island City. Northwest Territory: arctic tundra, uninhabitable. He only feels warm for the wrong reasons. He thinks they’re the right reasons: two arms around him, why should he pretend to feel something when he’s paid for his own past insincerity? Supermarket aisles pour out their aspartame love songs. He wears ear plugs sometimes to ward off these infectious tunes, even when he is in love.

  After Watching Certain Documentaries on the Manson Family

  Like a crime-scene technician, he requires too much proof. Such a call for evidence rules out people saying things like the following: Look at Him, He Loves Love, Doesn’t He Just Love to Be in Love?

  Customs and Immigration

  His body is a kind of property. For example, his mother told him when he was little how other people might try to touch his private parts. When they were children and fought all the time, his cousin told him to get lost. Get off my property. The cousin’s hand was at his crotch whenever he said it.

  The Gift of Clean Sheets

  Though he has little right, he wants to say and do the same thing when his predecessor, the former housesitter, his other friend, drops by with the sheets she’s washed. Why wash the sheets? It’s considerate, but why bother? Is she covering something up? Did she bring someone here? She would have told him. He thinks she should have used her opportunity to bring someone here: she lives with her parents, something he could never handle. In his own way he’s just as homeless, but not as familial.

  Virgins

  He goes to make the bed, picks up the clean sheets, but the friend says, No, Wait. She insists that there is a specific way to make it and she must help him. The skirt must adorn the bottom frame, the fitted sheet must be folded around the mattress just so. She was a virgin unti
l she was twenty-five. She doesn’t know how he envies that fact. He wishes he could go back again to not knowing how to kiss, how to produce the overhyped conclusions. The borders become so obvious again, whenever it’s over and it’s time for numbers and pleasantries, when all the secrets of the other have to be sussed out. He holds back from orgasm so often with this other or that other, to keep the sweet, sweet arrangement going as long as possible.

  No Laser Surgery Necessary

  Used to carrying unwieldy things from his all his apartment-hopping, he lifts the bulky mattress off the bed. It’s stained with ink, not blood or semen or piss. Pens used to explode in his pockets in grade school: a bid for attention by means of self-humiliation. If you won’t mark me, I’ll mark myself. Now they explode on the bed when he leaves them there uncapped when writing something he hopes will be published or at least read by someone else. Posturepedic tattoos. His body has no such insignia: is it property or territory? Does he really know the difference?