A Black Cat Walking Across the Street Signifies

The human psyche embraces
symmetry and that is why famous
people die in threes. That is why
Stalin, Miro and Jacques Chirac
died on the same date. Chirac, bitten
three times by his clinically depressed poodle
named Sumo still asked
that the dog be present
at his funeral despite the trans-

gression. Why do we cheerfully accept that
without three the hum-
drum nature of the cos-
mos would be analogous
to a ceasefire between
tall but slender nations? Something
like a war
to end all wars.

Two men in North
Korea have wired together three
Playstations and a modem
to test launch their missile
which is a sign of three things—


that Fyodor
Dostoevsky's father was strangled
by his serfs, that the cat is indeed
going somewhere and that
what my great-
grandfather, who was a dyslexic
radiologist said was true, “the mind
will only allow what the body can stand.”

Skyhook
for Todd Colby


Today I lost my mucus plug
which is funny since I'm actually
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and didn't expect
to get pregnant in the first
place. Here are some

facts you should probably
know about me before yous start sending
my soon-to-be-born son X-mas

presents. My real name is
Geraldine Ferraro and, coin-
cidentally, Geraldine
is the very woman who got me
pregnant. She is also the world's

first face transplant and grew
up in the same house where Robert
Lowell's poem “Skunk Hour” takes place
at the end when he is watching
the skunk put his nose into a
dish of sour cream. Edgar Allen

Poe wrote an excellent
short story on a case of
mistaken identity steeped in Fichtean Idealism
in which the ego creates and projects itself

onto the basketball court
which mirrors the political arena
where Ms. Ferraro spent most of her
formative years. But it's Schelling's

concept of "identity" which ill-
ustrates the interaction of the
individual with its counterpart, the
man and machine, deus ex machina,
fathers and sons.

Used White Wife

It is absolutely unnecessary to write serious poetry.
In fact, anyone who
even attempts to write a serious poem reveals
him or herself to be completely anti-
intellectual by throwing (his or her) brain
into that vast trash heap. Mao Zedung,

your poems are horrible (esp-
ecially “Yellow Crane
Tower” and specifically when you state that the “yell-
ow crane is gone” and then have the nerve
to ask “who knows whither?”

My used white wife writes serious
poetry about Jacques Lacan. What a mor-
on! Doubling the drama of our frequent
disputes, she wraps our newborn
son with the highlighted and underlined pages
of his lectures. She who has
the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity
more purely than Mao Zedung

wastes her time starting poems with lines like
“That we may believe its conception arbitrary...”
when what she needs to know is
that analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret
as the yellow crane
who stole the scholar from the tower that day on
the bank of the Yangtze.

Palm Trees

Once Had I a Paramour named Cesar
who was obsessed with

pineapples. (Pineapples
induce labor because there is an enzyme

in the pineapple that is
similar to one found in sperm which
is also said to induce labor.) His answer

to all could be found
in those two interlocking helices

of the Anana comosus, a duality
of form
which I believe is the perfect metaphor
for our relationship.

Cesar was not from Paraguay.
Cesar was not from

Brazil. If I had a
nosebleed he would ask

“How about a little bit of pineapple-coconut
smoothie from Jamba Juice?”

If I had a stomach virus
he would say, “It would be nice to own
a desert island where I could grow a grove

of pineapples so I googled
“How to buy a desert island for a Paramour you
love dearly”
and found out that sometimes

a private island such as Samung Island
in the Philippines goes for up
for sale on Ebay. It retails for $425,000

but given
worldwide economic problems I'm sure
you could get it for cheaper. The pro-
blem

is that not all islands are suitable
for the growing of pineapples
and my Paramour's golden dream

was to open a Jamba Juice
on the desert island but unlike all other Jam-

ba Juices, he would
use the supply from his own groves.

“It's the green revolution.
Everyone is saving energy by using solar power

and the buying of desert
islands is part of going green like the palm
tree top of a pineapple” Cesar

said. “It's the green revolution” I said

“Everyone who knows
anything is buying

the world supply of Macaw

Parrots and becoming
a botanist or farmer.”

(Note: there was a thunderstorm last night so I couldn't post bc my internet was out...so...this is yesterday's poem!)

A French Film / Once I Saw


To relieve some / deep-seated
about a fille / who cuts her flesh
psychological pain. / Because she thinks
forward is illuminated / history will flow
in loop-a-doop letters / then the desire graph will bleed
a manuscript / and that if you only
the mystery of / the medieval world
the language / could learn
anhanga / seeken
itself sequentially. / Would reveal

Isn't you? or is / it me? that it's never
It's always a mis- / placed dish; This is a customer
about that stuff? /Lacan's
service call regarding / your unpaid debt.
Toujours about / getting the girl, be-
pile up and / you realize what a
trayal. Mousier / you loved and let go because

What a silly girl / She should cut back
grows / skin where it should go.
at the marrow / where the poem really
ly go / should real-

Hey Danny!!!!!!

Here I am climbing Mont Blanc with my posse. That's Nuchu and Kolimba to my left and Horace on my right. The climb was pretty tough but thanks to my guides Nuchu and Kolimba, I was able to summit 3 hours before sundown. Do you like my necklace? I traded Nuchu for it for 3 Snickers bars. Her mom back in Swaziland makes them and sells them. OMG I'm so glad I got one directly from Nuchu because she says her mom asks for 5 Snickers bars and I don't even think that that would be worth it lol. Anyway, I really don't have time to write a long email from the MONT BLANC and Horace is getting all of the food ready for the trekkers even though I WOULD RATHER STARVE than eat that food again lol. Anyway, I'll be back in Burbank soon. Hope you like the pic cause it's really a typical foto from the Alps.

Love
Gretchen

Law & Order SVU

At least, I thought, being a
serial killer gives you
some sort of direction in life.
The rest of us, who don't resort to stuffing
the cut up bodies of prostitutes in suitcases
and throwing them into Lake Erie,
have to deal with the ennui of just
being by taking up hobbies such as
the therapeutic art of fly-fishing.

In the poem “Treading Water”
Ben Friedlander writes “a Styrofoam
cup obliterates the
world.” Being a direct descendant
of Plato, Ben probably knows that
he was a high
general in the Peloponnesian War
and it was during the great battle
with the Mongolians that he was
inspired to write
the best line of The Republic—
“great crimes are the outcome
of a nature full of abstraction,”
which is an obvious reference
to Russian cosmonauts coercing
their citizens to embrace
the American dream.

What I like about Olivia Benson, the am-
bitious and emotionally driven
detective is how unambiguously she
embraces continental philosophy
(and Ben Friedlander). She never
writes abstract poetry
about the Special Victims
Unit. As Hargitay puts it
in an interview entitled “The Missing
Occasion of Saying Yes,”
“Plato is not only a competent, street-
smart cop, he's also an empathetic
man who can respond emotionally
to victims of terrible crimes
without compromising his professionalism.”

UNOVER or
(United Nations Observer Mission to Verify the Referendum in Eritrea)

Because they sell Pure brand gas
at the Salem Country Store
Benny, an immigrant from Eritrea,
has asked my husband Craig to
paint an American Flag on the canopy outside
(which is the logo
for Pure Gas) to comply with
the company's regulations. Benny
tells Craig that in Sweden the girls didn't like
him because he was too short
and in America they don't like him because
he isn't black enough so he
married a poor white Southern
girl with one purple eye and one
green one and a uterus
that looks like a sieve. She bears
no young. The Salem

Country Store sits on a sink, where the water
filled caves beneath your feet are a secret home
for some unusual creatures- like the cave
crayfish and freshwater eel. These are rare
species only found in
the Woodville Karst Plain.

Today marks the end of mothers.
What could we do but haul an old goat
up Mount Rushmore
and slit its throat to celebrate the
equinox? Today at the hospital cafeteria, my
colleague, Operation Room Technician Ana,
told me that a 300 lb
man with an Aquanet Can up his ass came into
the OR. I continued to eat
my chili and then Craig called saying
Benny's wife, that total bitch, told
him to stop painting mid flag.

Pirate Standoff
for Anne Boyer


I have been a husband, a cop, an illegitimate
cousin and now I am a sharecropper.
As a sharecropper you are told to
google “octopussy” at least 16 times
for best results and then the person who owns
the land sells formaldehyde diapers to you at the
baby boutique (which sits on the
land you farm) for $16.95 each. There is a sign
upon entering the baby boutique
that reads “Most people in Africa have blue eyes
and most Swedes are technological inventions
that have short shelf lives so get back
to work.” There's also
a gym under the boutique called “Art of the Catwalk,”
where you learn to pole dance
because everyone knows that Baruch Spinoza
(high prince of philosophers)
was buried with a
Lil Mynx Removable Dance Pole
a few days after those high seas bandits
overtook the Maersk Alabama
shouting “God is the indwelling.
Mombasa,, we're here.”

The History of Asemic Writing as Told by Our Asemic Writer's Illustrator

In the Voynich Manuscript
our speaker, King Rudolfo the Eighth (who is also an
amateur herbalist
with an extensive knowledge
of the powers of chamomile develops
a false writing system of nymphs
who predict Morgellon's disease, an unexplained
dermopathy wherein spools of black and red
thread emerge from the patient's skin.
Because when a contract is awarded
by the CDC to Kaiser Permanente's Northern
California Division of Research to assist
in the investigation of this condition
the bodies of the homeless will be
drawn into our manuscript by our illustrator
King Rudolfo the Eighth.

Lasers in the Jungle


I was at a union party last year and this girl
was telling me about how her
mom is allergic to everything--everything? I asked.

Everything, she answered
even the earth's magnetic field.

I've heard Paul Simon sing
about the boy with the baboon heart

one to many times today. No
wonder he was sued. Have I told you about

how Edie Brickell's band
drugged my husband with PCP-laced walnut
cookies about ten years ago in Dallas?

What a duo. In 1906

French physicist Bernard Brunhes
proved that the earth's polarity

reversed by taking warm honey and
pouring it over a
Taung child's (A. africanus) smallish

mandible. His life of seed-eating, sex
and reproduction is common
in generalized

endotherms. Humans
arn't cheetahs, you know—they don't
run their prey to the ground. The cost

of bipedal walking: a bubble allergy.

Dear Jen Knox:

You've been tellin' me you're a genius
since you were seventeen

so can you please tell me

why Wislawa Szymborska's poem
“Brueghel's Two Monkeys”

has two monkeys chained
to the floor in the first stanza? I mean,

is that even possible?

Let Shark Meat

Let the rich demolish the rich, enzyme
the catalyst. Let nothing stop
my psychologist's wristwatch checking.

Let nuclear piss eradicate
hypnagogic hallucination, goldfish's suck
mouth swish endlessly for his tail swirl.
Let the dumb maid ask does tarragon tea
have the power to cure bunions?

Let it be known that dogs have 4 blood
types; cats 11; cows around 800. Let Alas-
ka. Let Pompeii. Let Botulism the rim
of you're the last tin can left.

Let mercury fish apocalypse the warm ocean
syphilitic and humping. Oh let
elephant AIDS, llama tampons, platypus barf.

Let the rich dismantle “The Song
of the Humpback Whale,” meta-
morphic rock quake the palm's fault lines,
the vaginal canal fill with sparrows.

A Warm and Witty Transsexual Prostitute


The only thing that will get the sound of Manuela
in All About my Mother screaming Esteban!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
out of my head today is

reminiscing about how I wrote a famous
conference paper on Trench warfare wherein

I argue that Wash-

ington DC is not, in fact, an
astrological hub of prepubescent

miracle workers with green
skin like most of the lit-
erature suggests. (It took some time but

all the historians cite it now
and that makes me feel pretty good).

Times are tough and Sally told me that to
compare everything
from my pregnancy to the high cost
of dishwasher detergent
to the Russo-Japanese war

is a bit misguided but I think she's just
jealous that I am able to

wield metaphors like “trench war-
fare is the fort-
ification of the film industry when actors

and actresses dress in multicolored
robes like cakes in the shape

of Christopher Columbus's head
you eat on Christmas."

Don't you get it?

Sally, said I,

there are only a few things in my life
that I must hold onto—the title

of this poem, my new-
found fame as an historian and you, Sally, you.

Metal Detectors On

The poor taking too big a dog bite out
of the debt millennium
and not rich enough
to be a vegan or to install organic diapering
systems designed by poets
with trust funds. If your baby touches

mine with a twist of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese
I am going to call you
“black boy.” Craig and I were

going to take
dynamite and porridge
to the landfill tonight to find
diamonds under the corpse-light of the moon.
(It's our anniversary, you see).

Once, stuffed in an Oldsmobile's car door
at the Pick and Pull I found a slice of Visa
but it took
beating a junkyard dog
with a club to get it. Not that I

don't envy your spiked collar.
Not that the global cholera problem has been solved.
Justice for Baby Amit!

The far right,
workaholics, pamphlets. Just the idea of Guy Ernest

Debord makes me too resentful
to move. I tried to explain to my beloved that

Slumdog Millionaire is a stupid movie
with an extra stupid soundtrack

and extra stupid cherry on top child actors
and that you, Baby Amit, are the slumlord.

Dear Oprah:


There are so many ways to treat the octomom
so please don't stop publishing O.
We were going to dismember
the octomom no sorry we were going
to shred the octomom
with a paper shredder like her
financial difficulties I'm sooooo sorry
all of my colleagues are going
out tonight to drink tequila and throw tomatoes
at the octomom to make
an omelet they hatched eggs forever
like chickens or Dexter.
There are eight eggs in the Justice Omelet
I made the octomom
eat all of the eggs at Winn Dixie and then
I begged Dr. Phil to come
on the octomom's forehead
because that's what we
do when we don't have a skillet
and I love porn, don't you?
There are so many ways to treat the octomom
because when I was a little girl
all I ever wanted was a baby octopus, didn't you
or were you more of a mini octopus yourself?
(PS I think a green tentacle is emerging from
my vagina which leaves 7 more to go. Yay!)
Do you know that there are 8 eggs
in a figure 8 and that the octomom
was born in October with 8 ovaries androgynous
and quivering
ovaries because she will die
of ovarian cancer like my dog which
is not what we want because we are treating her OK.

Night Blooming Cactus


grows in Jamaica.
Birth forth at sun down; It is right

sided. It is a major heart remedy.

As if caged in wires, feels like a wire is
digging into the affected part.
Whole body feels... as if caged.

Pain is so violent it makes them cry
out in agony. Worse deep thoughts.

Blood always seems to be in the wrong place.

He becomes stupid.
Sharp vice like grip?

Cardiac patients have dreams of
falling. Violent dreams of falling. Tincture from

the leaves from the two-year-old plant.

A picture of an elderly man
with dribbling prostrate etc.

Frequent sticks in the heart. (As if the heart
would stop beating if he moved.)

Bad news (Often you can trace it back to divorce.)

Deep sighing.
Sad stories. Became very wealthy with one remedy.
Flocked

to him. Made more money
and more money. Built up this reputation.

Brain cells go pop every time
you take it. Introduced by the old school as an

inhalation when the blood vessels were
contracting. Anxiety during the menopause.

They have to run to the window for fresh air.
Feeling of foreboding.

Did the porch just blow away?--------When panic
attacks, yoga mom-------------Buddha baby. Stand
with your feet-------------------comfortable distance
apart. I used to be---------------lofty; now I am led
to speculate? The----------------poem-columns hold
their ground. Lift baby--------------Jenga no straighten
baby Jenga and as--------------------you bring your weight to
the right side think----------------------about what Condo-
leezza Rice could have---------------------been, music-wise
if she had only followed her God--------------given talent.
With zebra wood, dwarfed-------------------cherry trees outside
the scraped south----------------------------scrapped by. Don't you see,
Randolf?—nothing-------------------------crumbles like a set of fingers.