JB

His jungle green Civic has been in my driveway for five days now, with its right side still wounded from a previous excursion with a parked car (he was petting a dog in the passenger seat). There is no possible way I can get my car out of my driveway. My Toyota Yaris is a very small car, but the driveway’s narrow waist and the broken down Honda prevent any possible escape route. He says it’s his clutch, and this wouldn’t surprise me as he’s already managed to break four clutches in three years. J.B. begins walking down the orange, muddy driveway before taking a long, final drag off of his Marlboro Menthol. He flicks the butt high into the air; its arc taking it all but a few feet from the street curb, the gold chain around his neck swinging violently.

It’s okay though, he says he’s quitting again. We exchanged our teenage boy handshakes and I open the creaking door to my house. He asks me what’s up, addressing me as kid, despite being seven months his senior. There was a lingering stench of beer and spaghetti on his breath, meatless sauce. He says he only had one beer before coming over, though the mutual laughter suggests we both know this is far from the truth. J.B. drove drunk with a scary frequency. His driving habits were dictated by the philosophy that “if it was his time to go, it was his time to go”. He hated when I resisted this logic, insisting that God made seat belts for a damn good reason.

I ask him what he did today, and he rattles on, blurring days together like words on a wet newspaper. He finally stops rambling and his excited mouth stops while forming an O. He pulls out a new book from his backpack, unwrinkled spine and all. The title reads: How to Hide You’re a$$et$, repeating three of J.B.’s favorite signs, which are likely what caught his attention in the first place. The book claims that it can answer pressing questions like whether it’s better to hold funds in Switzerland or Bermuda, and what customs officials are likely to watch out for at borders. He says the Good Will has a plethora of real good books for real cheap. He almost bought a book on Economics, just to read it, he says. This attempt was a few years too late, since he took Economics years ago and read nothing for it.

This might actually improve his handling of money, I thought to myself. How many times just this past month has he gone to the Monticello dog track to play poker. His confidence never ceased, and he would always challenge me to a game of heads-up poker. Despite his four time losing streak against me, J.B. was always down, as he says, for some gambling. Why get it if not to spend it, he would tell me. Spending money is definitely a talent for J.B., though it’s unfortunate that acquiring money is not. He looked weird in a collared uniform. His constantly shaved head looked big under the conglomerate hats atop his head. Maybe his sense of fashion forces him to quit the minimum-wage jobs he is always applying at. The last visit to Zaxby’s ended with him asking for an application, one he would never turn in again, if it wasn’t lost in the graveyard of his backseat.

I have to drive J.B. back to his house now, still not quite knowing how he got to my own. A friend or brother likely dropped him off, but it didn’t matter- he was always floating around. We push his car forward, putting the lumbering beast in neutral. He lights a new cigarette, noting that he has to finish his fresh pack so he can finally quit, and rolls down the window to my white car, a plume of white smog erupting from his mouth.

Elementary Education

Elementary Education

Chicken nuggets dragged me by my nostrils

As I carefully stepped over every gap in the cement

Speckled with the ABC gum of a hundred fourth graders

My teacher cooing behind us

Brooding over her clutch, wearing a macaroni blue jacket

The cool kids were smoking candy cigarettes

I preferred skittles, but now I crave the chalky cloud

Like a teacher’s pet stamping erasers




I worried about my dollar ten lunch

I liked apple jelly with my peanut butter, not concord grape

That flavor was a last resort for anyone without money

Now I think less of the jelly and more about the bread

I want to salt my soup less, and have

Nap time every day again, so I can dream

Of flying over fences

Grinning a rainbow of gummi worm guts

Holding a girl’s hand without hesitation,

My arm sore from a daily cootie shot

I want to pluck the stars from the sky

And put them back on A papers

Renga Experiment

group effort poem
roughly 575/77
what forms in between:



Birds perching in trees
hot dogs to relish and eat
five plumes- barbecue

Refracting red/light/prisms
an apple kaleidoscope

Bumblebees arrive,
having ran out of honey
to eat our fruit pies

Gun powder rockets soon fly;
pink dandelion explodes

Our sucrose presence,
growing under mustard sun.
The sky on fire now

Sticky arms and ice cream jones
Heat stroke, or: heavy daydream

Smoking Marlboro,
Girls in best Sunday dresses,
Denim Levi jeans

A day off to honor work
Tomorrow: bleached pants are banned

Haiku Experiment

Haiku Experimentation

My brain is a bee
Always flying and buzzing
About the honey

Groaning and creaking
Like an old house in winter
My lungs collapse, open

Thoughts come like bullets
Gorge on my fleshy peach brain
An attempt to kill

Concrete drinks water
Transforming: black licorice
Green with mold, envy

Writing a haiku
Tough as nails and hard as stone
Picking words like apples

Nature coalesced
Florida orange blossoms
Roots, branch, shoots, leaves, bloom

Floating spider webs
Relentless creation, the sign
of a new morning

Baby powder snow
Dissolving ice on a road
Salt on everything

I am the ink pen
Convinced of my permanence
Writing a statue

Sticky mud on shoes
Retreated sun behind clouds
November morning

Trading sun for moon
Sunscreen and swim suits for scarves
Autumn evening

The moon hangs so low
Even insects are hiding
Autumn evening

Shakes leaves like a lab
Cardboard helicopters float
Daybreak in autumn

Spitting bluejay songs
My freckles soak up the sun
November morning

No more grass trimmings
Hanging scent of chlorophyll
The end of summer

Hearing my own breath
A mattress spring is stretching
I know I’m alive

Write about a person...

He was whistling like he always did. Half-whistling, that is, as his mouth was at a full half part. He was too gentle to whistle, which requires the forceful projection of air out of the all but closed mouth. The air came out of his mouth naturally, like breathing. The small red truck reeked of butterscotch, his breath perfuming the car with the dissolving Werther’s hard candy that sat atop his tongue. There was an endless supply of butterscotch, their home where cigarette butts usually lie.

We were on our way to the farm to feed the cows. A 45 minute trek with decreasing urbanism as the distance increased. The whistle was soothing, as was the warm sun on my face. I usually wrapped myself in a buttery blanket and slept like a kitten, but today I just listened to the song of mixed whistles, air being pulled in through the windows, and air being pushed out of his lungs. He bought my help that day with the promise of double cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, though I would have helped him either way. He pried open a coke can top with the nail on his dark thumb, as thick and callused as his hands and handed it to me.

I was his companion, the Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. I followed him everywhere, even to early mass on Sundays where I was the only child. I would wake up to the familiar scratch of his hardened nail on my shoulder- this is how he always got someone’s attention. Still sleepy-eyed, he would slick my hair back with the same thin, greasy-toothed comb he used in his hair, still covered in pomade. Our hair would match: his jet black and shiny, mine a dark blonde. His dark skin, tanned from years of work in fields and his own natural color, was contained within a modest polo. My pale skin and thin figure was similarly clothed, in the same style polo and slacks as he. I was a miniature model of my grandfather, the yin to his yang, the white to his black.

I call him Tatay. Tatay (TAH-tie) is a Tagalog word for father, and all of his children called him this name during my childhood. The entire generation of grandchildren, learning from their own parents, attributed the same affectionate name to the same man. We knew no better- we thought this was his name. We were all his children, and he looked after us all with the same hardened hands and soft voice.

As I was his faithful companion, he was mine as well. It was he alone who took me to Boy Scout meetings in the fourth grade. His face was the only face I saw in the audience of the Clay County School District Elementary Spelling Bee. The language was his second, and he did not care for learning to spell or the fact that I comes before E, except after C. He sat in the crowd with the same beaming smile he always had on. He was watching his favorite, after all.

The truck he drives now is black and roaring. He climbs down from the mounted vehicle, the one with a ram as its logo, a more slender man. His hair is graying, no longer jet black. He moves more slowly now, and I wish more than ever that I could help him lift feed, eat cheeseburgers, and hear the constancy of his whistle once more.

Deadly Cupid Experiment

Thursdays are peach cobbler days. Most Thursdays, at least. My wife, Deborah, always made the most delicious peach cobbler for me on Thursdays, and on Tuesdays she made fresh cookies. On lucky Fridays I was greeted with my favorite dessert: vanilla pudding. She made it from scratch- not from the small JELL-O boxes of powder they sell at grocery stores. It was buttery and soft and cooled my tongue after a hot week of commuting.

Although my commute to work was only 15 minutes, it seemed like forever stood between me and my peach cobbler Thursday. I was swimming in an ocean of cars, navigating the busy boulevard like a salmon finding his spawning ground. I plan to eat a slice of cobbler for every minute I’m in the car, even if I’m completely stuffed with a rack of ribs and rosemary roasted potatoes. A glass of milk always helps it go down and tastes great competing with the hot baked treat.

I always thought Deborah would make a great mother. The kids would come home from school, throw their bags down in the kitchen and make a huge ruckus about their return from the torturous care of teachers at Grove Park Elementary. Deborah would appear from the kitchen with a tray of cookies, perfectly timed to be pulled out of the oven as the kids walked through the door. The most important element of cooking is timing, and Deborah had all the time in the world. It was me that was the problem.

We couldn’t have children for some reason. We’ve been trying for years now, ever since we married six years ago. A small ceremony near Jacksonville, Florida, in the Fall, when it was cheaper and we didn’t have to compete with the April shower lovers marrying under the rain in anticipation of blooming flowers. We wed when the leaves were falling and the trees were stretching to the sky, naked and exposed. The leaves in Florida aren’t as pretty as other states, though. When I rake the leaves in my yard, it’s the hard crunch of dead Sycamore leaves that I fear constantly. I sometimes wished we lived in upstate Georgia or Asheville, North Carolina, so the path to my car would have my walk a driveway paved with yellows and orange and cyan, but instead a drab path that no one would ever write a poem about. Her parents lived in Jacksonville, and I knew she would never want to leave them.

I was nearing the house now and I could already smell the cobbler on my plate. It was strong and familiar, even while passing the cheap burrito stand and Popeye’s chicken and biscuits that usually dominated the aroma of this street. There weren’t any bums out today, which was a huge relief. I always feel really panicked and anxious when a bum approaches my car. I try to look straight ahead at the road, or pretend I’m fiddling with the radio. I was never really fiddling with the radio, because my car had XM satellite radio, and it was always tuned to Octane, 80s rock for lameasses, and it was always at the same volume level. But I wouldn’t have to do that today, I could just drive straight to my wife and my pie and relax on the couch after a long day of data fields and cost benefit analysis of different cooling systems for buildings, which my company sold all over the southeast.

My car and house have great cooling systems. I can’t stand to sweat at all, and being a pretty big guy, almost anything will make me sweat. I always get the Freon in my car filled up at the start of every summer, when young couples are blooming like the wildflowers on Old Jennings Road, after a beautiful holy union at Sacred Heart Church. That’s where I would have my ceremony, if I could. If I were Catholic at least.

I was finally at my house, and all I had to do was traverse the difficult driveway. Whomever built my driveway decided to only use a third of the cement, maybe to cut costs or because they liked the challenge of driving over two narrow concrete ledges. The ledges were surrounded by a mote from last night’s two inch rainfall, and the five inch cliff was too much for my small Hyundai to climb over. I had to drive as straight as an arrow, and I would be home free.

I unlocked my door and opened it slowly, to try to let the aroma waft into my nose slowly. Sure enough it did, weak at first, but growing stronger and stronger as I opened the door wider and wider. I brushed my feet against the doormat that read “Got Dirt?”- a stupid birthday present from a cousin who obviously doesn’t know me. I just couldn’t risk Stephanie dropping by and going berserk over its absence.

Deborah looked great. Really great. It’s her smile, I think. It’s that motherly smile, the smile that makes the cookies taste softer and sweeter. It attracts your eyes, and it was all that you looked at when you talked to her. I asked her for a slice of cobbler before dinner. She knew I was home half an hour early, so she complied. She always does, even if I come home late. It’s that smile.

The cobbler was absolutely superb. I think she gets the peaches from upstate Georgia, where the driveways are littered with leaves the color of strawberries, tangerines, and pears. The state must be sweeter with so much fruit. She used cinnamon in her cobbler, and it made all the difference in the world. She was modest about her cobbler, but it was my favorite dessert. I think I liked it more than Friday pudding, because this tasted softer and sweeter with her smile, softer and sweeter than her vanilla pudding.

A rarely heard my house phone ring, so I was a bit startled by its ring. I hoped it wasn’t a telemarketer or someone from work. It was 8 minutes until 5, so there was a good chance. I wouldn’t answer the phone; I’d just go back to my cobbler. The name was unknown, but the number looked familiar. Not the bad familiar of your boss asking you to come in early, or the aunt who wants to ask you to fix her rain gutters. I answered the phone and heard a stern woman’s voice on the phone. She asked for me specifically, and I said this was he.

I listened intently. She had the test results from Dr. Jones, our family doctor. I was getting frustrated that Deborah didn’t have a bun in the oven, even though we’d been trying for six years. We began taking tests and giving out blood like we were O negative. She said a word I hadn’t heard recently, so I asked her to repeat it. “Diabetes,” she said.

“Diabetes?,” I asked.

“Yes.”

That was all she needed to say. There was a pause on the phone. I didn’t quite know what to say. I had to go in for more tests? I might have diabetes?

She didn’t have the answers I wanted. She couldn’t tell me why my body doesn’t control insulin properly. She wouldn’t tell me why my love was killing me.

Gingerly

Gingerly

First, match her hair with the color of rust
Or even the red clay in south Georgia.
Next, put her feet into a pair of tall boots
So I hear her coming a mile away,
Her heels talk talk talking to the ground.
What about her eyes?
Should they green like a tomboy’s,
Blue like a mermaid’s,
Or brown, like Sycamore leaves in Autumn?
After you wrap her shoulders in a thin green sweater,
So she looks like a Christmas present,
I will unravel her like a greedy child.
Will her skin will be soft
Like a stewed carrot that I crush with my tongue?
You should put a freckle on her face for each of her birthdays,
I guess she won’t get much sun.
Then paint her fingernails the same color as her fingertips
When I hold her hand too tight and it loses feeling.
Perfume her neck with strawberries or rose petals
But make sure her blood tastes like iron.

Home for the Holidays

My brother was cutting away at white construction paper with a pair of scissors too big for his hands. My parents never bought the sharpened plastic scissors that kindergarten teachers often require. “As long as you don’t run with them”, they would tell him.
He interrupted his work to look up at me with a closed mouth smile. I rarely saw kids his age with glasses, but they sat atop his nose like they had always been there, right out of the womb. The white products in front of him were supposed to be water crystal formations, as unique as his DNA. Instead, my brother had repeated a pattern for all the paper snowflakes we were going to hang on our windows. I rubbed his shaggy head with the knuckles on my fist and took a new batch to hang on our frosted windows.
Looking out of my winter retreat, my parent’s home in Florida, I saw nothing but dead grass and dirt, which even the fake snow encrusted on the panes could not hide. The snow smelled like burned Styrofoam cups or gasoline if gasoline was a convenience store sugar treat.
I hung the snowflakes with Scotch tape, tacking them onto the white windows of our red brick house. At night, when the lights outside that hung down like electric icicles, you couldn’t see the paper snowflakes, but I know they were there.
I wanted to go outside and breathe out smoke, but I couldn’t as long as my parents were around. They didn’t know I enjoyed an occasional cigarette, or that I loved winter because the water vapor in my exhale and the grey in my lungs commingle to form dragon’s breath. Even as a kid, walking to the bus stop on Laurel Lane, I would pretend to smoke a cigarette, amused by the plumes that would escape my tiny mouth. I felt older than my peers, who stuck chalk candy sticks into their mouths and pretended to exhale what their parents would never condone. I knew none of their parents smoked. Only my dad did, because my dad had to. What else would you do when driving a semi-truck for twelve hours a day? The Winston eagle on my dad’s pack was so familiar to me, even after he quit driving his truck, and stopped smoking a pack a day.
I would have to drive my car around the neighborhood, or pretend to get a chicken quesadilla and an order of nachos from Taco Bell, in order to smoke. My dad’s nose was strong, though. His olfactory once had a race with a bloodhound’s and won- how else could he always know? I would walk up to my dad, shorter than myself, and give him a big hug. He would always say the same thing to me, “you smell like cigarette.” My Filipino father and many other first-generation immigrants rarely used the plural, so I imagined the aroma to be a name brand fragrance. The newest scent by Calvin Klein: Cigarette. They already advertised in movies and television, so why not step it up and make a fragrance. Phillip Morris could be on par with Jessica Simpson, or any other trashy pop singer, and release an unoriginal scent for young girls and ignorant parents to scoop up during the holidays.
It was approaching late afternoon, and the sun was starting to go down. This time three months ago, before we fell back to save daylight, before Benjamin Franklin influenced our times yet again, it would have been bright. Brighter than Washington D.C., where it got dark too early and was cold year round from the hearts of the politicians. My brother used the approaching dusk as a reason to get an early present. “Christmas is only like, 7 hours away”, he would beg. “Please, just one”, he would bargain. He always picked the biggest present, a trick he learned from his older brother. If the biggest isn’t the best, then why bother?
I was jaunted from my thoughts by a red wrapped package landing on my lap. My father had tossed me a gift, too. This one definitely wasn’t the biggest of them all, so I assumed the worst. I told him I would open it later, that I didn’t need to open it now. I was in college after all- I could wait. I would wait. So I put the box in my room, on top of my dresser, to open later. Maybe I could open it later, when I wanted to go outside and play in the cocaine rain, the only white Christmas I can imagine in Florida.
Several hours were burned away watching re-runs of classic Christmas movies. My phone lay next to me, as dead as the grass outside my windows. No movements, noises, or signs of life came from the small, black accessory. I needed something to do, something to occupy myself with. Christmas was still three hours away, and my boredom only just began to seep in. There wasn’t even any beer in the fridge. My father liked to drink hard alcohol on holidays. Crown Royal was his favorite, and the whiskey kept his belly warm even though we didn’t have a fireplace.
I saw the red package on top of my dresser again. It looked like a book, so maybe it was a book. I rarely read anymore, not out of pleasure at least. I couldn’t imagine what kind of book my father would get me, as the only books he ever read were written by poker professionals. I pulled off the ribbon, and undid the Scotch tape that held the Christmas skin on. When I was done with the present, there was a neat pile of paper next to it. After years of scrap paper hurricanes at present time, and the wails and yells from my parents, I learned to unwrap presents with the grace of a hungry, poor child. I would slowly peel back what I was looking for, careful not to appear too excited or anxious. There was nothing but a plain brown box inside, thin cardboard that you couldn’t even ship with. I was disappointed there was no book, as if I would read it, but pressed on.
I pried open the book sized box less gracefully, missing a piece of tape entirely and ripping an entire flap off. I pulled out a plastic sleeve, and tried to see what was wrapped inside the thin layer of tissue and bubble wrap. It was a metallic box inside a box. I flicked the top of the silver box open and tried to ignite the wick with a spark of flint. It was a new Zippo lighter, fluidless and dry- as dead as my lawn. My father knew all along.

The Lesson

Look up a
meaning
for life

in a diction-
ary. Words fill
pages, but

understanding is
in life, not
arranging lines

from life
to death. We
learn that a

meaning
for life
involves

end of life
in order,
to appreciate.

Swim. Swim
against the current,
our bodies

tire and
slump. Death
defines life.


Prompted by Robert Creeley's "The Language".

District 9/10

District 9 is the newest popular science fiction release, and does a tremendous job in revitalizing a genre that is often lacking and hokey. The film employs legendary American director Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) to produce the film with lesser-known directors, writers, and actors. Despite the lack of mainstream production factors, the end product is filled with clarity of purpose, dynamic social interactions and commentary, and of course action, action, action.
The introduction of the film is done in a mock documentary style, relying on a pastiche of news clippings, interviews, and television programming to create the backdrop for the sources of conflict in the film. The story’s main character, Wikus van de Merwe, is also introduced and discussed in this style, adding to the film’s verisimilitude. Members of Wikus’s family and friends are asked to give commentary about Wikus. The audience is given negative but mysterious comments about him, which are only understood at the end of the movie. The introduction, although very different from the rest of the movie, allows the audience to relax and suspend their disbelief. The usually ridiculous scenarios, weapons, and technology gaps from other science fiction movies like The Matrix or Star Trek do not seem as far-fetched after the strong, documentary-style introduction.
The intro explains that the government opened the ship’s hull to find 1.8 million malnourished aliens. The creatures, called “prawns” by humans (although not shrimp-like in stature), look like crustaceans- complete with thin waists, claw-like appendages, and thick shell skins. The film introduces violent civil overtones concerning the relocation of 1.8 million aliens into the city. Citizens of Johannesberg began to protest, eventually leading to civil clashes between humans and aliens. Videos and pictures of facilities with species-specific service remind the audience of the recent racist past, adding to the film’s believability. The entire film is rife with irony, but does not lose its class or seriousness.
We follow the adventure of flawed protagonist, Wikus van de Merwe, as he is assigned by his father-in-law and boss to lead a military operation to evict the prawns from their slums called District 9. With the help of MNU, a military weapons company, Wikus and his team go door to door to evict prawns, often times using coercion and threats to get the necessary signatures (inky claw streaks). While delivering eviction notices, Wikus luckily stumbles onto the house and laboratory of Christopher Johnson, a peculiarly intelligent prawn. Wikus confiscates a small cylinder from Johnson’s shack which explodes onto his face and begins turning him into an alien.
The rest of the film takes place during the first 74 hours of Wikus’s exposure to the substance. His left hand begins changing into the hand of a prawn’s, by some unknown and unexplained biological phenomenon. This lucky location for first growth is especially important given that the prawns have brought powerful alien weaponry that can only be used by DNA activation- alien DNA activation. Although the movie’s coincidences and improbable scenarios create a seemingly contrived plot, the movie’s style of direction and production, combined with the familiarity of subjugation make it entirely approachable and watchable.
Although the explosions and bloody, piecemeal bodies left in the wake of the weapons is amazing to watch, and at times slightly humorous, the true brilliance of the movie lies in its scope. By choosing South Africa as the setting for the film, the obvious allusions to apartheid need not be mentioned. The aliens are transformed into the new “other”. The class system of colonialism is changed into an “us against them” situation- where humans are united together against an alien race. The cause of this ambivalence, of wanting to discriminate the aliens but not destroy them, is never understood or explained. It can be attributed towards the xenophobic meditation on race that the film undertakes, or simply as a dramatic device to spur the plot along.
Although modern science fiction films are no stranger to social commentary, with films like Children of Men and Minority Report starring big named actors and grossing millions of dollars in profit, District 9 has a key difference: the social situations which develop in this film are a direct commentary on our past, and our present. The film manages to present a popular conflict device, conflicts in race, and engage the audience in a new way. The irony of a nation still in the aftermath of apartheid advocating a system of discrimination is powerful and thought-provoking. This movie will leave the audience wondering many things (like why the prawns love cat food so much or how the movie portrays human tendencies), but one question I often ask remains silent: “Why did I spend money to see this movie?”