by PY

Today and every day I am a kitchen sink,
and I fill up.

Dry hands have no use for getting wet with
grease, old food, and Dawn.
Yesterday’s uneaten bits of rice and corn
mingle saucily with broken eggshells
and whatever chicken guts were scraped off,
raw,
from a thawed breast.

Dry hands will not touch these today.

No; they will surely opt for
the peace of a freshly baked pie,
the clean of a new dish,
and the calm of forks from drawers.

Eventually, though, a tornado will come and
clear me out,
sucking my mush down
the garbage disposal drain.

The storm will raze my fields of
unidentified food remnants and dirty dishes,
and I will be as Clean as Kansas again.

Eventually, I will empty,
but not today.

You are not the first man I have eaten.
I’m telling you this so you’re not surprised
to meet a John, a Jonah, and a Jacob
mud wrestling deep inside of me.
They’ll seem familiar to you
dressed and garnished
well prepared and half chewed up
just like you were before I gorged on
your sloppy innards like a lady and a tramp.

Do you remember when I stole you
from your bed, piece by piece?
How I swapped out your body part by part
with some heavy stones I stole
from the frothy river bank where we first met?
Do you remember me cradling your head in my arms,
hushing your sweet song of nothings,
afraid of waking your raging sleeping father,
as I carried you out of his house
and into to my windowless van?

No? Well, I’m not surprised.
They never remember the work I put into them
when I put them deep inside of me.
They never remember the hook and the line
the sinker, and kitchen sink they washed in.
They never remember the half eaten apples
the gravity that fell on us in delight,
or the sound of the honey moon dripping
its sweetness into the brew of the night.

by ML

by PY

Long leg hairs mark my
prolonged solitude. And, like them,
I am told sometimes that I am a
dark, coarse, and useless
thing.

Are never finished

Thousands of little nubby pink erasers
Are scattered around my home town
Every one is lying like a boat in a desert,
Every one is constantly searching
For something to rub up against
Every one is looking to be rubbed into little shreds
That can be swept off and away with one hand.

Millions of little yellow tubes of half gone lip balm
Are flying around in a balmy fever,
Yellow and thick buzzing with a rage,
Looking for a pair of lips to smack upon
Looking for a tongue delightfully count
How many licks it takes to peel off its two layers.

Several pork buns from the yum cha
Are lying in a pink box, corpse cold,
Patiently waiting for someone’s mouth.
I’ve had one in my mouth, but I didn’t swallow the insides,
I only ate the fleshy outer skin, the baked outer shell
Reveling in the sweetness it revealed.

One empty full bed in the corner of my house
That hasn’t held me through the cool hue of night
Because I’ve been too busy writing about erasers and lip layers,
And pouring out the hum of a yum-cha that steeped in my head
Onto the floor below me like accidents.

by ML

by PY

I give Monday to my Atheist Mother,
who looks nothing like me and speaks very loud.
In return, she gives me her neuroses.

I give Tuesday to my Sometimes Father,
for no better reason than to spite him.
He repays me with a joke that is lost in translation.

I give Wednesday to my Bulldozer Sister,
who lives forever in the middle of the week.
She tries to give Wednesday back to me, insisting that she cannot accept such a gift.

I give Thursday to my Sitting-down Brother,
of course.
He returns the favor with short sentences.

I give Friday to my All-Weather Friends,
in hopes that they use it to seek out my company.
They give to me whatever they can afford to spare.

One day, I’ll give Saturday to my Treasure-Chest Love,
should I be lucky enough to come upon him, buried in the ground under a giant “X”.
I am told he will bestow great gifts unto me as well.

I would give Sunday to some Almighty God,
were not my belief in his existence squashed out at a young age.
But I would receive nothing in return from him, anyway,

so I give Sunday to Myself.

by ML

A fourth of my body belongs to the yellow river,
And to the ghost city that appears above the waters.
It belongs beneath the wheels of a moving car
And then again beneath the wheels of a moving car.

A fourth of my body belongs to the winding Rhine
Floating among the French dead with their stomachs
Bloated, ballooning, with the song of death
Only heard by the body closing up shop.

A fourth of my body belongs in black face
In Indiana. Singing on the stage of some spring sing
Singing some slave spiritual made up one drunken night.
A third of that fourth of my body belongs to the slave.

A fourth of my body belongs to the rail road
To the dynamite, to the golden spike
To the pidgin crumbs I’ve picked up on my way home
And to the moon cake filled with red bean.

The Dirty Underwear
by PY 

by ML

My French is bad boy slang
Mixed with the odds and ends
Of my mother’s liquor cupboard.
My French is a sex fiend warrior juice
Slurred into a tumbler
For someone to drink 
With its great big rim covered in sea salt.
The kind the Santa Maria pushes out from her eyelids
When she takes a heaping stack of air
Into her stacked chest
As she takes a stabbing here and there.

I speak French because I like to watch
The screen fade to black
While sitting in my chair
Rubbing my Santa Maria pendant with diligence.

I get up from my chair and
Yell at the night “fuck you!”
And the night yells back “fuck you!”

I crawl into the darkness
And slide to my bed, as the door slams shut behind me.
I fall into the mud of my bed
And close my eyes
And become someone else for a minute or two.

by PY

Tomorrow is a short ways away,
but we still have time yet to
consider our
better halves and
bank accounts.

Still, the salty sea water
makes itself available to us,
the consumer,
in order to turn a profit.

And still, we hear the faraway
claps of an audience,
hooting and cheering us on,
all the while hoping secretly that we choose
distinction —
some spectacular death —
over the slow, popular extinction
of an office clerk.

And still, the salty sea water is slowly rising,
creeping up,
licking its lips in the hopes that
we might choose instead to drown.

And our fourth and final option
is to die in our sleep.