Peacock Online Review
Publishing innovative writing, quarterly.

 

From Local Valentine Carnation Industry

I am like a man, and first I read Nietzsche, read you quotes about cows. Every boy I ever loved read Will to Power after we broke up, loved Ginsberg and Kerouac—no, loved On the Road and Howl but not the writers. The smarter ones read “The Surrealist Manifesto” and maybe Nadja. Actually, none of them read Nadja. I’m a naked ghost, but trying to sink through the floorboards is getting boring, and I’m done with following my lover out into the night, woods or no. The roads are so wide. And the traffic. O! Le trafic!

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The town was never a town in the traditional sense of “town,” and I never lived in it, either as town or not as a town, and not as a citizen driving past America’s largest retail complex or as a member of an enlarged middle consumer class. I’ve never been in the military, though the military is responsible for most of the jobs I’ve had post-college. I have worked hard at balancing the contrasting social mobility on each side of my family.

 

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Explain everything with sports analogies. In language class, talk about feral parrots not teenage love among young people sick of slang for drugs. Everyone’s the same age until we speak. I return from work minutes after the murder, bodies dissolving in acid, saved puppies and babies in Iraq.

 

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Watch TV and think, “I can do something else and escape this will for employment.”

 

“Unlike les bouges,” she says, laughing.

 

But you need a pass to the Socialist conference, too. Use an adverb to make your opinions less general. But that was in my other life—I’m worried about you in this one. You’re wearing sweatpants and have a girlfriend. It’s a complex situation.

 

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The male house finch notes us and calls to the hatchlings in the eaves of our balcony. Last night I dreamed you were a nest and I was a goat.

 

“That’s a nice baby, where did you get it?”—We don’t say that.

 

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“Hey, hey, that’s ok! You’re gonna work for us one day!”

 

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Yesterday, I was feeling suicidal again at work, so I left at 1 PM and headed home to hug the children.

 

Later, I wrote on the door of madness, and instead of the usual robotic ethno-runes, out flowed natural, Zen-like, calligraphic script.

 

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“Oh, Hi!” he said, happy and startled. Then, he stared into ceiling space without speaking.

 

I introduced myself to the woman next to me. “Hello,” I said enthusiastically. “I am likely to never see you again.”

 

The wealthy California community by the sea is far enough off the highway to be difficult to get to but still be defined by the highway.

 

I ask if there is mastic. “Mastic,” she says, “Is an Arabic thing.”

 

I say, “Yes, I know. I want to use it in a pudding, and you have a sign that says ‘YES! WE HAVE MASTIC!’ ”

 

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Fathers must supply food and gifts for birthday parties. My concrete house was home to good citizens who enjoyed a daily happy hour and a stake in the land. There is a refusal or inability to process the simplest statement without rephrasing it. Middle class houses as the homes of people who will not live there, even as an artificial ownership class.

 

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Hugs which avoid direct breast contact; how my favorite people encourage a kind of social weirdness in me. Strong feelings of being a turnip.

 

When you leave your bearable job and intelligent, creative, attractive lover, remember that there really isn’t anything better than this. That this is all there is, always.

 

It’s important not to believe in a lamp burning for you or anyone in a window somewhere.

 

I know that no one will call us home.