Category: This; And also that

tipped too soon

how was I to know

your service
would suck                       so

1. Reform
2. Conservative
3. Orthodox
4. Hasidim
5. Canadians

said my five-year old tonight, dressed in full Batman togs, before delivering 360 degrees of pain to the sides, the back, the seat of our oversized wooden rocking chair.
“Hunh? Chairie?” he cooed. “You want a piece of me, Chairie?” And somehow that familiar name only made the beating more savage.

I’m surprised you’d
say that. I mean, you’ve
read the articles, right?
I sent you the articles, so you must have read them.
Which means you know all about my generation
and the way we
transformed
pipe-cleaner-beading
from a sort of kid’s sort of
crafty project into a serious art form
and then, finally, a competitive sport.
I was at the center of that movement.
I was near the center of that movement.
And you can sit there
with your bucket of light-shifting beads and your horse-brown pipe cleaner
and you can lecture me
on the importance of varying color and closing out the sequence with a half-twist
because you know, that’s your prerogative.
But I’m surprised.

When your kid tells you they love you
and they’re laughing when they say it
wandering off toward slow down
toward stop and sleep well
everybody sleep tight.
sleepy tight everybody.

Jake has lived with these dogs for four years now. They pace around his cage on dry paws. He rotates as they pace, tracking their progress but never catching their eyes.
He learned this truth in the first few weeks: catch the eye of a hungry dog and it will bark. And not a yippie bark, but a rough angry thing that feels like a scraped knee somewhere inside your head. He doesn’t need that.
Meanwhile, there were these other guys, the ones pacing around the dogs, pacing around him. The dogs smell almost sweet — light-rain-sweet — but those other guys smell bad. One day, Jake asks them to shower.
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Sedates the dogs. Keeps them from barking so much. You know that.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot.”
“Hey, at least we don’t smell like Fish People,” one of them jokes. “Oh wait, you’d probably like that.”
“Ha ha.” Jake drifts back to the war, five long years ago. What had he been thinking, aligning himself with those Fish People? That was a huge mistake. And now here he was, paying the price.
Just a really gigantic mistake.

The kind of place
where they name
their kids “Hunter”
and mean it.

This weekend my 5-year old asked: “wouldn’t it be funny if ‘Justice League’ was ‘Justice Legal’”?
Like it was some hit ABC show, where big-city super heroes
practice the law wearing costumes.
Never using their super powers
just, you know
arguing the case
fighting over turf
falling in love in spandex.
Flash is bucking to make partner.
And maybe Batman is the D.A.

The car was a used Chrysler LeBaron convertible
parked just around the corner.
Dark blue and dented, it had lived
a bumpy life.
They got in and Cal started the engine.
And when he shifted, the car rumbled
and fought back, and to Greg,
it felt like Cal was shifting something
inside Greg’s ass cheeks.

He projects things on her
like she’s a drive-in movie.
He plays whole movies on her.