He can have small feet, as long as he can carry his own weight, lurch, shuffle, flex, beat ride heel-to-toe. Her grandfather was a Fred Astaire clone, stiff-faced in intimate mirrors, demanding as a choreographer on low-budget. She would love to dance with a drunken sailor in her bedroom, as long as he is full of salt & mist, good jokes, & sleepy-eyed soul. She doesn’t want a cold wind from nowhere. She doesn’t want a tattooed stunt man with no sense of tap & history. Or a man who can’t improvise deep house to bass & drums, can’t grasp her internal rhyme schemes. That would be a sound-proof wall of death. She wants a jazz saxophone to blow heavenly blue notes under her star-cuffed mini-dress, all day long.
SOUVENIRS/ KELSIE HAHN
He came back from Peru, alone for the first time, and a few weeks later the doctor showed him magnified, gross-out pictures of heaps of coiled worms and even closer pictures of circular mouths lined with bristling teeth, and she said in a narrow pitch that, “I’m sorry, but you’ll have these for the rest of your life.” At home, he ate a piece of unwashed fruit. He said, “Hello little friends, hello.”
PLATONIC IDEAL/ JASON BRAUN
Things aren’t as they seem,
so much so that
when Paul says, “That’s the most
crack-pipe-looking crack pipe
I’ve ever seen,” I know what he means.
