J. T. Barbarese

Re-reading him in Bouchon past noon, it is mobbed midtown, like an ant farm seen through painkillers. God, what a bust it’s all been, capitalism, communism, feminism, this lust to liberate. Che should have stayed in medicine. The girls here admit they can’t wait to marry and get to the alimony, before they hit thirty. The men, heads skinned like Lager inmates, know only the revolutions in diets and spinning classes. Still, one table away, these two, with gnarled empretzled hands, seem unhappy in the old way.

I smell me coming up behind me some days— sweet sarcophagal history. The Ark after the beasts disembarked, the motel bed as the maid draws the shades, shakes the sheets, blinks back the stink, the leafed hollow where the stalled mower sits in its exhaust and smells of wronged flesh, wing, meat but me mostly, climbing the steps, extract of me, stinking of me.

Fireplace blocked, sealed with cardboard, and taped. Furniture trashed, paneling smashed. On the second floor mid-corridor, a rotting cat furry and fey in a nap of  gore glued flat to a spot on the floor, ether-sweet in a frieze of decay, up-staring, popeyed, pissed. The screens I installed belled out, belled in. Every window cracked, broken, or forgotten, left open. The in-gusting Atlantic left smelling sick. A shade softly crashed on a sash, finish nails and a bare molly bolt fanfared me from the gloom. Google the address: from outer space it’s a bare green blot, treeless, erased, terns where we made love, gulls where we fought.