Fallopian tubes
energy
doctors
lampreys
infection
elephantiasis
surgical rubber
planes
foreskin
soil
boredom
kittens
intestines
parking lots
trilobites
rheum
topology
urine
freaks
crash
owls
meat
Caucasians
winter
babies
fat
shrines
Europe
***special bonus poem***
worms
stripmalls
God
geodesic domes
steam
machinery
heaven
rash
subways
mutants
cats
islands
rain
Japan
impetigo
dogs
blood
bacteria
raccoons
abortion
death
The Shrines of Japan
There is a shrine in Japan dedicated to the souls of broken air conditioners. There is another shrine in which one contemplates computer operating systems that no one uses anymore. There is a small shrine for grains of rice that remain uneaten and stuck to the bottoms of bowls. There is a shrine for the kernels of corn that have made it intact through the human digestive tract and aspire to be corn plants again. There is a shrine to lost pins. There is a shrine to the books I have read but not properly remembered. There is a shrine to the translucent worms that scud across my eyelids when I shut them against the sun. There is a shrine to all the baby canaries who died inside their eggs, their precious daylight hours just a rumor passed through calcium pores. There is a shrine to anaerobic bacteria and a shrine to spoiled meat. There is a shrine to gravity and another to the refutation of gravity. It is after all just a theory . . . .
He shrimps forward, trying to grab a bite from his sandwich. But hell, he’s driving and already holding the phone in his other hand. He works for an advertising agency with only one client – a video cooking school, somewhere down in Florida but now he’s brooding along a strip mall service road somewhere in the Midwest, watching ice pellets ricochet off his windscreen. “Oh yeah, “ he says, “they finally found the body of the pilot. When the doctor took him out… “ The conversation trails off from here.
On the other end of the phone, the squealing of steel against steel, the humming of electric motors:
“I’m here in New York. I won’t be back in Iowa for a while…” The guy stretches out ‘Iowa’, savoring the chewy hiatus of its vowels. From somewhere on the platform a crazy man starts screaming – “IF YOU’RE UGLY, TAKE THE ‘L’ TRAIN!” People look away. Something thrashes under some fast food wrappers afloat on the narrow concrete ditch next to the subway’s third rail. A one-eyed, shoe stretcher-like head breaks through the water’s oily surface then disappears again before anybody notices. The train arrives. I black out in my armchair, thousands of miles away from these people.