…Leada came up from L.A. to escape the fires. She talked about electromagnetic fields, the ex-Mormon guy who gave her chlamydia, pyros and tweakers, the Rothschilds, the imminent Earthquake that would destroy everything, the entire state of California. She picked Leila up in her car that smelled of old Taco Bell and vape smoke and perfume and just drove, blasting different cloud rappers she’d fucked or tried to fuck or who’d tried to fuck her, who were too ugly to fuck, etc. Talia was in the front passenger seat. They crossed the bridge, weaving manically in and out of traffic, drove through the TL, ended up at Fisherman’s Wharf on a cold, desolate night.
Poetry & Fiction
Urged by Evangelical Christians, The U.S. Returns to Her Rapist (January 20, 2025)
Free from the horrors of the next four years,
the quiet dead rot peacefully
beneath offerings of flowers.
Co-Existentialism
GAZA,1974
I
After dinner with the grandmother –
young wives of the household
are feeding children
and serving dessert to the men.
I am a guest, an English teacher
new to the Middle East,
without even the basic Arabic
most Israelis know
and I cannot play in pantomime –
like my daughter –
with the children and the goats.
I am placed in a bare room
with an old woman
who talks continually
as if eventually
I must understand
her native tongue
Because we are women.
How to Mourn a Famous Friend
Recoil from the headline’s slap.
Scroll through all the phases of her face.
Dig up your own photographs. Decide the auspicious number means she died without pain.
Place your favorite – arms around each other, grinning like fools – on your body where it aches the most.
Hold her pet name for you under your tongue.
First Pomegranate
Which part of this crimson
honeycomb to eat? And how? Sun
highlights the knife’s blade, stripes the room
like prison bars.
I watch you scoop seeds, then copy;
savor sweet-tart bursts
as red pearls open.
Your food soothes me, your kind,
scratched-by-smoke-and-whiskey voice.
You must meditate, Sweet Pea.
Learn to let go. You’re just like me
at that age – beautiful and charming,
far too stubborn.
Not with you.
Afterlife
…Leila, do you believe in an afterlife?, Heidi asked. Leila was on mushrooms, lying in a bed of roses. The way Heidi asked the question made her think of a spring day on a planet where it snows all the time (after the last snow on Earth). She closed her eyes. Everything passed too much like a dream. I don’t know anymore, she said, truthfully. There had been a time when she had seen certain things, known them, well after the atheism of her adolescence. But seeing, knowing, passes away too, into the void. What about you?, she asked.
Lost Ghazal
Midnight. Teens wander – beautiful, lit, lost.
A homeless man waves his torn flag. Git lost.
How close lie pleasure and oblivion.
Till Roe – missed period, dead rabbit, lost
future. The waning moon makes her wonder
about old boyfriends – cop, convict, Brit. Lost
to time or wives. Renunciates fear their
hungers. The grump toasts, Here’s to more shit lost.
The woman pulled to pieces by her kids’ and
husband’s needs. She offers kiss, toy, tit. Lost,
the free, whole self she once was.
Late October 2024
Ghouls in the bushes, bones on lawns.
Leaves reach the height of their fire
and the veil between the worlds thins
toward the only day that I am
once again my mother’s child.
Some people avoid this doom-focused revelry –
children’s faces bloody and scarred,
plastic fangs crammed in their small mouths,
spider webs and gravestones in suburban yards.
But it’s the living who can hurt us.
I’m hollow-eyed from too much news,
my family fractured,
democracy unravelling.
War Twofer
A necklace
Lost in a looted
Burnt home
In a kibbutz
Was found
Last week
In a burnt home
In Gaza
Words don’t come
Just names say it all…
Stefanik, Patel,
Rubio, Noem, Hegseth, and Huckabee
Perfumed in Musk,
A vanguard selection
buttressed by Supreme Court
benedictions
on a sanctified election
Girls Lunch
An excerpt from the novel When I’m With You It’s Paradise…
…Leila was run down. After her trip east, as summer gave way to fall, she got sick again. And then, for a whole month, she didn’t get better, or she didn’t want to get better, which amounted to the same thing. She didn’t see friends, didn’t write, stopped going on walks. She spent the days, and the evenings, in bed. She saw a few clients, dizzy and ill in San Francisco hotel rooms. She looked at porn, edged for hours on end to fucked-up fantasies. She felt dysphoric (got off on her dysphoria), started looking at the blackpilled trans subreddits, felt herself getting uglier, or plateauing in her beauty, which amounted to the same thing. She made a lot of money from men by telling them to kill themselves, then she sent some of that to an online Domme in Canada, whose beauty and sexual power, whose body, whose pussy, hurt her in some supremely pleasurable way. Well past midnight, she took baths, and before bed she listened to the new Sally Rooney novel on audiobook (numbed with pleasure but dimly aware that all this bourgeois heterosexual drama, the drama of so-called human life in the twenty-first century, had nothing to do with her), with rain sounds on in the background, cups of rose tea she barely touched on her bedside table.
Amber Nicole Thurman
What is the sound of desire –
heart reaching toward nursing school,
time with her six-year-old son?
Pieces of the unchosen future
rot inside her,
turn septic.
Discussing the War
Photo By Ezra Gut
Sometimes I go down to Sodom
to talk to Lot’s Wife
where she looks out at the Dead Sea
Drowning in War
Hold fast to the garden,
the little blue shine of a bird.
Its long, curved beak probes for nectar
in the flowering bush next to my kitchen.
Make this bird as necessary as knowing
what the government does in my name.
Lonely Ghazal
The house smelled of cats, mildew, loneliness.
Through empty rooms, the wind blew loneliness.
The Uses of the Rothermans
Originally published in “New Mexico Quarterly” in 1953.
I was eleven when my uncle closed with the Rothermans. This was 1933, in a village on the south shore of Long Island that is now pure metropolis and that was then becoming a suburb. My uncle’s family and my sister and I (our parents were killed in an auto accident in the mid-twenties) had moved shortly before from a great, white-pillared, Georgian house that faced the new golf course. The vicissitudes of a stock called Vanadium were the cause of the move: the house, the Lincolns, Robb (the former dumptruck driver who chauffeured them), Anna and Maria, illiterate German housemaids in their teens, help that had been pressed a year before from “The Daisy Huggub Agency” in Hempstead, and some other ill-chosen earnests of marginal gain — all were let go at once. The Georgian house, a product of my uncle’s massive pride, was sold to the Jewish owner of a chain of retail jewelry stores.
Two Short
Overcoming a Quaker Education
Riffing on Joyce Wadler
…..Arthur Bremmer, Squeaky Fromme,
…..Sara Jane Moore, John Hinckley, Jr.
…..Now this guy
…..Left them walking away.
…..(Well, not Wallace.)
Sometimes the Eyes are Enough
What a woman knows, she tells slant.
Let men and the sun spill everything.
The moon, too, keeps secrets.
Birds broadcast their news all day.