Union
They’ll fire us after we’ve been
at the company a certain amount of time,
to bring in fresh employees who haven’t been
ground up yet, who haven’t been sliced up
and turned into meat with plastic covers
over us to feed to their customers yet,
who haven’t burned out yet, as if the job were
a kind of fire, and we were the kindling, or as if the job
were a kind of crop circle and we were the corn
that teenage aliens doodle their graffiti on for a purpose
that’s beyond us, for a purpose we are told
to believe in, and I too am angered by employees
who tend too slowly to my needs, who peer
mole-y eyed at me from stacks of paperwork at the
DMV, or who squeak mole-y voiced at me from
burrowing too long into the twisted tunnels of a phone,
angered at them for not being paid enough
to know English, or how to turn on my
cable, so I can watch rich beautiful people
with no problems fail to fix their personalities,
or watch an exposé on how people are
already hard at work doing nothing to fix
problems much bigger than mine, like wrestlers
paying for their own brain damage,
or a community developing cancer trying to
blow out their favorite flaming river,
but it’s easy to be bitter, and it’s hard to join
a union, to show up to the meetings,
sign your name to the list, stick your neck
far, far out from its shell, so others
will stick out their necks from their shells,
until we are a field of necks too numerous to
chop all at once without making a mess,
or until we are a field of throats blooming all the
same words at the same time, the way people
join together to pray—as if God were a
little deaf and can only hear us if we’re all
speaking at once, and a little nearsighted,
so he can only see us if we stand on each
other and form a human pyramid in the exact
shape of a person struggling to build a pyramid.
Wound Up Wrong
“What do you do?” asks the Russell Brandish/hipster-adman at a deadly L.A. party (full of workmates from a non-union shop). It’s this twit with a top hat’s follow-up question to the antihero of Emily the Criminal—played hard by Aubrey Plaza—who’d deflected his first prompt about her art-life. Emily/Aubrey gives it to him straight: “Credit-card fraud.” No doubt she’d’ve been better off quoting Jesus (the basis for my own once-and-future response to what-do-you-doers?): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…” But Aubrey/Emily is no Lilly. (She’s no shrinking Violet either.)
The War Poets
It has been a year, a year of bombs and voices. These people speak through translators, these people speak their lives translated through war. This is the collective landscape, wrapped in the mist and myth of the moment, told in the fractured piecemeal that is war.
INTRODUCTION TO THE METHOD
What happened
We were going to gather snow
From the tops of the mountains
In summer
That’s what he said he wanted
From there we would carry it back
On the backs of our “swans”
To the city
To sprinkle it onto the roiling streets
And citizens squinting up joyfully, gratefully
This we would do not for personal glory
But purely for that of the city
Eternal glory to the nest where we were born
Should I keep reading “Enlightenment Now”?
Should I be good? My therapist insists I could.
Simply read, NOT “read into,” Enlightenment Now.
Poem with Snow White, Don Lemon, and Madonna’s Face
Even a mirror
can adopt the Male Gaze.
Berlin
…Now, literally all I want is to be hot and famous. I want power. Not power over people, but the power to act, to provoke desire that expands my capacity to live. This is not the lesson I’m supposed to learn, but I’ve always learned everything, including my lessons, a little askew. If someone were to say, what has living your life like this gotten you so far?, haven’t you always been like this, even before your transition, in one way or another?, I could only say that it’s led me to dark and beautiful places. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me on a spiritual level: for instance, don’t I need a little Hierophant in my life, an internal structure, a system even? But I’ve never been able to fit myself into a structure, a system. Maybe that’s the Capricorn in me. I don’t care about astrology, but I like any spiritual idea in which the universe is speaking about me, or in which I am speaking the universe.
There were things that happened
Jackie Curtis
In 1970, my apartment, four rooms on the 6th floor of a building on 12th Street and Avenue B overlooking a fried chicken joint everyone called Nodders, because junkies, whose habits made them crave sugar and salt, would hang out there during the day, nodding out over paper plates of fried chicken and cups of Coke. The place didn’t have a bathroom because the owner, an old Greek guy who wore a white shirt and a white apron and a chef’s toque, got tired of dragging overdose cases out of the single stall and calling the cops. He didn’t get rid of the nodders, however. They made up more than half his business.
I furnished the place completely off the street.
January 6, 2021
Someone told me you were seen
running behind that beast you’d bred,
Its hide bristling in flashes ahead,
and you, in the wake of stench,
didn’t mind the slaps of slaver.
Then you saw steps, the police.
He Could Sing, But He Couldn’t Fly
We heard about the memo: Legal Aid lawyers had to ask for papers,
a green card, policing what the law called illegal aliens, as if they
had antennae sprouting from their heads and searching the air,
sputtering in tongues from another planet, choking on oxygen.
This would account for their coughing, not the oil tanks empty of oil.
Bensonhurst
I am standing on West Ninth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, sometime in the 1930s: a horse-drawn ice wagon has just come down the street, and I am looking at the golden apples the horse has dropped and saying to myself (not the horse), “Your necktie is maroon.”
My mother had an elegant way with colors, which devolved on us children, a flair she developed along with her flair for elegant names; this was clear in the voluntary refinement of her name from “Esther” to “Estelle”—a habit acquired by her younger brother Yitzchak (Isidore, Izzy), who chose to be known to the world as “Morton.” My father, an affable salesman of millinery (i.e., ladies’ hats), did not care for his eccentric brother-in-law; and when he called, my father would answer the phone, saying almost nothing but declaring to my mother, after she had asked who’d called, “Itza Mutt,” reducing her to literally helpless laughter. My father liked to make my mother laugh so hard that she had to run, as best she could, out of the kitchen . . . but I digress.
Standards (& Stadiums)
Stanley Corngold’s evocation of his first time in Yankee Stadium reminded your editor of a Q&A with another Brooklyn boy (and friend of First). When the late Jules Chametzky was in hospice last year his son, Rob, asked him if he’d ever seen Willie Mays play when Mays was in the minor leagues. Rob recalled their exchange at his father’s Memorial…
Chasing Kareem…Becoming Kareem
Thelonious Monk with 18-year-old Lew Alcindor (soon to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in the kitchen of the Village Vanguard, New York City, March 1966. Photo by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.
Happy Valentine’s Day
[an excerpt from something new]
.. Yesterday, before heading over to Amal’s to get tattooed, I sent an email to Heidi that contained an email address, a password, and the contact info of three people: Benj (who’s been my editor at First of the Month since I started out as a writer), Mike, and Rebecca. I don’t mean to be morbid, I said, but I want you to have access to the account. It’s where I’m going to be sending my unpublished writing, the manuscript I’m working on, whatever I don’t release immediately into the world. If something happens to me, I want you to share the account details with these three people.
..It was one of those days where death seemed right around the corner, felt as certain as the ineluctable arrival of a new season (a secret winter within the heart of my summer), where everything felt like a prefiguration of death, a native language spoken by death, a whisper from somewhere else: from the void? Who the fuck knows?