Lulu’s Loose Screw

I had a professor who had a long lost brother.  Yesterday I saw that nameless brother on the train.  I knew it was him because he looked exactly like the professor.  He was tall and slender, and wore a neon green shirt under a beige blazer with white tennis shoes—very much unlike his brother.  But his face was exactly the same.  And in my dream his face was on Kurt Vonnegut.  I was standing outside of a diner.  Jim Carroll’s* ghost was smoking a cigarette in the corner of the alcove awning. Revamping Nighthawks ,** the painting.  I was pointing out Jim to my parents when a man tapped me on the shoulder. “Kurt Vonnegut!” I said. And because it did not look like Vonnegut himself I thought, maybe this is the shape he assumed when he slapped on his Jr. When we went back into the diner it had turned into a barren bar: a few scattered tables set up as a Texas-hoedown-theme—minus the mechanical bull. A stage was also set...

Somewhere in someplace like New Mexico a UFO crashes in a field of dry wheat.  An alien orb juts out of the clouds; a neon eye zooming in blinking seconds, darting from the slated slanted sky.  The circle continues to float in an invisible vertical line through the pink and yellow way the sky has faded from the day.  And suddenly the globe flashes out, into the night, gone. A signal! Dark. The stars blink; match the eye of the machine. One red dot one green, flashing beams. The animator inside the craft shields spindly fingers over its oblong face. A metal staircase spits from the mouth of the space-engine. A farmer up the hill pushing a wheelbarrow of corn watches the creature shamble from its shelter.  He sees the creature salute one grayish hand to protect its large pupils; its eyes two dark cutouts like microphone speakers. The farmer races back to his barn and calls authorities on a knotty-corded cream-colored kitchen phone. Thirty...

Herpes Hippie She slumps along the sidewalk, her broken Birkenstocks chipping cork against the hardened heels of her dirty day-old feet. She shrouds her head with lifeless clumpy-candlewick dreads. And her back tilts down at a 35-degree angle, but her boobs are not nearly big enough to be the cause. She is the shamed who slums. Sprouting gentile warts and herpes from an acid-reflex orgy, the skin on her face is green blotchy and bumpy with disease; maybe she can hide it with a beanie. Still, while she was skinny-dipping in the pond earlier, a little boy mistook her for a toad.  That is why her mother always told her, “Never do it with a guy who is fifty-five years too old.”   ❂    ☮    ❂    ☮    ❂    ☮     ❂    ☮    ❂    ☮     ❂                               ...