By the time he was infamous enough to sell out bullfighting arenas, the Caruso C was a sort of burlesque number.  He would inch to it from the frequencies below, nearly embrace the note, and then flat a bit before trumpeting, C! with full tenor fury. Toscanini chided him for grandstanding, but this in-and-out tease worked well with German and Latin American houses, which particularly enjoyed the punishment of a loud flirtation.

To hear that girly voice escape the concertmaster’s staff and push into secular, structural ecstasy must have felt like a peep show from behind the veil. In [the castrato] Farinelli’s highest note, they might have heard a terrifyingly private sound, one usually made by a woman, smirking at them from the mouth of a breathtakingly lovely man.  Maybe the women felt anyone who sang sounds so close to their own must understand the root tone of the noises women make.

Did men feel the same way two centuries later, upon hearing a square-jawed, shoulder-padded Lauren Bacall hit a baritone C2 for “put your lips together and blow?”

The third scream, I think, is the scream that won it. You can hear me lose a battle in my throat.  You do not have to assume that I will be mute for days afterward; you know it.  Because on the e of that last “Stella!”, the sound sinks lower into my neck and starts ripping. Imagine the margin of a piece of paper torn, notch, by notch, from a spiral notebook, or an anvil dropping through floor after floor of a cartoon tenement.  I did not tell myself to make this hurt, but there I am, punching lower and lower into myself to see what comes up.  The noise is just awful, but it is mighty loud.

There was an old buzka on Luther Street known as the Cat Woman, not because she kept cats but because she disposed of the neighborhood’s excess kittens. Fathers would bring them in cardboard boxes at night after the children were asleep and she would drown them in her wash machine. The wash machine was in the basement, an ancient model with a galvanized-metal tub that stood on legs and had a wringer. A thick cord connected it to a socket that hung from the ceiling and when she turned it on the light bulb in the basement would flicker and water begin to pour.

The elephant was there, waiting in the overgrown lot where once long ago there had been a Victory garden, and after that a billboard, but now nothing but the rusting hulks of abandoned cars. The children grew silent as they gathered to inspect it: the crude overlapping parts, the bulky sides and lopsided rump, the thick squat legs that looked like five-gallon ice-cream drums, huge cardboard ears, everything painted a different shade of gray, and the trunk the accordion-ribbed hose from a vacuum cleaner. They stared back at Budhardin’s eyes looking at them through the black sockets above the trunk. The holes were set too close together for a real elephant and made it look cross-eyed and slightly evil.

Calvin held to the sides of his seat as he felt it begin to whirl. For a moment the seat seemed to pitch backward like a dentist’s chair. His body had flinched as the head appeared to roll into space. He struggled like a dreamer half awakened from a nightmare of falling to regain his equilibrium and breath. The earsplitting screaming made him weak and nauseated: he couldn’t understand how it could continue like a broken record. Where was the audience? Had the projectionist gone mad?

Calvin ducked his head between his knees and clapped his hands over his ears. He entered the world of the smell of the theater floor, the spearmint wrappers, the rancid popcorn oil, old urine, stale sweet wine. Above him it went on as if it would never end.

In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.

She’d discussed killing herself, she confessed, with Sarah Miller, her best friend, who’d gone to the same high school in West Virginia. Discussed how she’d do it in the style of Marilyn Monroe. She’d clean the trailer completely, and dress up in her black negligee. She’d use Sarah’s ex-husband’s revolver, and Sarah would listen in the night for the shot, and then listen in case the kids woke up. She’d stand right in the doorway when she did it, so she’d be the first thing he found when he came home late from running around on her, stretched out on the floor like a dark Raggedy Ann doll with her brains in the kitchen. Because already he’d stayed out two nights in a row. That was that, that was all, so long. The note would go like this: No Thanks.

Now that the shooting was started, Bill Houston wanted it to go on forever. Holding his gun out toward the guard and firing was something like spraying paint—trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through. He didn’t want the guard to have any life left with which he might rise up and kill Bill Houston is return. When the guard was still, lying there at the open mouth of his C-shaped desk with his jaw hanging off to one side and the blood running down his neck and also back into his hair and his ear, Bill shot him twice more in the chest, and would have emptied his shotgun into the guard but caught himself up short, feeling he didn’t want to spend his shells, because shells were more precious than all the money that surrounded them now. The smoke of gunfire lay in sheets along the air around his head, where light played off the fountain’s pond and gave it brilliance. In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey. He heard nothing above the ringing in his ears.

The words she would have said and the sound of the blow she’d gone ready to deliver echoed and died in her head. Words rushed up and died in her throat—panicked words, words to soothe, to tame, to call him back—they rushed on her, but she forgot them halfway to her mouth and he lay so still. And that’s how she learned that Beau Clinton, her only son and the son of Charles Clinton, was dead.

They gave her a plate with the world’s biggest hamburger on it. It was like a cartoon hamburger, the kind she ate with her father every Saturday at the drugstore: no onion, no mustard, a frill of lettuce, and the reddest red tomato. Twice she tried to bite into it, twice the bread slipped, and a pinkish mix of catsup and mayonnaise splattered onto her plate. It was the most beautiful hamburger in the world, but she couldn’t eat it. She began to whimper.

In our family, it’s customary that on our birthdays we wear or assemble or plant what we’ve been given. Nobody remembers how this began, but it’s a ritual. Toward sunset on that birthday I went into the back yard and found Papa there digging holes for the azaleas Mother had given him. The yard is choked with flowering shrubs. He wore his new tennis shoes and he dug back along the fence line. He aimed each jab of the shovel. In the fading watery sunlight the skin on his forehead looked thin, the bone was a fact underneath, and seeing this I was suddenly afraid.

I do not know how I need the air,

or if it needs me. The lost air,

the air which is smashed, like a red hat.

When the sun rises the amnesty

of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,

the maroon horses - when the sun rises

the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard

with a thumb on top.

Went walking with a few others

in the guarded sunlight of hilly

streets, saw a man through the door,

beyond another man, assumed owned,

bequeathed to the street for only

a moment: saw the fat man sitting

there in black, like a receipt,

a fat black receipt waiting and waiting:

o deliver love and no other word,

deliver flawless feeling to the house,

the feeling that comes once in a lifetime,

then, when least looking, once again.

It was told I could pull

the wagon of death

as long as I chose to pull.

My shoes didn’t tell me,

my cobbler told me.

My cobbler tells me a lot of things.

I turned you into a widow,

I was that tough on myself,

the two of us effaced

like stones you might erase

the miles from, the journeys

of the names and other stars

and evenings.

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

This is the house my father tried to build.

That patch of dirt raked

in geometric plains is a Japanese garden.

Those gaps the pigeons roost in are French windows.

The step-ladder, a spiral staircase, a helix. My father hasn’t

slept in six weeks. There is a crack in the living-

room wall. There is an icy roof.

He is watching the plaster.

Certain the house will collapse.

Should I talk to him when he doesn’t talk back?

His tongue coated white.

Should I touch him? He is dirty.

By midnight I get over it. I start hammering again.

The guards stand by the fire pit, burning papers.

So many numbers, so many names.

Hammer gently, they say: we’re trying to think.

The guy next to me can’t stop coughing.

The guy next to him can’t stop singing “Glory to God

in His sacred groves.”

When is this going to stop?

The ovens stay lit all night. Everything sounds the same

when it burns, like newsprint, like the telephone book,

like name, rank, number, date of birth.

Once I start talking, what’s there to stop me?

When I run out of nails I hammer pens.

Ink stains the wood the color of my tongue.

I don’t need my pens anymore. They know it was me.

They can sign my name to anything

and they won’t be wrong.

We are the nothing-to-lose ones,

the try-anything-once ones,

weed seeds inside our cells –

dandelion, nettle, lizard tail –

roots sunk in, for it is the tips

that count, reaching out to tap

new moisture. Roots, stems, leaves,

the stomata, those little mouths

opening, closing, sucking in air

in the evening when we boil

wild ginger and sleep in its vapor.

Like cures like, we hear in the morning

when we brush ourselves with

vegetable fiber in the shower,

beat ourselves with our fists.

(This is no crazier than anything else.)

I bet on the reptiles, on the scaly-skinned,

the spadefoot toad who burrows backward

and sleeps seven feet down in the sand.

I go with the insects who breed and feed at night,

with the single-celled protozoan protected

from the heat by is own cyst.

I bet on the woman on the couch with

a growth on her cheek, the seven-year-old

in cowboy boots with eczema head to toe.

I roll for the shay hand, spastic muscle, drooling lip.

I roll for the palsied girl that she may walk,

the diapered man that he may no longer drip.

I lie hour after hour, staring at the lightbulb

in that lamp over the bed, then everything seems rimmed

in peelings – the intercom, the nurse’s caps, the strings

that tie this gown around my neck. I’m encased in

this room and if I could pull away the rind of this illness,

it’s been so long, I wonder what might be left underneath.

My skin. No one can understand the pain of being touched.

Or not. The problem: not even a rash to show the staff

bustling in at 6 a.m. Disappointing, I’m sure, for the interns.