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I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my

smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut

might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad

muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took

me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the

willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of

course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.

The boy’s name is Cecil Mayberry; he is twelve, white, and he knows something. He knows what his mother is going to make for supper, pot roast and green Jell-O salad; he knows that the Russians have put a Sputnik in the sky. But these are not the items that are just now on Cecil’s mind. He is thinking about a man, a waterman, lying face down in a tidal pool two hundred yards from where he sits. Cecil knows the man’s name, Grayson “Tommie” Todman, and he knows that two .22-caliber bullets have made a mess of Tommie’s head. He knows the first one entered just below the right cheekline, cutting short Tommie’s last Fuck You to the world, and the second one grazed through his hair before nipping in at the peak and blowing out a portion of Tommie’s unlamented brain.

In fact, this is going to be the first time in Cecil’s life—but not the last—that he is an undisputed expert on a certain subject. He knows who shot Tommie, and why.

Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We

were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,

thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was

Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth

an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or

was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets

together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,

such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow

from a shinbone.

Some of the prisoners were strung like beef

From the ceilings of their cells. “Gus”

Was led around on a leash. I mean dragged.

Others were ridden like mules. The guards

Were under a tremendous amount of pleasure.

I mean pressure. Pretty disgusting. Not

What you’d expect from Americans.

Just kidding. I’m only talking about people

Having a good time, blowing off steam.

My father believes that the United States is destined one day to be engulfed in a socialist revolution. All revolutions are bloody, he says, but this one will be the bloodiest of them all. The working class—which includes me—will at some point in the not-so-distant future decide to put down the tools of our trade, pour into the streets, beat the police into submission, take over the means of production, and usher in a new epoch—the final epoch—of peace and equality. This revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent. It is not only imminent, it is quite imminent. And when the time comes, my father will lead it.

From a side lane soft with lunar mulch

and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone

on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties

as wide as an elephant’s forehead.

I sighed across the boy-mown lawn

and they shook as though they shed blessings

to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.

Who would dare pour such panties

along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.

The Milky Way was pavement

compared to their luxury. I knew

I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.

Next morning my feet felt like mallets.

I was back in the world where people

wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,

and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.