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ANGEL: Here’s your big chance, baby. What would you like to ask the Angel of the Lord?

MARISOL (Energized): Are you real? Are you true? Are you gonna make the Bronx safe for me? Is it true angels’ favorite food is Thousand Island dressing? Is it true your shit smells like mangoes and when you’re drunk you speak Portuguese?

ANGEL: Honey, last time I was drunk…

          (Marisol gets a sudden, horrifying realization.)

MARISOL: Wait a minute – am I dead?

In that darkness,

Speakers rose like

Housing projects,

Moonlight diamonded

Mesh-wire panes.

What was it that bloomed

Around his curled

Body when the lights

Came up, fluorescent,

Vacant, garish?

The gym throbbed

With beats & rage

And his eyes darted

Like a man nailed

To a burning crucifix.

After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.