The Last Moonbeam Pushes Up Against The Scrim

Fresno’s drive-in is still open—a reprieve from the rest of it.

The beam searches across the crinolined dark.

A woman in a red Honda opens her mouth for a jujube as

her son gleefully pegs it into her eye. 

     Things that never leave:

     impressions, mists, your mother

In the Poconos two lovers push themselves together and pant out their postmodern 

urges until the room pulses with guilty avoidance.

As they finish, you move forward with a sigh into my hand, nuzzle the

back of my eyes into orange explosions like flour fluorescing in a bakery fire.  Then 

the moment is      over.                  

Can we ever know that we are

loved at the      exact     moment                                that we love? 

     the tongue-licked fur of a Banded Galloway

     the lust of the child for the teat

     Genuine need         

     Wish in one hand shit in another

The figures flicker on the screen.  A dead man plays his comic

part and someone props him into a beach chair, gives him a drink,

pretends he hasn’t started to smell.  When I was seven, my mother

and I took a trip to Florida.  At the restaurant papered in peacock

blue, I ordered an artichoke that I later vomited into a toilet at a motel

across from the ocean.  It rained for the next three days.  When the

storms were over, tadpoles swam on the pool deck.  The man in the

car in front of us is wearing a toupee.  As we watch, his lover gently

raises it, caresses his bare head, leans in and kisses his ear.