Mechanical gulls and crows. When it got late, the great moon rose behind them
and the night’s damp breeze filmed their beady eyes and still—the mystery of lightness,
the chemistry between the real and the superimposed. Made with paper maché, wiring
and motorized wings, these silhouette crows gather in rows while a teacher sings.
The Notorious Man
A small boy beneath a marquis of rubied letters. Inside: his feet sticky to the floor, the crackling strips of film, and Ingrid Bergman looms on screen, speechless, a type of rose in his mother’s garden.
He imagines he is the one in the grey suit with slicked hair, well into his forties with immaculate movie star hands. Hands that hold pistols carefully as if they were a woman’s wrists. And after,
he runs home and decides he will have strange love affairs in small, dark apartments. The streetlights’ sheen protects him from the woods and from what he hopes are bird-less trees.
The Casual Lover
I fall into the space between their silhouettes. I’ll do that, I think. I’ll do that on a train car’s pull-down bunk where the stars can see me.
While the window rattles its cool light. While the sound of the razor slipping down the sink is clean as falling ice.
The camera pans to cities in the distance, sparkling with power plants—cities beyond the crop fields swept in silver and
the crop duster who chases down his foolish love of night. The bi-plane’s shadow, a rope around my neck. It ends in a miniature impact
and plumes of smoke rise like curled fists to blot the moon. My tongue crawls her white throat like smoke.