“to burn out 18 times before midnight”

Love is pheromones, pinpricks and bubbling liquids, like men in long coats planning perfect wars, but it’s chemical, and oh it’s the way he smells and glistens neon-bright -- when the other equations were an August power outage with those spent-out fireflies -- and he’s an equation to her, she needs to cross out and solve and mutate her colors but when they get sick on the acrid smell of nuclear waste, it all gets balanced and it’s her finger-tips splayed over the gash of his mouth, then the crook of his neck, and she burns out over the furrows of his spine like bombs bursting over Baghdad.

“bob dylan playing shortstop, edward lear playing goal”

Time is gonna wipe us out, like the big dinosaurs with rotten bones, she sneers looking like a made-up Madonna in her blue coat, and then she wheels around with her arms out and professes correctly that 1) the carpenters have all been eaten by the termites sick of turnips, and 2) she knows that she’s giggling with a glee that streams over her teeth and swarms out like hot milk and bee’s honey poured together in her mother’s soft-stitch glass bowl. But then in swaggers Isis, with her jaundiced finger-tips and her lips all wet with a certain dripping nonchalance, and she plops down with her mama’s hips and a drop-out smile, and there’s Isis, there she is, and here I am, and Claudia don’t stop spinning till she wretches and liberates that vast creation of a rainbow, and you can make out dinosaur bones inside the flecks.