vProse: Syndicate- so so. Literary agent- Ding!

         BOX TURTLE (PJ Reed 2011)

American trance:
they shuffle in, sometimes wearing house slippers
freeze there, bowls of coins, hands perpetually pulling
on levers from heaven.

You hear stories about children
left to die in their parents cars,
or occasionally one even keels over right there
in front of one of the machines. Dead.
(emily van horn is dead)
(bela lugosi was already dead)
(little coz will never die)

Economic development
came to indian country in the same way
I came to the arizona state hospital:
empty promises and malingered streams
of information fueled by inefficiency,
greed, and humor. Levi saw it true:
It's always, all of it 
a big laugh in the end.

"Two Peggies in the hand
is better than one Aleesha in the bush"
is the only funny joke I ever heard Josh tell,
although I had to chuckle when Thaden said:
"A goddamn egyptian weasel. You go through life
being taught that there are no weasels in the middle east
and then you meet that Saeed fucker." 

So I said that to him one day:
    "Hot damn, look at that! An egyptian weasel!
     I didn't know there was such a thing
     as an egyptian weasel,
     and then you appear, Saeed.
     What's up with that?" 

Phoenix is pretty warm in the summer months.
I suppose you may have heard that. Out there on the patient mall
I used to watch Donny P swagger up to the fountain
like a battered John Wayne after a brawl, he'd dip his whole head
into that fountain, with its bird shit and mold,
then straighten up, blink 
throw back that massive head of hair. 
Beautiful men in awkward settings.

It was like a frozen planet
darting from shadow to shadow,
eyes peeled for water holes. I would sit out there
"I am the only one out here"
and watch desert birds dance
"I was the only one out there today"
Lard ass security really hated it,
it was warm, pretty warm.

Enriquez and Williams
saw it.
The one,
he was uncomfortable from the beginning,
he told me this very clearly, and he went home
to Georgia. He was alert to his surroundings, a nice man. 
Enriquez
kept me glad,
it was the Espanola connect
and his love for revisionist historians:
"Speak to the truth, bro, speak to the truth!"
and the joke: "Joe Arpaio looks good in circles,
right there in the center of the circles. Ha!"

"Tom Horne is as crazy as a bat!"
I heard that in Texas, of all places;
his reputation is apparently....

"I will never look at doctors in the same way;"
she told me and my girls stories
about children sleeping in holes
underneath the houses where security slept
between shifts. "They wanted them close, 
the kids." She somewhat lost touch with God
because of what she learned about men
there in those places. Hospitals, and homes.

American trance:
they have their desks
their windows and lights
they are sterile there.
      They poison the minds of the given angels:
      I am revolted and I am electric-
      they are so, so wrong. 

"I dance the dance, the dance, the dance...."
                                    (robert miraval)

credits:
    -the peggy(s) (by permission of the hoboken, nj, and wayne, nj transit authority, 
      respectively)
    -aleesha (property of seafood mart: "whale on the beach!")
    -sheriff joe (satan, the b-sides)
    -williams (caspar the friendly ghost)
    -enriquez (chris montano, juanita tally, larry jaramillo)


          (PJ Reed 2011)