Lights Out

Through a puff of smoke and the discordant

notes of an amateur piano man, I watch her

sitting alone in a back corner booth,

a candle paints her face, eggshell

eyes like two dead light bulbs.

Paper or Plastic? (Part II—Double D’s)

    I used to work with a red head girl everyone called Double D’s. She inherited the nickname after she banged Robert the produce guy on a stack of lettuce boxes in the produce cooler. Double D’s stood for Dirty Dana, she was the store slut.

Beyond Palace Walls

    Drunk, I staggered down a Tijuana alleyway. A moon bent like a finger nail clipping lit my way. I watched a mangy brown puppy eating old tacos from a tipped garbage can as I dragged my tired feet back towards the U.S. border. I had just been drinking, laughing and dancing with friends at one of our favorite bars when that familiar anxiety came over me. I had to leave. I told everyone I was taking a taxi back to the border, but I had something else in mind.

Paper Contortionist

We boys found refuge in the bamboo forest.

We cracked and snapped through yellow shoots

that pierced the earth like leafy daggers.

The Showgirl #5

In fifth grade, the dancer was the playground princess. Boys gathered in the grass to watch her swing, while girls scowled from lunch tables. The higher she pumped, the more she wondered if she could swing over the bar. The boys said no one could do it.

Porky’s

    Tucked in the back corner of Tijuana’s Plaza del Zapato there’s a dirty gem responsible for some of the best nights and worst mornings of my life. Porky’s was a melting pot for Tijuana’s punk kids, cokeheads, Goths, gays, hipsters, and

Twolips

Remember how our tongues swam

like two eels playing Twister?

The Private Dance #4

She caught a man from across the room; her sticky-eyes cooed him behind the black velvet curtain. Her mind wandered as she rhythmically rocked her body on his excited lap. When

The Virgin and Marilyn Monroe #1

When asked her occupation, she would say “professional dancer,” she preferred the ambiguity and it was far more respectable than “stripper.”

Sixteen

    I was sixteen, a virgin, working at Vons as a bagger. One day an Italian woman named Monique was hired as a checker. Two honeydews sat on her chest; her ass was flat as a flour tortilla. She said she was twenty-six, but Tony the Butcher told me, “Don’t let her make-up fool ya kid, she’s over 30.”