New York Waitress

The talent she has creates distance at work. There are other women with concerns in the locker room and they make their own faces when they see mirrors. Complaints relieve us chocolate relieves us changing clothes and shoes relieves us a drink of water to be taken up the stairs will refresh. Aprons paper crisp at three are down about our knees in specks of wine or noodles.

How will I explain to your mother when your remains are shipped home but there are no brains included because we couldn't collect them from the road? Should I tell her that it was your choice to ride on the back of this bicycle down route 246 at 2 am?

Differences not loved

A guy and a girl were noiselessly feeling each other up and down at a cafe table next to which my student and I were having a lesson when the shoe slid off my foot.

The student told me a hot girl shouldn't wear a sock with a hole in it. I told him he shouldn't wear a suit and tie if he liked so much the feeling of freedom he gets from taking a shit in the woods. (He had said that was the case.)

I poured the remains of my tea onto the table. He poured the rest of his latte into mine and the liquids mixed. He acted as though he found it sexy that they were mixing. My insides convulsed. He put his fingers into the mixture and then licked them.

He said he didn't have time for a lesson next week. I told him I didn't either.

Clairvoyant Kotaro

When Kotaro told me his Bose speakers used to talk to him late at night, I knew our friendship would last.

"Kotaro, what are you doing?" the speakers would say.

"I'm just making curry," he would reply to them.

He is pale and thin but always knows which cafes serve good desserts. He used to order two, then eat them both himself.

Tokyo is my dearest friend. She is nameless in street and sliding in door. She screams without speaking and will for ever more.

Love

I had entire solar systems in my head today, spinning stale pincushions and mistaken tomatoes skirted with rings of grinding notebook paper revolving around me, a solar fetus, when I stopped to notice that there were millions of copies of me everywhere, all of us quietly heaving in black. I imagined the untold horrors and ecstasies that soared through the galactic spaces inside each of us. How we pass lithely by one another and exist quietly together while straining to hold up the ever-heavier worlds inside our beings. I watched all of us, carrying on in infinite combinations of what were the same notes played on different instruments and barely perceptibly, I squeaked and I droned.

And lustily sighing I worshiped those who were swirling around me wearing black headphones and blinking like paintings, or standing stoically in long black coats reading soft-cover books curled back upon themselves.


There was an all-awakening, metal clanging on a thousand flag poles, wind sweeping across golden prairies, jump off a cliff because Jenny did LOVE for quiet strangers.

I regret that I never went with you to South Dakota.

Chandeliers

Erection エレクション and Election 選挙

On the other side of the world, we were stark and austere as ever, our socks pulled up higher and higher still. There had been a monumental erection back home, and we knew we were missing something good.

We went out searching for it in an overtrumped Parisian nightclub. The winner of the erection (waving) and the loser of it (coughing) were coloring the walls as projections. We got ready to feel free and brave.

But who are you? Near the bar, a bully from New York was squinting out at me from behind all the white skin that puffed forward around his eyes. His mouth was moving quickly and it asked me who I was again and then mimicked my name, smiling hugely like something was funny. In his paw was a mobile phone containing a photo he'd just taken of David Hasselhoff.

David's left the club, they said. Too many people had been fighting over a chance to take his picture.

I went outside and saw him standing on the blue overpass with his chin on the railing, looking down at the river of cars passing under him.

When I got home my roommates were watching the tea pot boil. It was starting to make ticking noises but the water wasn't moving yet.

How to be Rich / How to Act Like a Bear

Eat something that is still twitching.

Grateful for the experience, humbled by my host's profound material wealth, I thought I was going to throw up as the still-dying body of a shrimp spasmed its way around my teeth. Dodging for a safe escape it burrowed its way into my esophagus and into the pit of my stomach where I've been pregnant with it ever since.

Elaborate Plate 女体盛り

Are her breasts real? Minnesota Ryan asks hypothetically.

Don't question it, I reply, they're performing beautifully! Pointing upward and multiplying in tongue-colored fleshes of various market-fresh animals, the breasts have supplied us with a party's worth of conversation as well as dinner.

In a glimmer of Midwestern friendliness, I try to feed a piece to the girl to whom we owe this bounty but she politely refuses. Right, that would be strange. I go back to talking to Ryan, who has just dripped soy sauce onto her wrist.

This is incredible, we marvel, The children here grow up eating like this every day.

What were you raised on? I ask my countryman.

Spam hot dish. You know, with the macaroni?

Yeah, I know. Did you ever have an Eat-Spam-Hot-Dish-Off-A-Naked-Woman's-Body party?

Naw.

Me neither.

We share a smile, a common story. A heritage.