Dina & Darlene

Out too late again, locked doors, access denied. All lights in the trailer park dim in every window. Dina & Darlene have to sleep in the carport in the wheelbarrow under the old shower curtain they use as a blanket. They rest their heads against each other, no need for a pillow. They are raccoons or opossums, scavenging or playing dead. This morning, no time for real sleep. Instead, they knock on the front door, the vinyl and fiberglass indented under fists. Their father lets them in, standing in the doorway in his hibiscus-print boxer shorts. They grab a red, macrame, hemp backpack with a marijuana leaf sewn into the front full of cheap, warm, cans of beer from their bedroom. Before they leave, they take a moment each to kiss the nearest face of River Phoenix. Out in the toolshed behind the trailer, friends are waiting. The toolshed reeks of corpse, or so Misty says, and she should know, she’s an embalmer’s assistant at the funeral home. Misty has stolen formaldehyde to smoke in joints. In the corner, a fat racoon has died, a half-carcass mama shrouded by skeletons of her babies. “Truly living,” Dina says as Darlene slams a beer. “To die in such a way, with each other.” Dina feels instantaneously drunk.

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Heartthrob (Partial Offering the Walls of Dina & Darlene’s Bedroom)

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Our Friend

The large, orange squash on the porch cut to look like it’s puking out its own seeds from its mouth, circle hollow eyes where a candle will burn later tonight when the kids trick-or-treat. Outside of the trailer park, every house a Barbie Magical Mansion, French doors and pillars, bay windows and two-story decks. They sit on the street in the car, watch the darkness of their friends’ houses, the house its own kind of corpse. There is his face in the top right window, “There he is!” Darlene says. But instead three yellow eyes, all in a row, tails briefly entwined. A tapping on the back windshield so faintly under the loud bass, unrecognizable at first, as if not even there. Elijah revs the engine, exhaust suspended and then enters the backseat. The cats jump from the window.

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Dina & Darlene

Dina & Darlene’s parents’ trailer is hillside and glistening. A long, rolling, pebble-lined driveway makes it easier to hear when people have arrived unannounced. Children don’t make the trek up for candy on Halloween, even Dina & Darlene’s friends, the road so steep. Small blue and red packages fill a skull on Dina & Darlene’s front porch. From afar it’s expensive candy, but once you get close enough you realize it’s leftover Smarties and Dumdums from last year because that’s the suck candy, Darlene says, because it sucks ass.

This morning’s snow doesn’t stay, and even though they live at the top of a hill, their father built a fence around the yard, the pretty side towards their trailer and the ugly side towards the neighbors. Their father, scratching his neck beard and spilling coffee from a broken coffee cup, watches the snow flit around the fence, whispers “I’m glad I waterproofed the cocksucker when I did,” so pleased he is with his own handiwork.

The fence was a fun job, or so their dad called it, and Dina & Darlene knew it was a fun job by how much doing the job was going to suck ass, so it was a suck job as they called it. But the fun jobs paid cash money, and they have been able to sock away enough for magazines with River Phoenix on the cover, and trips to the city for fan club meetings, and an airplane ticket to Los Angeles for November 1st, 1993—tomorrow morning, bright and early.

Through the clock radio the Monster Mash plays. “One more day,” Dina says, and River Phoenix will fall in love with us.” The one fun job their father never could do is fix the bulge in the wall of their room, water gathering behind paint and stretching, sagging, which they covered with a large poster of River leaning over the back of a chair, half of a smile, eyes of knowing, which they bought at K-Mart. Every inch of every wall covered with River Phoenix, even the light switch plate which protruded out his mouth, his head pitted and fastened around the toggle. Thousands of pairs of River Phoenix eyes watching as a hex at all times.

Today, the fun job is shelves in the bathroom. Here is Dina with a hammer in one hand, here is Darlene with nails in her mouth. They are queens of home repair. Queens of cash money suck jobs.

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Meat is Murder

We stop eating meat
because River Phoenix

we throw everything away,
the freezer, our Mother’s closet

meat and leather
shoes and rib-eye

Jell-O casserole
into the street

what about the scene
in Running on Empty

when the family
leaves Jomo behind

did it break his heart
as an animal lover?

how he did he dig
deep enough to separate

from the loss of the pet
or did the loss fuel the scene?

did the anguish of mistreating
an animal keep him up at night?

we weep at the sight
of the bright pink slabs

in the supermarket
faux grass accoutrements.

how can we ingest
things River thinks

are so bad for us?
our mothers

ask for two pounds, thinly sliced,
and we watch the hunk

run back and forth
through the slicer smugly

blood-juice drips
from the blades

and the man
with the bushy eyebrows

rhythmical and methodical
tenderly grabs each slice

before it falls to the counter
we want to slam our bodies

into the glass, smash the hams,
the whole octopus,

bright salmon fillets
which we learned are dyed

so we eat them,
the pork cutlets,

the roasts,
we want to smash

the chicken livers
into people’s faces

make them choke
on their diseases,

we want to scream
meat is murder

at the top of our lungs!
Meat is murder

because River Phoenix says so!

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River Phoenix

Black snake
slith belly

dream and lang
with nowhere to be

and not very fast
senses us in wait

stops to tongue air
diamond fang a-shine

neon yellow glow
in some dankity fog morning

drip, drip, drop,
small venom biding

in a wide S form
heft and curve, tall grasses.

We remember how our grandfather
had to chop ones head off,

a menace to chickens,
the way everything turns

its tongue out
when life leaves it.

Will there be snakes in California?
Living in palm trees?

Lying to us about paradise
like Eden.

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River Jude Phoenix (Bottom)

To wrap our arms around love
             October & bones

The first time we saw you we knew of divinity
           we call

your fan hotline             busy tonight

          we’re sorry, this number

disconnected

             no longer in service
                                                    please try your call

                                                                              again

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Our Friend

        One week ago, the River Phoenix Fan Club met for the first time in the city.

        Our friend, who loves Madonna more, but attended anyway, never made it back.

        Street lamp fritz. Above the car, a mourning Autumn sky where we will joyride for infinity. A moment we must remember when we are older, of slightly larger width: The wind, part gritty, part cornfield, edges of air populating encroachment. The fluorescent buzz fades. Moths slam glass, as if to get under skin. Here we are in the search party.
        We are calling his name. The swift beat in the pit of our legs, glutes want for a stop sign. Rows of stalks, half-green, half-wilt, enough ears to hear. I bite a cob, yellow-white kernels dribble down my chin. Voices scramble, rise, disappear. Car running. Someone walking so slowly, we think they are dead. Where are you? we say. Where are you! we say, no longer interrogative, but a declarative. Voice as map: X for here, O for there.
        Walking hours in the same direction. “Didn’t we see that house before?” Elijah says. On the ridge a house in the holler, plumes of smoke chimney black and confusing. The parking lot near, but our vicinity to it expands. A lost shoe, a sprained knee, a lack of oxygen. The trees lean closely, listen. Circle one way, circle the opposite. The whiskey is gone, and everyone slurs. Eventually, the bridge reappears. Eventually, the holler is far away. Eventually, the house no longer exists, a woodstove in the back of our tongues. No one admits we were lost. No one admits there is no way we could have been lost at all.

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