Brainwrecked Blackboard Brainstorm

Sleepy nailbiters sip through transparent straws sighing at snitch jellyfish snatching potato pancakes to use as crutches. Ducks dive beneath the surface, transcendental, plummeting into aleph bet gimmel dalet gimme more loud thunder. Wrap the tourniquet tight into teeth that transgress in cherry bomb hands. The defenestration is a dance in the hot pan, shining welts rising. Seagulls circle planets.

The Day I Was Born

My mother was a three-time Olympic Russian gymnast. She won a gold medal, once, in Munich. She was fifteen. The ribbon raised welts on her neck where it touched her skin, and she cried silently through the entire medal ceremony. When she returned to Russia, she had it made into a lapel pin, and she wore it through the streets of her little Russian town like a war medal.
My father married my mother the day she turned seventeen. The wedding ring was too small, so my father pushed hard. My mother’s finger was swollen and bruised for the entire wedding. It lasted a week. By the end of the wedding, my mother could barely stand, but her mother told her to be proud that she and her new husband had enough liquor to go around and enough devoted friends to stay that long. My father was twenty-two when they were married.
The story goes that my grandfather made a drunken toast and, with eyes as cold as marble, asked that my mother kindly not shame the family and beget a male child.
My brother was born first. I was born second. On both occasions, every male citizen of the USSR smoked a big fat cigar.

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There’s a homeless man who sits outside of the Food Emporium on my block.
He used to have dreadlocks. He cut them off. Cropped his hair real close.
He looks more professional that way.
He sits with his bags of bottles and cans that he dug out of the trash can,
Coffee cup half-full of coins or sometimes even coffee,
Mumbling jumbles of words that don’t make sense to no one.
He’s got a penny in his mind for every dime he’s ever seen.
He ain’t mean, no, he just don’t know where he’s been.
And he’s got dark brown eyes and dark brown skin, lived-in cargo pants,
Stained t-shirt, eyes that dance.
He’s got style, man.
He’s got a penny in his mind for every dime he’s ever held in the palm of his hand.
Sometimes he holds the paper,
But I never seen him read it.
So I read for him.
Every morning I open the paper to the corrections page.
In black-and-white ink it says,
“We’re sorry for any confusion.
No one died today,
They were only born again.”