Jon Frankel's Blog, page 2

at home with her stuff — for my mother

at home with her stuff — for my mother

1.

the sun
lies shattered on ice

rain peels the paint
wind strips the clapboard clean

intoxicated ants
mill over roadkill deer
ravens divide

who feeds on the ants and wasps
what chews on the dust
who bathes in the ashes

among the many things
i find it hard to remain

2 .

the responsibility
and fascination
with brocade

pearls and ebony beads
ruffled ribbons
on gold shopping bags

antique drawers
stuffed with ephemera
newsprint in silk bags

she lies there in sunlight
and lemon pledge
magazines in blankets

parquet collage
ivory and mother of pearl
inlay, chinoiserie

victorian green
plush upholstery
velvet and faux marble

and a glass bird
in a glass cage
in a plastic cube

i remember
when it shattered
in hot water

3 .

so ugly
reduced to effort
at last

the scoured crevasse
collects dirt
for the dandelion

the small ferns
in wet walls
grow bright

SAFE, CLEAN, SMALL, CHEAP: ISLE OF DOGS PART 4

First he went to Officer Quick. They were walking down Broadway. It was a hot rainy day. The rain
came in squalls of high whipping winds and then
would abruptly cease. The sun came out and baked
the streets dry until another band darkened the island.
They approached Julian’s, a pool hall.

“That prick owes me,” said Officer Quick.

“We were here last week,” Sargon reminded him.
Keeping track was a part of his job.

“Yeah, so what. He shorted us. He sells heroin
now. Plus the new machines. Did he include the new
machines? No.”

Julian’s wasn’t operated by Julian but by Elliot.
Julian was Elliot’s dead twin. Twenty years earlier,
Elliot watched his brother die a horrible death and
hadn’t spoken to anyone since, except for business.
He also owned the BowL-O-RamA on University,
a bowling alley decorated like a Hindu temple. The
workers had blue skin and dressed in gold pantaloons.
The doorways were decorated with gold leaf and
painted scarlet flames, like portals between heavens
and hells. They served the hottest curry on the East
Side. But the pool hall was traditional.

Elliot had grown tired of patrons going up the
street to buy heroin. He might as well sell it himself,
but he didn’t want to pay the tax, and he didn’t want
to schtupp the cops, so he stiffed them both. But
Quick knew everything that crept on the street. If a
roach got fucked by another roach, he knew.

“Elliot’s OK,” said Sargon. “He’s just sad about his
brother.”

“It’s been decades. You know how he bit it?”

“No one ever says. They look away in shame.”

Quick nodded grimly. “Let’s get some coffee. I
need a boost before shaking down that prick.”

They took two stools at The Last Grind and
ordered from Jill. Last Grind waitresses’ breasts burst
out of skimpy bodices with nipples etched on the
front, and they wore silver Statue of Liberty crowns.
Jill brought them coffees and smiles.

Quick slowly stirred in three spoons of sugar, one at a time, before
adding a plop of cream. “Always melt the sugar first,”
he muttered, as he had on numerous occasions before.
Quick regarded all information to be of equal value
and was solemn in his belief that his job was to impart
to Young Sargon a steady stream of chestnuts. Leave
the safety on. Wipe a baby’s ass front to back, never
towards the genitals. Avoid stepping into puddles on
the corner. Never walk on sidewalk doors. Muzzle
control. Always clear the chamber before you clean
your gun. Use a condom with street whores. Rain
gear brings the sun out. Shake down junkies before
they buy if you want money. The most important
thing to learn is a patrol officer rarely draws their gun
and hardly ever uses it— “In thirty-five years of patrol
I’ve fired it once, and that was to take down an armed
gorilla. How the beast got the firearm we were never
sure, but he weighed 600 pounds and had a head like
a coconut.”—Sargon had definitely blown that one.

They sipped their coffee and Quick, looking out
the window at the evaporating puddles, said, “This
used to be a good town. Used to be everyone knew
their place. Who to kick up to, how much and where.
Whores stayed on their corners, punks gave it up
when you leaned on them, the bosses took care of the
cops. Woman goes into labor, cops’ll deliver it and
bring her to the hospital. That’s good police. Peace on
the streets. Everyone gettin’ by. Students were polite
to their teachers. The garbage got picked up, none
of this strike bullshit, horses and people crapping in
the gutter, graffiti so bad you can’t see out the train
windows, criminals and anarchists on the streets, dogs
everywhere biting people and shit, rats. I hate rats.
Came to work this morning and twenty rats come
racing out of a garbage bag. Saw two rats fucking in
an alley. Ever see that before? No. The streets are like
their living room now. We’re fucked.

“The Red Suits don’t know shit about public order.
Sure, business is up. For us, bad times are good times.
People afraid, they live for today. Fuck tomorrow.
Booming business for bunko. I’d rather have it quiet.
You take Elliot. That son of a bitch never felt the
need to sell heroin. He had the tables and the booze
and the cigarettes and that was enough. But now he’s
thinking, what if I have to fuck off in the middle of
the night? How’m I gonna to pay the border guards
upstate, how’m I gonna cross the Mohawk Nation
and get to Canada? If he goes south, what’s there for
him? Nothing. A northern man heads north, he never
goes south. Remember that if you’re ever chasing
fugitives. Go south you don’t turn up shit, but go
north, there they are, in some cabin in the woods not
five miles from their mother’s house. I hate fucking
cabins in the woods. Gimme the creeps. Did you ever
see that movie—”

“How did Elliot’s brother Julian die?” Sargon asked,
not aware of interrupting as his mind was wandering
over Phaedra’s face and body, her scent on his lips and
fingers.

Quick sipped his coffee and looked away. Without
feeling, he said, “Cut to pieces. They used a serrated
knife, so it would hurt more. Elliot had to watch.
He was tied up. We found him in a warehouse on
Delancey Street screaming because wild dogs were
eating the body parts. The reason he respects us now
is that when he needed something we gave it to
him. We saved what was left of Julian for proper
burial. We didn’t just let the dogs eat the rest. It’s
important for them Christians. Get this—they believe
that the body rises up after death and flies to Heaven.
Wouldn’t it be nice. Not so nice for Julian, because
part of him came up as dog shit in the park.”

Forcing himself to focus, Sargon said, “I have a
favor to ask,” as they left the counter and walked
up the steep, dimly lit stairs, two floors straight, to
Julian’s Pool Hall.

“Uh oh,” said Quick, winded.

“I need an apartment.”

“So look in the paper.”

“I’m fifteen. I need an adult.”

“You live in a Fifth Avenue mansion. Your pals
live in that high-rise. What the fuck you need an
apartment for? I live in one. Believe me, it ain’t
special.”

“It’s for a friend, who needs to hide out. He needs
somewhere safe and clean but small and cheap.”

“Safe, clean, small, cheap? What city do you think
you’re in?”

“How about small and cheap?”

“Let’s go small and see where that gets us. What
neighborhood?”

He took his nightstick and rapped
three times on the door. A vacuum cleaner whined
back and forth. They waited and he rapped three
times again. The peephole popped open.

“Downtown is best,” Sargon said.

“Very popular place to live. Harlem would be
easier. I know a landlord there.”

“Downtown is better.”

He scratched his grey hair and rubbed the white
stubble on his florid cheek as they pushed past the
janitor. “Landlords down here are scumbags.”

It was a large dark loft with two dozen tables and
a horseshoe bar in the middle. There were no
distractions save the grimy view of Broadway
through windows and metal Venetian blinds that had
never been cleaned. Elliot was a spare man with a
hard mouth, slight of build. He sat with a calculator,
peering through reading glasses at a sheet of copper
electraweave. A short clay pipe sat smouldering in
an ashtray next to a discolored mug of coffee and a
rocks glass of whiskey. He didn’t look up but said, “I
schtupped you last week.”

Quick raised the nightstick above his head and
brought it down on the bar hard. “Fucking roach.
Don’t insult me.”

“What?” he asked, pushing the glasses up his nose
and drinking the shot of whiskey.

“You know what. The heroin and the machines.”

“The machines! I bumped for that.”

Quick smirked and shook his finger. “Not the new
ones. I know you added three slots and a poker. Plus,
the dope you’re running is worth a grand every two
weeks. Otherwise I’ll shut your ass down.”

“C’mon Quick, we’re friends. I gotta make a living.
You take a grand more and I’m fucked. I can’t pay
Lawrence here. He’s got a family. And I got debts.
You think Martini gives a crap about my expenses?
He wants the vig on time.”

“And so do I.”

“It’s impossible.”

Quick said, “Don’t make me look bad in front of
the kid.”

Elliot said, “The kid? He makes more’n I do off this
place with his stick. Shake his ass down.”

“My next move is to send the Red Suits in.”

“Balls busted! Fuck me. I thought we were friends.”

“We are friends. That’ll be one k, and don’t weigh
my pockets down with silver.”

Elliot shook his head, yawned, and drank the rest
of the coffee before descending the stairs to the
basement, returning with two diamonds in a
cellophane bag. “Motherfucker. My margin just
shrank to bupkis.”

“That’s a pile of goatshit and you know it. I’ll tell
you what—you can skip a week if you do my partner
a solid.”

Elliot looked at Sargon with brief, but evident
affection. “Sure. What’s the kid want?”

“A safe, clean, small, cheap apartment downtown.”

Elliot laughed for the first time in twenty years.
“Get outta here. I don’t wanna see you for two weeks
unless you’re renting a bucket of balls.”

coming soon

ISLE OF DOGS PART THREE

CHAPTER 24 OF ISLE OF DOGS:

Exiles
Dear Sargon,
I write to you from a small neglected window seat
in Castelul Banffy where I now live. It might as well be
Mars, it is so far from New York and you. Getting here
was hell. For two weeks the small ship rose up and down
the monstrous waves of the North Atlantic. Nauseating
pitches and rolls, sliding into troughs of green-black water.
The smell of burning fuel and rope tar made me so sick I
puked up everything I ate, even the bad toast and jam they
served with tea. The toilet in our cabin was just a hole in
the floor you squat over like a dog and it stank of sewage.
We slept in narrow metal bunks that felt like coffins. There
was no clock or calendar and I never knew where I was,
except I wanted to be with you and Papa and Renee, out
riding or sailing on the Rosamund Fair.

The only thing I knew was pain and loneliness, an
empty electric feeling in my gut that burned my brain.
Sleep was the only escape but I kept waking up in the
middle of the night because of terrible dreams, not knowing
where I was, and I would remember what had happened
and the empty electric feeling would return, not that it
had gone anywhere, no, it was hiding. Sleep was just a
blindfold on its glare. Day and night I lay listlessly with
shallow breath, like an unstrung curtain.

Finally we landed late at night in Rotterdam. I wobbled
down the gangway like a sleepwalker, to the waiting
carriage with four black horses and a cloaked coachwoman
with a black whip. God, she was creepy! Does Britomart
have an even-more-evil twin? I somehow managed to nod
off in Mama’s arms (really embarrassing, I would like it
if Mama kept herself ten feet distant at all times) and
awoke to the tumult of a train station, our trunks in a
pile. The conductor was typing our names into a book,
handing a sheaf of tickets to Mama who as usual was
a nervous wreck keeping track of everything because the
truth is Mama doesn’t know how to do anything, none of
us do, except ride horses and play beautiful songs. And
Duck is totally useless, she has to be carried everywhere.
On the boat Mama and I would hold her over the toilet
hole so she wouldn’t fall in. Mama had to wipe her butt
like a baby!

For the first time in weeks I was actually hungry, so
hungry I could have eaten any shit they piled on my plate.
A vendor passed by pushing a steaming cart, the smell of
eggs, fresh baked bread, and kaffee in the chilly air. Mama
let me buy a fried egg sandwich with a runny yolk and
kaffee, which I ate in our train compartment. Nothing ever
tasted better. I decided then that I would start to write to
you, feeling sad you would never read it, that we would
never lie in the grass again, or go swimming. I guess I’ll
always be alone now. I started to write pretending I was
on Mars and you were Iocle back on Earth, which is New
York, but the game didn’t seem real. I’m sure I will get
back to the stories one of these days, but I’m just too sad
to write without you here to do the drawings.

Dream Sonnet

Dream Sonnet

I remember teacups rattled when the subway
rumbled beneath the sidewalk and a man
whose muse was dynamite stood high
his mouth ringed with fire and his hands raised
in prayer, how the glasses shook before they broke
ice exploding into air. It was spring and snow
blew carillons, the Latin mass effaced by time
resurrected by the storm, warm crocuses
in mid March froze and fell in place, the disguise
that held so long erased in a spasm of truth
that has passed, the dishes cracked in the racked
silence, I awoke to sun my face in a lightbulb
suspended lifeless from the ceiling, its nimbus
webbed by spiders and the taloned shadow of sleep

airborne routes

airborne routes

crooked shadows of branches on the snow
grow sharp in the glow of early sun, dawning
maps of roads that interlock the sky–
nodes above and below the ground that sound
the run of wind and water, spun of light
tapping veins to sustain my errant flight

Undisclosed

Undisclosed

Their love is clothed
In the undisclosed

The wind is whipping
Her scarf like a flag
And he flies like a jay
Blue feathers furrowed

And her eyes are a round
Green fire enclosed by roses

Self Portrait

Self Portrait

An abyss of selfies in infinite regress
Lenses shuttered by black
Refrains of fire drowned in hurricanes
The eye impaled by a cry
Magnifies the whistles barks and sirens
No one survives

Days I Could Not Find

days I could not find the sun
darling so blue without you
day doesn’t die, it does it blind,
it furies, it comes and goes
in braided bells of birdsong
swells and hollows in grey
curtained woods laddered
with shadow and copper

To The Dust excerpt

The Admiral stood hunched over the surgery counter, staring sadly at Phaedra’s placenta. She knew she had to preserve it intact and was resisting an urge to eat it raw. It was a gnawing hunger centered in her mouth, not her stomach. And surely, she thought, a mere slice would do the trick. Just a nibble. She sliced off a piece with a scalpel and Yrmela came in just as she was slipping it in her mouth. A drop of blood dripped off her lower lip.
“What are you looking at? Prepare the samples for analysis and storage. I managed to swab her cervix and collect fluid and tissue samples but not nearly what I could have gotten if she’d been twilight.” The Admiral shook her head. “I had no idea Panic was so perverse. Do you think she goes in for nipple clamps and fisting? Not really my thing. I think you’ll agree that a little bondage now and again is like a splash of pink or yellow in a grey room, but physical pain is overrated, a vulgar synecdoche of emotional pain.”
Cane could not help looking down at the placenta. She wondered if Yrmela could see where she had taken the slice. It was obvious, a different color as the outer tissue had dried under the lights of the lab. Protocol was that Yrmela would take the placenta to the cryovac, but Cane wanted a little more time with it. Why, she wondered, did she care what Yrmela thought? Yrmela was her slave. Her vent order was on file. She could get rid of her before she squealed. But what would she do without Yrmela? Sometimes Cane even thought that she’d leave Yrmela alive for her replacement to dispose of. It gave her a chance, a roll of the dice that her successor will have the same love the Admiral did for her. Because her successor would eventually discover the order. They’d discover all the dead the Admiral had kept alive over the years.
Elma came in. “Ah, Elma, that was a first rate birth. You did great. I haven’t given one so much attention in—well—I have never given a birth so much attention. Usually it’s just pain meds and twilight. Push down on the belly and out comes the baby, like those little novelty pigs you squeeze the shit out of? How is our patient doing?”
“Resting. I hope she’ll sleep, Boss.”
“Has the baby nursed?”
“Yes.”
What wouldn’t Sybil Cane do for a few teaspoons of colostrum to drink and a drop or two to sequence and amplify. That’s all she needed. A few draws of the breast pump.
“Yrmela, see if you can get her to give up a few drops of colostrum.” Yrmela’s nostrils flared and she quietly stomped out of the room.
Elma said, “The baby needs that. Panic is worried about immunities. Hers developed late, she says, and so did her brother’s and sister’s. It runs in the family.”
“Elma, you’re taking your responsibilities to heart! I’m so proud. But I’m sure you will agree that medical decisions ought to remain in the hands of Boss? Hmm? Since you’re here, and the others are out of earshot, tell me, what more have you learned? Making you her birth partner was a stroke of genius. I could not have done better.”
“She hasn’t told me the names of her family, if that’s what you mean.”
“But she grew up in America?”
“She doesn’t say. It’s just the Summer Cottage, a mansion where they went sailing and swimming, and the Winter Palace, where it snows sometimes. How would I know where that is? She can’t name the moons of Neptune. She’s never seen diamonds rain down on Uranus. I’ve never seen America. I don’t even know where New York is.”
It’s where she’s from, Sybil Cane thought. “What about Budapest or Vienna?”
“I can’t keep the names straight. She talked about being a teenager on the streets of a city and working as a prostitute. She did not like it. She talks a lot about a librarian they had as kids named Babylon Sippar.”
“That rings a bell.” Cane thought about it but could not place the name. “Learn what you can and take good care of her. I expect her back, front and center, in eight weeks.”
When Elma left, Cane checked that no one else was around and sliced off a larger piece of placenta, which she chewed slowly and washed down with cold coffee.