NEBRASKA WIDOWER’S WALK
by TODD ROBINSON
Death is a long black sack. It goes on forever.
In Omaha wind scrapes its hundred hands through black branches and my
mother’s cigarette smoke. Two packs a day pulled from the black refrigerator. She is
Circe who turned my father into swine.
Death is snowing softly on a laundromat, a florist, a gnarled dog at the end of my
leash.
O love, promise me you will return. I negotiate your clutter as small footsteps
sound on the ceiling. Aren’t you the only angel dancing on the head of a pin pushed all
the way into my palm?
ALL OF THE ABOVE
by TODD ROBINSON
We were nobodies from nowhere but we didn’t know it, spiking our fine hair with gobs of mousse, rolling the hems of our jeans up tight, wearing sockless Sperry’s and Top-siders like we knew what a boat was, like we were Kennedys even though the nearest body of water was a gravel pit pond and the nearest river was a highway for barges made of fertilizer runoff and cow shit.
We hunkered down in basement bedrooms, our fathers always gone, mothers on twisty phone lines with soap operas on the televisions, pulling cigarettes from fridges and filling ashtrays with lipstick-smeared filters to fill the trash barges we never saw steaming down the river with concrete banks we never even thought of.
In our paisley we went to the mall or drank Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers in two liter bottles until we threw up on Applewood golf course or cut the bottoms off the bottles and used them as gravity bongs in garages hung with large and small pliers nobody used.
We knew the world was doomed. This made it easy to smoke weed out of shop class pipes, to pass little orange bottles of locker cleaner in the back rows of Psych class to flare red-faced or to slobber all over strangers we didn’t really want because we were so blasted on beer or white crosses or tabs of acid printed with little blue window panes.
Of course we were also good students who memorized the quadratic equation and knew something about the industrial revolution. Or we were football players in jerseys tucked into Levi’s button flies cheating on the history test because Mr. McDonald who everybody called “Bullet” because he used to be fast before he became a fat bald fascist left the answer key on his desk and disappeared while we answered multiple choice questions about the Nazis, A, A, B, none of the above.
Or we were luminous hominids parked in the endless cornfields that ringed our little river town, corn sweat muddying the starlight we kissed under, our engines ticking, Liz Claiborne perfume on the necks we marred with hickeys, girls with names like Candy and Anne, boys named Tom and Bob and John who brazenly wore beer-branded t-shirts with Spuds Mackenzie the party dog on them, slogans like Forget the mountains, show me your Busch. We wore black and white checkered Vans if we were cool and cowboy boots if we were hicks. We went to Colorado and snowplowed down whole mountains in our jeans and high school jackets, powder blue with Ralston in crimson stitching on the back.
But mostly we worked, dunking frozen cod and chicken planks into batter and frying them golden in the vats at Long John Silver’s, or answering telemarketing lines to sell records we’d never heard of (Sun Ra? The Lounge Lizards?) to people we’d never meet. We bagged groceries, flipped burgers, mowed lawns, shoveled taco meat into hard corn shells for drive-thrus full of station wagons.
We vandalized: mailboxes, streetlights, lives. We chucked eggs, toilet papered trees, lobbed bottles like grenades at the driveways of our enemies. We plastered our bedroom walls with posters of the posers we watched on MTV (Billy Idol, Duran Duran, U2) and blasted our defenseless ears with cassette tapes bought at Target with money we didn’t really have, girls with hair sprayed into high waves over their foreheads, boys with mullets, everything garish and cliched, easy to abandon.
We were we were tornadoes, we were muscle cars painted in primer, we were cracked windshield glass.
author pic here
Todd Robinson is
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