-the importance of raspberry jam and our early understanding of water-

I’m looking at my two and a half year old son

snacking after his feeding of nutritious food

prepared by the hands of his mother.
I've provided the snacks and now

his hands and face and hair are sticky with raspberry

jam and what appears to be cake frosting, although

no trace of cake can be found anywhere in the house.

his mother is in another room and seems content
to have left him in my care.

I don’t mind and my immediate concern is to find a way

to wrestle him from his passion for sugar and to clean him up
before I'm nabbed in the act by his mother,

but I’m too intrigued by his singular dismissiveness on being such a sticky mess.

It would drive me crazy.

everything he touches from his tray sticks to his hands.
his hands stick together, finger to finger.

his hair (Monica Vitti blonde) is matted in tufts of deep-red raspberry jam.

when is it, I thought, being a sticky mess like this becomes a nightmare?

I wouldn’t last a minute.

when does that instant of enlightenment come to us

when we look down at ourselves and the mess we’ve made of ourselves

and reason: “I need a warm running water”.

Ohio

-It's been a cold, cold war-

1.

downtown. 1962 or thereabouts. I’m drunk on orangeade;

hopped-up on chow mein, here at the busy China Royal.

(in a booth the size of a red-leatherette continent after the movies

with friends, and more than a hint of tension in the air, talking about

the space race, arms race, mutual destruction race with the Russians,
who were kicking our ass with their powerful rocket thrusters which
had the look of powerful rocket thrusters;
fat, grey-black, thunderous, menacing looking things.)

now, walled within our half-moon booth, we're talking about the cold war;

of how long that flash of light will linger, of how the blast's burn

will blister our skins, of how the blood will boil in our veins, and–––

will we see it coming?

all the while feasting on chow mein, and orangeade with ice. (no straw)

on hot summer nights while drinking orangeade, I liked the ice
to form a cold, convex semicircle between my nostrils and upper lip.

2.

this happened not only on the night under discussion, but also
on a number of other nights during the cold war.

addendum:
regardless of the USSR's lead in the power ratings of rocket thrusters,
an accounting from within our booth regarding "total destructive capabilities",

overwhelmingly favored the United States, and although the "Ruskies"

had the ability to destroy the entire world 10-times over, the United States

had the ability to destroy the entire world 15-times over, the tabulation showed,

with one voting "present." 

3.

J.F.K. said: (when warning of the futility inherent in a nuclear war, that)

"the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouths."

whew! it's been a long, long night at the sweltering China Royal.

Myrtle,..set me up with one last orangeade.

no straw.

lots of ice.

It's been a cold, cold war.

-behind the fence in Vinton County-

the first family arrives at 10:55 PM.

the pickup truck slows rapidly from its speed,

the dust of Powder Plant Road behind it settles to the ground.

the driver pulls over to the shoulder leaving space

for the others he knows will surely come here.

another family arrives within minutes.

those waiting at the fence can see them coming.

now the third family comes, then the sixth family and so on through the night.

they line the fence as if witnessing a stalled cortège. 

Into the distance beyond the fence, there isn’t much to see.

not even the smoke still rising, but the skies

above the dark facility are a heavy, blood-red at sunup.

there’s something wrong with the air,––
the pungent residue in spent nitroglycerin.

they shuffle left and right along the fence allowing for newcomers.

there’s nothing to see of the grounds but flashing lights.

the multi-blast shockwaves shook the foundations of their homes,

the walls of their trailers, the bones of their backyard dogs.

then the howling siren, droning, fatal, one pitch is enough,

sends them driving hard through McArthur, Ohio

and there at the fence they wait in a solemn row.

nobody on the outside gets in.

nobody from the inside is allowed to get out.

an official count of the living is in process.

the dead will wait to be identified.
but these are not the recognizable dead,
those we've come to know laying neatly in the parlors.

these dead are the “Powder Plant” dead, identified

through the process of examination, of science, of piecemeal pathology.

but first, the living are counted, myself among them and from the count

will come the “unaccounted for” who are then presumed to be dead

and presumptions such as these are never wrong.

Austin Powder Company

                    -Agatha on the lam-

                   It was Agatha Pettruci who lived

                   on the second floor of the initial
                   three-tenement, brown-shingled beauty,

                   one floor beneath Ernest and Julia Carocelli

                   and one floor above us, the D'Elia family;
                   father, mother, the one set of maternal grandparents,
                   an older sister, me and a younger brother.
                   (pick the parakeet or cat from the drop-down
                   menu, now available to subscribers)
                   I was the middle child of the family
                   and one could say that Agatha was the middle child
                   of the house on Bedford, officially designated as 1017.

                   Agatha was as old as my old grandmother
                   and as young women might have crossed the Atlantic together
                   during the earliest years of the turn to the 20th century.

                   while visiting the first-floor one night,
                   and after coffee and anisette cookies,
                   old Agatha began asking questions of, then began
                   searching for "la piccole persone"––
                   the "little people" she believed were living inside
                   our first television set; fatso cabinet, small screen,
                   and with supplied antenna fully extended, looked like
                   what robots looked like in the early 1950s. 

                   It was my father who found the absurdity
                   of Agatha's heavy-handed exploration, humorous.
                   but as evening fell more deeply
                   toward the hour of anticipated patterns,
                   Agatha became increasingly agitated after several attempts
                   to locate the little people frolicking inside the set, failed.

                   as often happens with stories to be told, it's only now
                   occurring to me that Agatha Pettruci, second floor of three,
                   might have looked upon us as a legion of demons that night,
                   and had she been in better shape, killed us,––
                   then climbed the stairs to the third floor and once there,
                   because they had a television set complete with its own
                   "piccole persone" killed Ernest and Julia Carocelli, too.

                    Quequechan 1950.

                    1952? 1951.