Super Mario Brothers

From time to time my brother would get me to play video games. But I was a terrible partner. I flew the battleship through halls of stars while my brothers shrieked help from Star Fox, Star Fox; in Selenitic there was a bookcase, filled with squares of cracked vellum, green leather, each rowed with black hieroglyphs like Hebrew on a corpse's arm. How could one resist such richness, how could one look away? I slumped through ivory patios and wanted to see. My favorite was a room above the crested mud gateway to the hall of Princess Peach. The black walls were noiseless and veloursome; it was an error of code, the material bounding the room jangling with emptiness. My steps clipped delicately and deadened on the lighted picture window, an inverse, rose-soft image of the Peach; there were only twenty paces wall to wall. The Princess held a rose. The noise of the game came in from a great distance. Other people were eating mushrooms, other people were leaping three hundred feet in the air. No one else could enter. I sat under the diffuse blush of the window. The sun came from far off.

Slapstick in Swiss Cheese: This Month's "There Comes A Time" Time; or, Mr. Donuthead, Who's Trying To Kill You?

I got up at 4:30 this morning. Not because I wanted to, or even because I had to. I did it for one reason. One mean old reason, the reason for the season, a reasonless reason, the reason to end all reasons: my back hurt. My goddamn back hurt.

That old waitress war wound, like every fake smile I ever gave turned on its side and stabbing me in the spleen. My back hurt. Like a cracked rib, like a dead dog, like an ice sculpture, like a fishing creel reeling me in. My back hurt. That old lady refrain pressing me tight as an iron maiden. My goddamn back hurt, so I woke up at 4:30. And I went to work.

Christ, you must be saying. Author. Jacqui. Is this going to be one of those complaining blogs? Like the cameraman in that pivotal moment in Wayne's World, you are walking away. Wait! Okay, okay, come on back, I say. Come on back. Things aren't as bad as they seem! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to dump on you. I'll figure something out. Okay? I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.


Some days the end of the world is burning a swiss cheese sandwich. This is one of those days. One of those "There Comes A Time" times. There comes a time, I'll say, when your rotten teeth and waitress wound and poor-me-Sally-ness and inability to make grilled cheese all catches up with you. These days you feel melancholy as a bear at the blind edge of winter and you want to dig a hole in the snow because the days are short and dark and full of hunger and it seems about that time. But you're not a bear. You're a human. A gol-darned lily-livered spume of a human, and singing in the shower, although fun, fails to change that peculiar predicament which you find yourself affixed to like a patch on the ass of a bum. You try to find the thread of where things went wrong, but it isn't there. It's all wrong. It's just you.

These are the days for harelip prayers.

I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.

Come on back.

Maiden Names

Oh mother, when I stand above the water,

On my white face I see your printed cheek.

I smell the betel shell of every daughter,

The currency of newness, rare as teak,

I see the teeth your mother used to crack you,

Whose mouth made holds that bellied you and blacked you,

Whose words were traders' tins to weigh you weak.

Why is my mother's maiden name forgotten?

Who tore your scrivened name to pieces, mother?

When did you take your fingers from the typewriter

and knot them in your lap to bloat and blubber,

to wend and bludgeon fatly through the water,

as, on the mudded bank, your only daughter

burning for an image, gasps and smothers?

The woman part of me was never named

Nor was the woman part of you. We are

Dumb sons without a provenance to claim,

Meek, muted by the keeper's clink and screw.

We cannot write in ink, we cannot mark

The places we have stood, submerged in dark.

How can I know my name, my nameless mother?

How can I be but some bright mirror's shadow?

A hold made sole for likeness, loyalty,

Blind darkness, corded to the absent shoulder

Of any captain, shunted sea to sea,

though rough, the waters hide my own clean cheek?

Daughter, will I brand you so I can speak?

Will rough reels buy my passage, weigh you weak?