All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
THIRTY PERCENT
RAISE IN RENT
Phantom jets scrape the roof. Slow
thunder unravels the air
down to the pig-colored walls.
Bubbles bob, thin cities of light, evade
his frenzied hands and slide
through a mirrored window
where images of the courtyard curve
repeatedly upward, one and multiple.
In the corner, a dented cart,
a philodendron jungle, and a mattress
smeared with yellow dust.
He climbs into the cart,
hanging on a pane where bubbles slid
through, the fading circles
unbroken, his palms, fingertips, and nose
pressed to the glass. Bug-littered,
celestial porchlights switch on.
He wizens a plum with budding teeth
in a clinker of fallen gingko leaves.
He was told about the invisible,
how it lives like air and squeezes
like smoke, how it resides
in his teeth and falls in his hair,
its hour like breath,
how it grows from earth and fire,
providing each table
with light and with water
as cold as winter rain.
__________
Shadows feel through the window
past reflected branches swaying
before his face in the glass. His eyes
follow tiny blackened stars of blood
on the concrete. He pulls his salvaged
wagon out to where the valuables wait--
a mirror, houseplants, stuffed animals,
a stray hand--and stares, timeless, at himself,
the journey already beginning, the dirt
peeling away from the street
as if the cells of everything
were sloughing off into the wind.
Everyone is moving. Back rent unpardonable.
No one allowed to squat on the lawn. No one
allowed to run around. A new owner, a new
manager, and a thirty percent raise in rent.
The old woman who had pinned his Nina, Pinta
and Santa Maria to her frig with a strawberry
magnet might steer a shopping cart
out the door, and he could curl up
below the carriage, dragging the cart
forward like a turtle, his shell heavier and heavier
as they trek down the alley. He goes back inside
and curls, legs up, on his bed, then ferries a Matchbox
ambulance in a stray sandal to bundles of wash,
the Canary Islands. Through the window, he sees
a bus lurching forward, floating into a cross-street
two lights away, vanishing downtown....
__________
Settling into seventy five, he glanced at almond orchards,
the rows between evenly spaced trees slanting south,
south-east, or east as his eyes shifted focus. The trunks
of the nearest trees floated, the orchard dropping to earth
exactly as his car passed, like a net falling short of him.
Another dry river. A night heron, crooked thumb, jutted
from a branch in the river bed. He thought of loose hands,
worn out, single gloves plucked from melon boxes
and clothes-pinned to the conveyor. The case sealer
crushed slow hands that struggled to pull jammed
boxes clear. Anorexia's calm fingers inserted coins
into the slot, pressed a button, and scooped up
a soda, just before she turned, slid boxes
to one side, and rested a .45 against her husband's head,
a hand splattered with mud as it slapped
the gun away. Her husband had abandoned her near
town, and she'd trudged twenty miles through the fields
to the compound. They used to bet about who would kill
whom at the "Okie Flat" packing shed. Frank once smoked
after the conveyor broke down again while others loaded
by hand--wasn't in his job description. Frank was found
dead in a car by the road, dents in his skull the size
of a police baton, the case "inconclusive." Steve murdered
Anorexia, cutting her up like a grape stalk and burying her
in his big red toolbox. They silently suspected something
was wrong when he hadn't shown for work on Sunday--
time and a half. Nor would Fifi do the shuffle for the ladies
while waiting his turn to shower in that outhouse
with a shower nozzle. Fifi had been released
from the "vocational institute" until he was beaten
and raped repeatedly. Driving by the last gas station
for miles, he imagined the land without people, the canals
almost empty, the floodplain of five rivers in wet years
extending from the mountains to north of Tulare,
subsiding into networks of marshes and shallow lakes,
webbed by teeming sloughs and channels, a refuge
from dunes and alkali sinks for birds along the flyway.
Once, while he pissed, so drunk he could hardly stand,
he teetered above the body of a great blue heron,
its neck a question mark, the wings extended
in the dirt. He was done as an activist after losing
his job at the big box store for chewing gum
and for not coming in on his days off--he knew it
as he neared houses of cardboard thrown together,
just as he recalled again the ash tree
in the compound, a tree dreamed
in childhood that revealed a fate no one
wanted to believe, the trunks
of loaded fruit trees blending
into one as the sun raced
on the horizon, the last light logged
on the walls of the shed.
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