No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
Gloria hesitated and simply stared at the enchanting woman; over seventy-years-old and dressed in white from the top of her head – wrapped with a veil-type material – to her ankles, where her long sheer dress ended. She wore a red sash around her hefty waist. Yellow beads hung from her neck, and various bracelets, also beaded, lined her wrists.
“Your first time.” the woman said as a matter of fact.
Pointless. That was the word Zaire’s girlfriend had used to describe his life when she dumped him. At first he’d been upset at the sharpness of the insult, but now he was starting to see where she was coming from.
Before that, before I’d walked off from her, she’d fastened my shirt by one more button. “It looks better this way,” she’d said. I liked to wear my shirts a little open, the way James Spader characters did in his early movies, when I was young. But when I asked her if she were sure and she said, “One thousand percent,” I believed her. Even though I didn’t know where she got her authority, I believed her.
She thought it was old-fashioned, in a way, the way they married. There they were, a hip couple of Baltimore artists, Billy a musician and she a painter, living in the eclectic neighborhood of Mt Vernon. They were not the type, she thought, who got married because of an accidental pregnancy. And they did not do it because it was the right thing to do, though their Midwestern upbringing could have arisen something ingrained in them. They did it because, at the time, it "felt" right.
“This is radio station WAST, the wackiest station in the nation blasting out at you with a zillion megawatts of pure rock right here in downtown Little Falls and I’m Don Zingo your favorite DJ here to zap you and zing you with the sounds of tomorrow today.
“You’re an intellectual and a revisionist.”
“You take that back!”
“Lower your voices! The neighbors.”
“The neighbors? The neighbors are with us.”
“Not anymore.”