Pelican Tracks

Trailers

 Trailers Like the bowl of a tarnished spoon, the moon scoops up the light and pours it over us, the way you tip that bottleneck against the rim of a Star Wars glass, Old Crow in the Coke, flat taste turned sharp as an ice cube’s clink. So what if there’s always some cocklebur stuck on your socks, and a stink in the shower stall like a week’s worth of diapers? So what if you waste whole days with your eyes one inch above the flatfooted prose of a cop novel, wearing nothing but huaraches and a sweatshirt, your breasts legible under the name of some washed-out college? Those games that others play in their suits and offices— the peekaboo briefcase, the file drawers half-open, scent of Obsession breezing back from the Rolodex— won’t work for you, not when your fingers make a scrimmage in the M&Ms, or slip another Lucky from the target pack, its logo gone up in smoke at the scratch and crackle of a kitchen match. We’ll take the quiet here, out in the scrub among the sweet corn and the cucumbers, no neighbors raving like rain on a tin roof, no clatter of trucks on a redball run. If we need the novelty of noise, like a blue jay cocking its ear from the crosspiece of a creosote pole, we’ll potshot the dump, the rats shifty in their whiskers, dapper as Adolphe Menjou down on his luck. In this lodestone for storms, this tornado haven, where breakfast comes as cold bacon and biscuits that defy the knife, where fossils of Juicy Fruit  ripen under the cocktail table, and oil slicks down from a . placed on the armchair’s upholstery, we pay no mind to the philosophic seasons, winter with its bone oblivion or May trees turning over a new leaf. In this box of double-wide dreams, we loll in the lowlands of desire, immune to the slow injuries of time and rent and rings. ...