Lonely Christopher
All Good Years
In the year 1993 in the municipal parking lot
a hapless woman collapsed against her car
and her earring fell off and she knelt on it
the sun was white and the roof was flat
and something evil happened in her skull
where her spine pierced her brain toylike
similarly near the end of the millennium
in the city an uncle the family disavowed
emaciated in a narrow bed with tubes in him
opened his mouth as his lungs filled with blood
and the black nurse put down her magazine
in the year 2009 the man with the truck howled
into the chest of some haphazard off-duty cop
near the drive-thru lane at a local restaurant
after unwittingly backing over a baby stroller
with a four week old newborn girl in it that
a mother had left unattended for only a second
and later in the year that the world ended (2012)
on the exact sites of provincial freak accidents
where the quotidian and unappreciated loss
drooled out of the chronology of petty histories
burnished fountains sprung from within the earth
and shot where years magnify into a heaven
and god leaned out the passenger-side window
of his brand new decked-out luxury vehicle
on the empyrean interstate in time to wink
at the sputtering faucets reaching up jealously
toward something I know that I will carry
but fear that I will never learn how to say.
Lonely Christopher is the author of the poetry collection Death & Disaster Series (Monk Books, 2014) and the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a 2011 selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint of Akashic Books. His plays have been produced in New York City and China. His film credits include the feature MOM (which he wrote and directed), the shorts We Are Not Here and Petit Lait (which were adapted from his stories), and Crazy House (for which he wrote the screenplay). He lives in Brooklyn.