Featured in Issue 1 of Madcap Review
Man Ray for breakfast. Man Ray for lunch. Man Ray to bring the
mimosa and a single flower to your sickbed, on Valentine’s Day,
like your mother used to do in winter when the steps of the
mason temple were filled with snow and your dog was young and
joyful and you could not make it once around the block without
resting.
As Lucille Ball as it is Frieda Kahlo, lips blood red
and impaled in the worst of places. Mexican too, like the sixty-
year-old cross-dressers you sat with on Fridays, when the
express 333 was full to Venice Beach and their red hair was
thinning in front and in back. Like the colors on your road trip
to Texas where New Mexico’s skies were a baby blue also, and the
winds at the rest stops were whipping and twirled you, in your
yellow/white jersey, eating pancakes alone. It’s the postcard
your lover made, with her girlfriend before you, in Scotland, as
babies. Her cheeks in black & white. The red rose in the
foreground was a magician’s prop, or was it? Go search and see,
in your bags of evidence and memories that you hate to look at,
just waiting for fire, or instead for the Polaroid of her,
rosebud nipples in your sister’s apartment, summer in Brooklyn
and all that must mean. Or use a fucking telephone where she
lives now, in Oregon, with that other nude model, the one in oil
pastel who posed as a bowler and a baseball player and was
impaled also, much later, same location.
Madcap Review 