Movie Star Girlfriend
The Book of Secret Places
Liar Liar
113 Degrees of Separation
Early on Sunday, the sky opens its skin
flap, ancient beauty once worshipped.
The overpass roils in endless surf
until the sickening crash that lurches
neighbors to marionette motion, to carnage.
An SUV has flipped onto its crumpled
side, sirens shearing the air, all reason.
Too late partying, too many substances.
Blame will swirl the plugged drain, rumors
of lost pregnancy, innocence, tear ducts.
No smoke, no fire, all are horror-bound.
Paparazzi shoot the scene, jaws of life
releasing a body dusted in cocaine,
a ghost’s makeup. No color anywhere
except a river of blood and dawn
drizzling over the Cahuenga pass.
Is where my lover promised we’d meet,
in the Southern hemisphere, in the place
between the between. There is danger
here. Descent. Dark. Drama. Desire.
My penis is a workaholic, spelunkering
through catacombs, drenched and tired.
She told me that she was afraid of losing
herself in that forever losing yourself dance,
the paradox, you know? Once you find the other,
others may come with roses and active tongues.
My penis sometimes feels like a criminal,
hooded on daring exploits in enemy camps.
There are whole Italian villages next to big
breasted women on ice-moon he-wolves.
So many daring lovers, so much in mist
that I dare not look down at the crunching.
My penis likes that it is finally in a poem
There is ego in pen, sword, and this, too.
My lover claimed that my lips are now hers,
which makes me a teeth eater of dark looks,
hider of random pages in drawers and pockets,
unaware of where the tale begins or ends.
A mother in my son Leo’s nursery
school claims her daughter named
herself. Absurd, unless we have
forgotten the labels of everything
no longer with us: the thing like
oatmeal but not, the flu I caught
from girls, the melancholy band
that made everyone want to kick
or kiss me. That imaginary world
with a king crab that I swore
to my kindergarten teacher lived
in the boiler room. A uniform is
a form of lie. I have asked for name,
rank, identification only to face
silence. What comes next.
On the hottest day ever in downtown L.A.,
a bearded man sleeps on his chaise throne,
Kings jersey and cap protecting his face
from the hot lance poking into his realm
of cold thoughts, unremembered home.
The open electrical box holds a sandwich
and wax cup emblazoned with burger crown.
No one dare approaches this royal sleeper
as our metal beasts belch fire and churn
into vaults that connect to tall iceboxes.
His majesty, perhaps, has learned too well
of the power of siesta and ambient horns,
the white-capped mountains of his childhood,
the quest for snow captured in damp fabric,
the mirage that has risen around his epoch.
When he wakes he will once again beat back
the heat with windmill arms and curse words
in ancient ash tongues. He will swing his middle
finger like a scepter to protect the fragile air
and our fluid forms from bursting into flames.
Martin Ott is a former U.S. Army interrogator who currently lives in Los Angeles and still find himself asking a lot of questions. His poetry and fiction has appeared in more than 100 publications, including Canteen, Confrontation Magazine, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner and ZYZZYVA. He has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes and his manuscript Captive will be published by C&R press. His short story manuscript Perishables has also been a finalist for the New American Fiction Prize.
