Number 790

Death lounges in the neighbors’ window; flashing a sneer through the blinds.
He slinked into this house with teal shutters and battery-powered candles flickering in the windows the night before Labor Day when firecrackers were popping in the backyard and the burnt brown sugar of peach cobbler seeped into his nostrils from a crack in the kitchen door as it bubbled in a Teflon skillet on the stovetop.
They hardly suspected him through the clink of glass and silverware as they slid their chairs in to corn on the cob canned baked beans and a pot roast that was just slightly blackened at the edges.
Passing joggers, dog-walkers, vanpoolers, night strollers now strain to spot him from behind manicured shrubs; recycling is put out every Monday, dry leaves are raked into curbside drifts, and mail delivered to the white mailbox tacked with a brass 7-9-0 somewhere between half past three and quarter to four every afternoon.
When a gurney creaks down the driveway 11:34 p.m. Thursday night nobody notices.

Gunsmoke and Candlefire

She drifts on smoke laced with ashes over asphalt whose veins throb with pitch through the shards of her ribcage riding dustrag clouds drifting dumb and sullen over a formaldehyde river, vendetta aftertaste thick and metallic.
It was there among the barbed wire and asphodel where everything splinters with dismembered chair limbs or rusts and cakes with verdigris alongside coffee cans and bent spoons among weeds bursting through cracks in the concrete; there at the windowsill splattered with wax;
It was there at the bitch's trailer windowsill with candlefire curling into wisps of evidence where the tramp brandished her Colt .45 as he screamed from the bedroom still hoisting up his pants in the smutty afterhaze as she in her neon polyester bra and jangling Mother Mary charms pulled back the trigger lock reload click doubleclick-- ashes.
When her fingers reach now to grasp that neck wind the gold-plated chains around it until the skin is tattooed with chain marks and a Mother Mary Print her fingers clasp at tramp neck nails dig into the jugular— pass straight through.
She retreats again to her headstone with rapture erupting behind her.

Harvest Moon Phantoms

Ancient apple fields yawned by the roadside, with
a labyrinth of pumpkins winding down the parking lot;
wooden crates bubbled with
gnarled dip-dyed gourds and
bowling-ball squashes, even
white pumpkins,
white pumpkins whose shells were
whitewashed by the moon fairy;

Pumpkinhead scarecrows
twitched in the October breeze;
the sugar off cider donuts was
licked off windchapped noses;
the bloodred coating of a candy apple
dissolved into burnt sugargasm;
pumpkin flesh singed from candlefire
flickered in jack-o-lantern eyes;
a graveyard of cardboard tombstones
was haunted by ghosts that hung from invisible thread,
moaning from battery voiceboxes;

Symphonies of shrieks chorused
to the grinding of a chainsaw
wielded by rubber skeleton hands, and werewolves in overalls
latched onto hayride trailers under a grinning disc of moon until
the fall of my freshman year
of high school they
bulldozed it for a strip mall.

The Queen is Dead

I just saw this literally 15 minutes ago and my eyes almost rolled out:

Designer Alexander McQueen Found Dead
Flamboyant British Fashion Icon an Apparent Suicide at Age 40

I LOVED Alexander McQueen, even though I could never afford anything from his regular line (that 4-hole crystal-encrusted skull knuckle ring clutch at upwards of $2000? If I had the money, I'd take the dive). That whole Braveheart-esque fall '08 tartan collection of his had me drooling as much as the time I first saw Mel Gibson naked in Braveheart. Don't forget that whole quasi-nude Victorian extravaganza which had some fashion editors' La Perla thongs in a bunch. I was always hoping that someday I'd actually have the cash for something similar to that fantasy clutch--you know how designers often repeat themselves--but the moment I saw that headline it was a total facepalm.

We'll miss you Mr. McQ. No one else can really fill your tartan stilettos.