My Father Picked Me Up From Prison
My father picked me up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat. It was the least he could do, since that motherfucker was the reason I was in prison to begin with.
Maybe he thought he could make it up to me by picking me up so I didn’t have to take the bus to whereverthefuck I woulda gone if he hadn’t shown up. Yeah, not on a longshot. It’d take a lot more than a snort or two of coke, a quickie with some hooker he found at the last minute, and the few bucks saved in bus fare to get me to forget about the last three years.
As I slid into the backseat I got a better look at Mandy and figured maybe the bus would have been a better choice, long term. It’s not because she wasn’t the best lookin’ chick in the world. I’d certainly gone out with worse. And gettin’ a piece of her was gonna be a lot better than the backdoor romances I’d been gettin’ in the prison showers. But I was pretty sure that sore on her lip wasn’t from a cold, if ya know what I mean.
And why did I think that she was there for me? Well, she wasn’t sittin’ in the front seat next to the old man when I got to the car. So either he’d already gotten what he’d paid for, or she was my “homecoming’ present. I’d hoped it was the latter, ‘cause I really didn’t want to do sloppy seconds to the piece of shit who wound up gettin’ me three years in State. That seemed way too fuckin’ personal to me. But all my life he’d been too damned cheap to even buy me a decent birthday present, so I can’t imagine he’d have sprung for a hooker just for me.
Should I ask? I dunno…She looked like shit. But she smelled pretty good, and that skirt hiked halfway to heaven sort of made me less concerned about the prelude.
Without much more than a “hello” when I got in, “dad” stepped on it and we laid rubber pulling out of the prison parking lot. What an asshole, peeling out in a stolen car right in front of the State Prison. Could he figure out a better way to draw attention to himself? And did he even stop to think that because I was now on parole if I got picked up in a stolen car I’d be right back in again? Good old “dad”. He really didn’t give a shit about me at all. He was probably just thinkin’ about how cool he looked in a stolen ride with some coke and a cheap hooker picking up his son at prison, like it was fuckin’ parents’ night at camp.
We didn’t get very far before I heard a steady “thump, thump, thump” from the rear right. “Shit”, he said, “Goddamned thing has a flat. Get out and change it.” “Me?”, I said. “You want me to change it? I just got outta prison. You stole the fuckin’ car. You change it.” Without a beat, he turned toward me in the back seat and slapped me across the face. “You do what I tell you to, you damned ingrate. I went through all the trouble to steal this piece of shit and pick you up. The least you could do is pull your hand out of where it is and get out and change the tire.”
Nothing had changed. Still the same “dear old dad” he always was.
I told him I’d do it, but they’d both have to get out of the car, since I’d have to jack it up to change the tire.
I wondered how hard it would be to get splattered brains off the side of the stolen Dodge…It looked to me that some of that piece of shit’s grey matter was lodged in the rusted-out portions of the side panel near where the flat was. Probably be smarter just to ditch the car as soon as I could find another. I tossed the tire iron as far as I could into the woods, shoved as much of the coke from the 8-ball up both his nostrils so maybe they’d think he was a druggie and not look too hard for his killer, and dragged his blood-spattered body into the bushes on the side of the road. And just for good measure I pissed on him.
Mandy was still shaking and screaming when I grabbed her hand and pulled her toward me. “Get in”, I said”. I turned on the radio. One of my favorite songs came on – “Earl’s Got To Die” by the Dixie Chicks. We drove off into the sunset. I had a smile on my face.
Carl Rubino July 28, 2023
Note: This piece was written to a prompt which directed you to write a flash fiction piece that began with the following line, verbatim or nearly so. “Your father picked you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.” This is what I came up with. It was written with almost no planning as to plot. But rather, it essentially evolved as I was writing it, which is how I write a lot of what I write.
Looking At All The Blackness
Looking at all the blackness I was forced to accept that my attempt to cook what should have been a relatively simple dinner turned into a culinary catastrophe. Not only was something that was once food now transformed into blackened charcoal in the pan but the entire stove, the walls behind it and the ceiling above had at least a feint black glaze from the remains of what started out as an appealing concept for falafel. Great. I had just moved into a two room second floor apartment over a garage in a tiny little town in rural Nebraska and managed to trash it in the first week cooking a type of food that my landlord would feel had no business being cooked in his “Red State” kitchen. “Should-a just cooked some hot dogs or gone down the road to the 7-11 for a few Michigans”, he’d-a probly said.
This was far from my first attempt at cooking since my likely soon to be second ex-wife ushered me on to a, let’s say, “sabbatical” during which I apparently needed to “explore independent living for a while”, but I began to wonder if perhaps it was a sign that I should establish a different approach. I don’t think it’s that I’m a bad cook, necessarily, or that I don’t want to cook. Most times I actually enjoy the process, until it turns on me. But somehow I don’t think it’s the pot’s fault, and by that I mean the cooking utensil.
Frankly, I think it’s just that my attention has a tendency to drift off a bit when dealing with details that I find less than deeply challenging. As with so many other things in life, including my relationships, my attention in such circumstances wanders and I simply draw within. Some might say I become “withdrawn”. Unfortunately, while I’m locked inside myself I seemingly have little to no regard or awareness for what goes on on the “outside”.
Take the other day, for example, when I was crossing the dirt road in front of my apartment and was nearly run over by a clearly overloaded logging truck, complete with multiple loosely secured tie-down chains loudly signaling its approach, while I was composing a song in my head instead of watching, or even listening, for oncoming traffic. But that’s another story. Or is it?
It has been suggested by my soon to be second ex-wife that I engage in the practice of mindfulness so as to focus intently and exclusively on the singular task at which I am engaged, thereby placing all potential distractions out of my “orbit”, so to speak. At first blush that might seem somewhat sensible.
But as I see it it’s an ingenious solution to a non-existent problem. You see, to my way of thinking that upon which I focus my attention, to the exclusion of my time and thoughts being trapped by the mundane, is far more compelling and worthwhile than, say, paying attention to what exit number is coming up on the highway. I mean, really, I can always just turn around and go back if I have to, but there is no re-do on a unique creative or inventive thought that escapes notice, recognition or recollection because you are focused instead on things of little consequence.
So, yeah, maybe that mindfulness thing is a good idea, but not if I use it to focus on things that are mindless. I mean, shit, I can clean the blackness off the walls and throw a veggie burger on the stove (or, like my landlord suggested, go down the road and get a Michigan or two) but I can’t recapture an elusive thought of genius proportions which turns to vapor in an instant if not harnessed at its inception.
Looking at all the blackness, I smile and patiently await the enjoyment and dimension of my next “wandering distraction”.
Carl Rubino July 18, 2023
Note: This piece was written to a prompt which directed you to write a flash fiction piece that began with the line “Looking at all the blackness”, so I did. It was written with little planning as to plot, and certainly not with the intricacies of plot that evolved as I wrote it. But rather, it essentially flowed out pretty much on its own, which much of my writing does. Then I edit it mindfully or purposefully.
Genevieve’s Erection
Every year, on no particular day, Genevieve tried to do the perfect handstand, though she really thought there was no particular point to it, other than to accomplish a goal that was seemingly unattainable, at least for her.
In prior years she had tried it in various settings, all of which were more than a bit protective, likely in response to her lack of any semblance of courage or self-confidence; and all of which were in the privacy of her own space and without the possibility of being observed, by anyone. One year she attempted it in a narrow hallway in her apartment, such that if she toppled over backwards her feet or legs would hit the wall behind her, saving her from a possible consequential neck or back injury. In a later year she tried attaining the goal in her carpeted living room with the back of her couch behind her, for much the same reason, while at the same time fulfilling a perhaps goal of providing some variety in the settings in which she tempted gravity.
Lying in bed the night before the designated day for this year’s attempt at upsidedownedness, Gen (sometimes, perhaps in a bow to puritanical self-intimacy, she called herself Gen, though she insisted that all others use her full multi-syllabic given name) wondered why she had failed in all prior attempts, especially since she had always created a safe-space in which to try to attain what she sometimes referred to, not so puritanically, as a full-bodied, inverted erection.
As she was on the verge of drifting off to sleep she thought of a quote from Jim Morrison of The Doors, “Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that fear has no power…” And then she realized it…That was it…All of her prior attempts occurred in a “safe-space”. All was protected. All was completely private. All was secure. All was surrounded by safeguards. All was there to protect her exposure to what she feared – failing and falling; and being observed in the process by others.
“Gee”, thought Gen, “Maybe if I remove all the protections, all of the safe-space shields and screens, I will be out there totally on my own, with everything on the line, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to pull it off because the price of failure will be too high and, from that perspective perhaps I will take away fear’s power over me.”. With that realization deeply formed she slipped into dreamland, in a sweet foreshadowing of the day ahead.
Sipping her first cup of coffee the next morning Gen stood barefooted in the living room in her nightgown at the sliding glass doors to her second-floor balcony and gazed at the people walking by on the sidewalk below. In that moment, and in parallel thought, two things occurred to Gen…If she was on the balcony the people passing by might be able to see her, especially at the moment when she would throw herself upside down into her, as she called it, “full-bodied, inverted erection”. And with that she said, out loud, almost as an announcement but more like a proclamation, “Gen…Today is the day.”
She abandoned her coffee cup on the end table next to the couch, drew opened the sliding glass door, slipped her nightgown to the floor and, wearing not a single stitch of clothing, walked out onto on the balcony of her second story apartment. She pushed the balcony dining table flush to the railing, looked down at the passersby on the sidewalk below and thought “Gen, ya can’t get any more exposed than this.” She climbed up onto the table, spread her arms up and out in a bare breasted salute to the sun, did a full forward fold, pressed both palms to the table surface and, in one never before attained totally coordinated motion, engaged the full strength of her core lifted both legs off the ground in unison, drew them to her abdomen and pressed them in perfect parallel alignment to the sky with both palms pressing down and grounded on the tabletop and her full core and back engaged and her toes pointed to the sun. In that moment, Gen had shed her fears and attained her full-bodied, inverted erection.
With the crowd cheering below, Genevieve slowly bent both legs at the knees, drew them to her core, lowered them in perfect unison toward the table, and pressing her feet into the table and her upper body skyward with palms outstretched she smiled from ear to ear as she thought: ”I always did love The Doors.” And she wondered, silently to herself, “Maybe Jim Morrison really did expose himself on stage at his Miami concert and, if he did, now I guess I understand why.”
Carl Rubino July 11, 2023
Published: Boreal Zine, Issue 14, Summer, 2023
The Clocks Have No Hands
The clocks have no hands. And no numbers. But something keeps turning, or it sounds like something keeps turning. Distant voices speak softly, constantly. But they have no vessels. Just voices, without bodies, speaking muffled, incomprehensible phrases. At least they’re incomprehensible to me – or to what me used to be.
It took a day to realize yesterday was my last. At least it seemed like a day. But with no hands or numbers on the clocks, was is it really a day? Maybe that’s the point. There is no more time. If there’s no time, maybe there’s no future. And no past. There’s just now. That tiny little moment in complete granular isolation. And you’re kind of stuck in it. Each one its own beginning, middle and end, until the next fractional instant comes along, if it does. And you can’t tell how long each granular moment lasts, or when the next one would come, if it would. ‘Cause there are no numbers or hands on the clocks. Just the constant ticking and clicking.
There are no windows and no doors. But there couldn’t be, because there are no walls. I guess there are no walls because there are no rooms. No rooms, no walls. And the house is empty. But if there are no windows or doors or walls or rooms, then I guess there’s no house. And there’s no breeze, but there’s definitely the sound of wind. And the sound of clocks – lot’s of them – the constant sound of the clocks.
I can still hear the last thing she said to me yesterday: “Don’t leave me! If you leave me who’s going to do the cooking.” And then I keep hearing the clocks. Just the clocks…And the wind, blowing through the windows. As if there were any.
March 24, 2023 Carl Rubino
Something Grandma Got From A Calf
She walked up to the open-air butcher and said “Trippa”. When my born-in-America mother cooked beef, it was either steak or hamburger, but when grandma stepped off the boat and came through Ellis Island, she came with all the Sicilian culinary culture that she accumulated growing up outside of Palermo. In Sicily, as in all of Italy, nothing went to waste, not even the stomach. It would be a good dinner tonight. Grandma was cookin’ guts again.
Tripe was the coolest looking of all the guts… Smooth on the outside, but when you flip it over it has little open pockets on the inside, almost like a little cup formed out of ridges of skin, and inside each of those cups are squiggly little wormy looking lines. It’s weird looking at the inside of a cow’s stomach, but when grandma got finished cooking it, it always tasted fantastic. Sometimes she’d cook it when she came to our house for the weekend, and when she did the whole house was filled with a delicious invitation of garlic, fennel, pepperoncino and tomatoes simmering gently as the guts gurgled comfortably in the pan.
One of my friends was over for dinner one night when grandma was there and we had tripe. My friend almost puked when she saw it. She said it kind of looked like cut up ribbed condoms floating in tomato sauce. She actually said that out loud, right at the table. My mom wasn’t totally impressed by her gastronomic critique. Grandma looked puzzled. “You don’t like-a tripe?” she asked. My friend gave her a sort of half-glance and a polite eye-roll and claimed to be a vegetarian. I finished mine quickly and then I ate hers. Grandma gave her the greens and bread to eat, with a smile and a slight shrug.
February 20, 2023, Carl Rubino
Granny Takes A Spin
Cold brass pole against alligatored skin, strange gazes roam every inch, granny takes a slow spin. Beats rise and fall to strobe flashes on a dingy black wall, pumping sound and light show paces all. Pulsating in carnal illusion on the pole’s every inch, greased-slicked with effusing sweat, legs sting tenderly in a controlled slide. Thin line of drool spills from the corner of her blood red coated lips, parted ever so suggestively by the gently flicking tip of her tongue. Dollar bills spill over red thong’s edge. Alcohol fueled glances find momentary resting places here and there, lust burrows deep inside as she slips so gracefully downward.
Leaning back she rotates slowly around the pole. Fixated faces in front row seats reflect in the mirrors on the back wall. She smiles gently…”I’ve still got it”, she whispers to herself.
Granny takes another spin.
c. 2023 Carl Rubino
Winding Up In An Apple Pie
It doesn’t hurt that much when they pull us from the tree where we’re hanging in the cool, moist sea breeze on the coast of Maine in early fall, and where we’d hung in the warm sun all summer. But it does when a 10” chef’s knife slits us into thin slices, they pour brown sugar over our skin and innards, and damn near burn us in an oven. I guess it never really occurs to them that we might just do that to them some day.
I wish they’d just leave us on the tree where, eventually, we‘d fall to the ground and lie there in peace for awhile. You could never get a good sleep on the ground there in the field, not because it was cold, but because you knew that one day, just before sundown, the deer would come. You’d first see them in the mist, at the other side of the field, and you’d watch them as they move slowly, step by step, chewing on grass as they made their way over. And you knew that soon they’d be at the line of apple trees because they knew we’d be there, waiting. And that’d be it.
But at least we knew that, eventually, somebody’d shoot the deer that come into the field and eat us. They always do…Unfortunately, the people who eat the pies will go on to eat another, and another in days to come…
February 12, 2023, Carl Rubino
Gorillas and Snow Leopards
The patch on his chest said Forest Ranger and on his bulletproof vest it said POLICE, so I figured I could trust him. I decided I’d tell him. “Have you seen them?” I asked. He looked at me and said: “Seen what?”. “Come on. You know they’re here, right? “The gorillas” I said. “There’s no gorillas here” he said. “Well actually there are. I’ve seen at least one” I said. “They escaped from a petting zoo outside of Montreal about six months ago, two of them, and they made their way down here to the Adirondacks.” “I live here” I said to him. “I’m in these woods all the time and I’ve seen at least one of them.” He looked at me oddly and let me get a few steps ahead of him on the trail, and then he said something into the microphone that’s attached to his jacket. I don’t know what he said, but then he called ahead to me and said: “Hey, wait a minute. Where did you see a gorilla?” “In plenty of places” I said, and I told him of a few of them and then I said: “More than that, I’ve seen one of them breeding”. He said: “Breeding?” “Yeah” I said. He said: “You saw it breeding with another gorilla?”and I said “Nope – with the snow leopards.”
And he looked at me in an odd sort of way and said: “There’s no snow leopards here.” I said: “Uhh, yeah, there are.” “Snow leopards?”, he said, “Where did they come from?” I told him I was pretty sure they had come from Russia, crossed the Bering Strait, went into Alaska and across Canada, and wound up in the Adirondacks. He looked at me with a bit of a smirk on his face and asked why I thought Russian snow leopards wanted to come to the Adirondacks. I said it was basically because snow leopards think gorillas are really hot, and they were headed to the petting zoo in Montreal to hook up with the gorillas, ‘cause the Canadians were cool with snow leopards and the Canadians weren’t shutting their borders down, so when the Russian snow leopards got there to hook up with the gorillas the guards told them that the gorillas took off a few days earlier and that they were pretty certain that the gorillas headed for the Adirondacks. And the guards at the petting zoo told the Russian snow leopards that the tribal lands of the St. Regis Mohawk Nation went uninterrupted from the Akwesasne Reservation in the US Adirondacks into Canada, so the best way for the snow leopards to get to the Adirondacks, since they didn’t have passports and would be considered illegal aliens by ICE and the Border Patrol, would be to go straight through “the Res”, since it was sovereign tribal land. So that’s what they did, I told him. And I’ve seen a gorilla breed with a snow leopard more than once, not too far from where I live. So that’s how I know the gorillas and the snow leopards are here in the Adirondacks. “I can’t believe you’re a Forest Ranger and you haven’t seen this and I’m just some local yokel and I’ve seen it a few times” I told him. “It’s beautiful, just beautiful.”
February 8, 2023 Carl Rubino
Two Eggs Over Easy
Two eggs over easy, edges overlapped, straddling half an English muffin, laying ever so tentatively near the edge of the curved top of a second-hand cheap pine casket at a hastily arranged funeral that probably no one would attend ‘cause it was at the back of a parking lot in a really shitty neighborhood behind a WalMart, and most likely no one would even know about it except a close relative or two, and judging by the fact that they were using a second-hand pine casket I’m guessing they didn’t really give a shit about whomever it was for anyway. Me? I locked myself out of my car in the parking lot and was just looking for a place to take a leak and WalMart wasn’t opened yet but this place was, or at least the door was unlocked.
Maybe the stiff was late for breakfast and someone thought enough of him to bring him what perhaps was supposed to have been his last meal, even though he probably wouldn’t get to eat it now. Kinda like a last meal for a prisoner, and although it wasn’t a prison funeral it bears a strange resemblance to the idea of the last meal a death row prisoner gets to have before they flip the switch. I think I saw in a Jimmy Cagney movie once that the soon-to-be-departed prisoner pretty much gets to order what they want, but sometimes they fry ‘em before the meal is ready ‘cause “the show must go on”.
I could see myself going for two eggs over easy for my last one. It sorta fits into an end-of-life theme, right? Eggs – where life begins on the one hand, but pretty much ends right there, all at the same time… Out of the chicken, into the frying pan and down the hatch before the egg ever gets to turn into another chicken. Too bad the stiff never got to eat his last meal. I wonder if I’ll get to be on time for my last breakfast. Then again, maybe there’s nothing inside that big pine box at all. Maybe it’s a funeral for the two eggs over easy
Kinda like a funeral for the chicken that never made it into the world….
c. 2023, Carl Rubino
Published: Boreal Zine, Issue 12, Winter 2023 instagram.com/borealzine
Grandma Made The Best Chicken
Sometimes I think I see myself standing in darkness’s shadow looking beyond its outlines to clear light beyond where all is in calm. There is no turmoil, no strife, no stress no strain…All lies in wonder – simple, plain. And it’s not like I’m searching for something. I just don’t know where to look for light… Like a butterfly that doesn’t really know where to fly to, but just gets blown by the wind. I never used to think of it that way back when I used to sail a lot, but its large paper wings are sails in the sunlight, transporting it more by soaring than flapping, or more like it was a sailboat that floated on the air instead of water. I guess that’s why they don’t’ get tired from flying and never have to lie down on the couch in the middle of the afternoon to take a nap or have a beer. I don’t really recall the last time I had a beer since I quit drinking over thirty years ago. It wasn’t like a DWI or anything, just a smart choice.
When I was a little kid my parents used to let me stay at my grandparents’ house in the Bronx sometimes for the weekend. It was fun. I slept on one side of the huge bed they had where the sunlight used to come in through the window first thing in the morning and you could hear the bus stop at the bus stop and open its doors and then leave again, and my grandfather would get up, walk over to the dresser where the radio was and turn on Arthur Godfrey, then he’d let out the loudest yawn I’d ever heard in my life as he’d stretch his arms up and touch the ceiling with his fingers. It was kinda more like a yell from a wild animal of some kind than an actual yell, and my grandmother would screw up her face a bit and look at him and tell him: “Joey, shut up…The neighbors”. And he’d laugh. But he’d only do that one yawn, until the next day.
One time my grandma took me up to Arthur Avenue. I think we took the bus, or maybe we walked, past the park and up the hill…I’d never seen people selling food on the street in carts before. She had a big bag and filled it with things…And then she said “Let’s get a chicken”…So we walked around a corner and there was this big fat guy with a bunch of chickens in a cage and she said “That one”, and he reached in and pulled it out and held it down on a big wooden table and whacked its head off with a meat cleaver…It shot some blood on his already blood spattered, used-to-be-white apron. It was kinda dead, but not dead? I mean, I knew it had to be dead ‘cause he just chopped it’s head off, but it kept kinda dancing around and flapping its wings as he held it by what was left of its neck, and the sorta-dead chicken even kept jerking a little when he first stuck it upside down in the metal funnel, and more blood came out. Then he wrapped it up in paper and grandma put it in her bag with the rest of the stuff she bought.
Another time my Grandpa took me up to Arthur Avenue, to see a movie. I keep saying “up” to Arthur Avenue ‘cause we’d first walk down a little hill to where the park was, walk through the park, and then have to walk up a really big hill to Arthur Avenue. I think it was one of those war movies that I always used to love when I was a kid. My grandpa was in the First World War. He did artillery, and he didn’t hear so well. They were always in black and white, and they had a news story before the movie started. Anyway, after the movie we came out on the street and there were a lot of people there. We started walking back toward where my grandparents lived, but before we even got to the end of the block, grandpa stopped and said there was a store he had go into that kids couldn’t go in so he told me to wait outside on the street and he’d be out in a few minutes. Anyway, I got bored standing there and there was a lot going on so I wandered along Arthur Avenue to see if I could find the chicken guy and watch him whack another chicken’s head off and watch it jerk around while it was dead, but I got kinda lost and the cop, who looked as big as the tenement buildings on either side of the street, figured out where my grandparents lived when I told him it was next to the park and across the street form a school yard. Got a ride in a cop car, but they wouldn’t turn the lights and siren on for me, and he brought me up the stairs and knocked on the door and grandma was home and gave them cake and they left. But before they left they told me never to go wandering around on Arthur Avenue alone ‘cause there were some weird people up there. When grandpa got home I thought maybe we were gonna need the cops to come back but he just pretty much passed out when grandma got finished yelling at him. That took a while, ‘cause she had a lot to say and he smelled fumy. I never really knew what kind of store my grandpa went into that made my grandma so mad, but now that I look back at it I’m thinking it must have been a bar, or maybe he stopped to see a hooker for a quickie. Anyway, grandma cooked chicken that night and it was good. I don’t think grandpa had dinner that night.
Grandma made the best chicken. And she always liked butterflies. She used to say they were like tiny paper napkins with heads on them that blew about in the wind and always made her smile.
c. 2023, Carl Rubino
Tying Your Mule On The Right Side Of The Fence
Love can be a fine forevertude – a dance that never stops. Or it can turn out to be more like a series of small tragedies leading to a sure catastrophe. And I’m thinkin’ that no matter which side of some imaginary beautiful suburban white picket fence we might be inclined to saddle our mule on, a drunken man’s words can still be a sober man’s thoughts, leaving us in near suspended animation, resolved to ponder the question…And you ask what exactly is the question? I’ll leave that for you to decide, for if I told you you’d only want me to tell you the answer, in which case there would really be no reason for the question.
As I opened the gate on the white picket fence, a lone sparrow fluttered in the breeze just over my head and, as it was nearly hovering in midair (which is unusual for a sparrow) I imagined it was trying to decide which branch to land on. I don’t really know for sure, but I imagine they probably never know exactly which branch it’s gonna be until they get to the tree and look them all over, ‘cause if they pick the wrong one it might break under even their dainty weight in a strong breeze. Kinda like when you walk into a strange bar and all the barstools are empty and you take a moment to decide which one to sit on, ‘cause if you pick the wrong one you might wind up falling off, right?
Before I left for home unusually late that day I overcame an urge to stop at the flower shop to pick up a rose, just one sweatheart rose, not a whole dozen – ‘cause one is more romantic. But I knew that if I gave her a rose she’d only feel the thorns, so I figured fuck it, and came home empty handed, as I did most nights. I mean, “shit” we’ve all been to fancy little “cocktail parties” where we listen to someone who has been woefully “overserved”, and who, had they been given a rose, would only feel the thorns, slurringly spouting off about how great their relationhip is while, as we hold our tongues to the back of our throats forcing back a gag, all we really want to do is spend time publicly bending their little lies back into the truth. But instead, when that happens, I usually just grab a drink, go outside and make sure I tied my mule on the right side of the fence
.c. 2023, Carl Rubino
Why I Love Taylor Swift
I opened the sliding door on my soccer mom van the other day and without looking inside slid my guitar into the back, closed the door, hopped into the front seat and backed out of the driveway. Almost in tandem motion I moved the shifter into Drive and turned on Spotify. Brandi Carlisle came up. Love her stuff. Halfway into the first verse I could have sworn I heard a feint voice from behind me say “Can I pick the channel?”. I looked into the rear-view mirror and saw the top of a blonde head looking back at me. I reached for my .357 and just as I started to spin my arm to the back of the van I saw in the rear view mirror that it was Fucking Taylor Swift!
How and why the fuck was Taylor Swift sitting down on the floor of my soccer mom van, asking me to change the Spotify channel? And how and why the fuck was she was wearing my favorite cardigan? I assumed she wanted me to change the channel to her Spotify channel, of course. But I didn’t.
She looked up at me with those big, beautiful eyes and with those cherry lips of hers, all perfectly framed in the rear-view mirror, and said: “Thank God you didn’t blow my fucking brains out, but don’t treat me like some situation that has to be handled.” Tossing her hair back and turning her head to the side quickly, she said in a low, deep (for her) tone: “I’m just here for the ride” and went silent. I just kept driving. No one said anything for the next few blocks. Then as I pulled up to the next stop sign she added, in a rather sharp and loud tone: “If I asked you if you wanted me, would you have me? Would you want me? Would you tell me to go fuck myself?” Before I could answer, she opened the sliding side door and sped off on her skateboard, giving me the finger, with my cardigan flapping in the breeze.
c. 2023 Carl Rubino
Note: Most of the words in quotations in the last paragraph are lyrics taken from songs written by Taylor Swift.
She Seemed To Pulsate In Perpetual Motion
Lust’s luscious leer, sorrow’s painful pause; grease-streaked window in mid-day sun obscuring all clarity in a world that drips raindrop tears into cups of coffee never drunk while they’re still hot; like a steak that coldens with the passage of idle time.
He lay ill-at-ease in tangled sheets with a half dwindled passion that should have come fully to rest hours ago and watched pathetic late-night shadows dance across her bedroom wall, a strange bedroom wall in a place he’d never been before, next to a warm body of a women he’d known only in an untouched sort of way but certainly never entangled with before in the way they entangled that night, living out a luscious fantasy that maybe they should best have left alone but were oddly compelled to dip into, perhaps at the urging of a hefty serving of Johnny Walker Black that probably should have been left on the shelf.
And all the while her eyes gave not a single hint of what lay on the other side. And they say the eyes are windows to the soul.
It was truly an odd time for a small bird, or any bid for that matter, to land quickly on a windowsill of a fourth-floor walk-up in a large city with horns that seemed to honk all night. And the thought of where the fuck could all those people be in a hurry to get to at this hour never even occurred to him, until now. But land it did. And it began pecking at the window. And peck at the window it did, as though it was the bird’s apartment or nest or “nestartment”, and it had misplaced its keys, much like his wife often does, but that’s another story, seemingly unfit for blending with this. And then it flew away. Disappeared as quickly as it came. But then don’t we all…disappear in the end… just as quietly as we come.
c. 2023 Carl Rubino
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Note: This is my third attempt at writing Prose Poems. Except for editing that followed, this poem was written entirely in non-stop, unplanned, unedited stream of consciousness fashion.
When You’re Not Paying Much Attention
Snowless, way-too-warm, Adirondack winter night in a hotel restaurant with big picture windows writing poetry looking out of a mist covered window through the steam rising from a mug of coffee desperately hoping inspiration, or maybe infatuation, will walk by and give me an idea, or maybe at least just a phrase, or even a goddamned word, as a jumping-off point, hoping my pen doesn’t run out of ink, or even start to run low and get to that sort of feint line stickiness that makes you wonder if you should throw it out or just hope that, if you roll it around a bit with your fingers, it will keep writing long enough to get to the end of the paragraph you’re writing, or at least to the end of the thought you’re working with; but then you realize you don’t have a thought, and that’s why you’re staring out the window through the steam rising from your coffee cup – looking for an idea.
It’s funny how the little things of no consequence, like the amount of ink in a pen, fill our thoughts when thousands of people die in a single day from a fucking virus that might have started in an outdoor meat market half way around the world when some guy cleavered a chicken, or a duck, or maybe a freakin’ monkey on a hundred year old chopping block with no thought more significant than how many coins he’d get for it. How the fuck do we let our thoughts get fully consumed with totally insignificant minutiae, like how long we can keep a freakin’ pen in action writing stupid shit that nobody’s gonna read anyway, or doom scrolling through endless stupidity on our phones.
There was a time when the most complex thought some had was how fat they should roll one. And now the shit’s so powerful that I don’t think any mere mortal could puff an entire fatty all by themself. Of course “I never inhaled”, so I’m just guessin’.
Funny how life changes when you’re not paying much attention.
c. 2022 Carl Rubino
There Is No Turning Back
Standing on the edge of an abyss, barefooting ever so lightly on shards of broken glass, shattered like tomorrow’s dreams never to come, we change our colors on the outside like chameleons blending with their surroundings but at our core there is no morphing, no shape-shifting, no transformation, no transition – we remain pathetically the same as we always have been – stuck, frozen, pasted to our inner selves.
At first movement the thinnest membrane of skin begins to glide bringing a well-deserved and much welcomed shudder in anticipation of the oh-so-familiar feeling that is about to come, about to break loose, about to surge.
Driving into a blinding storm we question our motivation, but our course holds true. Destination remains the same. There is no turning back.
c. 2022 Carl Rubino
Carl Rubino 