Fantasy Feature No. 2

Your old man has left for Los Angeles. You cried when he left. Now you get to dominate the Netflix que. You will stay awake until 4 a.m. watching these movies. (It really does say "Your Que," by the way). W. The Double Life of Veronique. Metropolis. Au Revoir Les Enfants. Blow Up. The Runaways. Scenes From a Marriage. Some of these films are on instaNetflix, but you will receive them in the mail just for you because you don't want to watch them blurry. You will have no one to curl up with because the old man took the cat. You will not bathe for three days.

Fantasy Feature No. 66

You finished. Something in you went away. You put the last segment of Bolano's 2666 back in its box and together, all three spines created the big red title, 2666. Bolano is the smartest person in the world and you held his writing in your hands. You didn't say anything. The old man was wearing headphones and watching something on his computer. You walked across the room and blew your nose. You're supposed to read books to be done with them and move onto the next one, right? You feel as though someone were sticking an arm through the triangle your arm makes while resting on your hip. A handful of almonds. Suddenly the old man stood up. "Did you finish?" Yeah, it's done.

Fantasy Feature No. 83

Your new bangs are going to be folkish hipster bangs. Everyone will want bangs when they see you. You will not run into a wall, trying to get your bangs out of your eyes, like that young girl did at the show last night. She also couldn't walk a straight line because her bangs were in her way. You've seen the pictures and your forehead is, well, let's just say you got brains, okay? They'll be like Swedish bangs. Young Marianne Faithful. Think Bangles. You're going to be like that woman who hung out with Flea while hanging out with Chet Baker.

Fever 103 My Nothing Fantasy Feature

Goddamn the goddamn flu. You watched a movie about how shitty the food industry is. You didn't know Oprah was sued by the cattle industry for saying she didn't want to eat a burger during the Mad Cow scare. It cost her one million dollars to fight them. What does anyone's sick voice sound like. You wanted to call someone but it hurt to talk. You wanted to know if you're whiny or pouty. Your eyes are big and puffy. You hurt so badly. The old man brings you water. He cooked you matzah ball soup. You sweat through your hair. Your pajamas stuck to the floor. You have now made it through four of six Lone Wolf and Cub samurai movies. Today you may watch Baby Cart in the Land of Demons. Slight suspicion--you watched them in the wrong order. Maybe there will be ghosts of the slain in it. You want to go to Japan. You want to not be sick.

Fantasy Feature No. 7

If garlic were tongues. The night after you cooked with garlic you sit with your fingers nearly up your nostrils on the subway. None of the other passengers know what you were doing the night before, roasted vegetables. Poor vampires. Definition of a hangnail: you were cooking not talking. You'll give up garlic like you'll give up booze. Is it time for soup yet. Research shows you should eat at least two cloves of garlic a day. With you. The family had an important meeting; someone was turning older. You were slicing avocado, looking at the garlic. Once it goes in it becomes a thing. If a bit of garlic fell on your leg would you eat where you found it. You had to cut off your nails to get the smell out. Someone said to rub your hands on steel.

Fantasy Feature No. 4

Nothing bothers you. See this heart? It's made of steel eating steel. Nothing "gets to you." A Friendly Frank, that's what you are. A regular. Everyone leaves you alone while you knit at the strip bar. Just kidding. You don't go to strip bars, but it wouldn't bother you if you did.

Fantasy Feature No. 18

No more dreams about bullfighting. At some point this week you saw two images of the running of the bull, but you have only dreamt of bull fighting. The bull took forever to die. It gored the bullfighter (it's fighter? weird) against a wall for a long time. Then the bullfighter hit it against the wall until it died. Someone gave the bullfighter the ears and tail. (Which is weird. Why not just give him the balls?) Why did you dream about this. You once watched a Bruce Connor collage film (a form of assemblage art) of a bull being brought down, among other things, as president Kennedy was assassinated and declared dead--presented by Peter Gizzi during a traveling lecture on Jack Spicer. You watched an Italian and Spanish film about the dispersed body of a bull. It becomes dog biscuits that an actress tries to sell in a grocery store and something weird happens to its heart or eyes. You couldn't find a record of that movie anywhere, which is really weird.

Fantasy Feature No. 23

Those poor pieces of painted linen. This was the plan: you'll paint them then you'll trace something on them with pastels. Boy howdy you thought pastels were oily and not chalky and your pastels turned into dust when you started to draw on the painted fabric. Only you can't draw for shit. So you hooked up your computer to the old man's projector and practiced tracing photographs on brown paper. You were up on a ladder, holding onto the wall, you'd been thinking on this for months, and the shapes were so beautiful. The old man said hmm and don't you want to cover the books. The paper was lovely and the pastel glided over it and you thought fuck this might be working, but your childhood rocking chair you traced looked like something out of Tron. You had one and your sister had one and now no one can sit in them. Everyone is too big and you suck at everything.

Fantasy Feature No. 1

Will you forget everything when you die. Will you be smoking a cigar in a lawn chair. What is all blackness like. Who will remember you and does it matter. Will it be painful. Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof says you have to feel pain to know you're alive. Barf. What will it be, in the end--too much drinking, too much salt, not enough fiber. What did you do well in your lifetime. Are you going to be this bitchy in heaven. What if what you believe is where you go in the end. You want to stay here and do stuff. You want to be a ghost so you can watch people having sex. You mean, you want to be a ghost and protect your family, friends. You want to be a ghost traveler. You will hold your breath for a long time when you're a ghost and you won't scare anyone. Is what you do totally empty because you will die. Bring your old dog Daisy. Bring chocolate cookies. You met a man who rolled cigars for a living. You lost a lace shirt your grandmother gave. What are you supposed to do with all this yarn. You want so badly to be Hob from The Sandman.

Fantasy Feature No. 105

You wanted so badly to not have to pee on the side of the road. You were just driving along, avoiding bright orange construction cones that flew out in front of the car. Nothing has ever hit you like it hit you in Utah and the Spiral Jetty that was supposed to have been an hour off the road was two more hours on serious off roads that shook the contents of your insides. You forgot about your mosquito bites. You lost cell phone service. The cattle gates were bladder jabbies. Suddenly your orange thermos was empty and the ground was salty and deserty. How is it possible that no one pees on his own shoes? You couldn't do it to save your life, wind taken into account and all. The old man laughed at you. He told you to watch your laces. Toilets are such a waste with their lack of recycled gray water and all the flushing, but you have no desire to pee anywhere else. Have you lost touch with nature?

Fantasy Feature #407

It's a disappointment that doesn't mean anything. You walk into a hotel room with the lights off and your eyes closed, knowing that they aren't there. Only two hotels in your life had cotton balls. You don't even know why you look for them, but you do. Why do you need them. You don't do you. Salsa passes through your same test. If the salsa is good, so is the restaurant. But cotton balls. It's only every so often that you have to dab a doo on one and rub something on your face. You wish you rubbed a cotton ball on your face more often. When you were a child, you used to stick your hand inside the bag of cotton balls that lived under the bathroom sink. When you were a child you told your art teacher that you wanted to paint with a cotton ball and she said that's silly. The next day she said you could make clouds with three cotton balls but I'm warning you you'd better not be playing around. It hurts your ears to pull a cotton ball apart so it's best not to do that.

Fantasy Feature No. 4155

If you were a perfect person, smacking wouldn't bother you. Your Mister could stand next to you with chips and salsa and you would think on the weather or those bubbles that floated up from the sink and popped near your mouth. But you is you, ain't you? You hate the sound of smacking. Sometimes this prevents you from watching a movie in a movie theater. Remember Woman of the Year? Well, you'd remember more if someone hadn't been fiddling with candy wrappers then smacking on whatever popped out of them. You once saw a documentary of Emmett Till, who was brutally tortured and murdered in 1955 for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Emmett Till's mother wanted people to see how heinously her son had been beaten and refused to have a closed-casket funeral. When the filmmaker pauses for four horrible seconds on Emmet Till's mangled body, you heard a noise didn't you. It wasn't of someone crying, but of someone smacking on a mouth full of popcorn. Well, you're off to see a Rivette film now. People don't smack so much during foreign films because they have to concentrate on reading the subtitles. You like foreign films because you get to do your two favorite things at the same time.   

Fantasy Feature No. 15

You will always be understood. Every crisp you say is perfectly crispy. For instance, your theory of quatrains. Because you get quatrains. Quatrains are the result of what happens if there were more than two sexes. Really, what if there were more choices, more than two genders. Couplets aren't enough for you, for the workplace, for generators, for car seats. What if sexual differentiation were a more complicated thing and two created a third, a new third. This third wouldn't be sing-songy nor set to any sort of marching tune. It would not smell like the 16th Century. Three, eh? Yawning with gleeking. The species isn't yet complete. You can't have a utopia with three. Factions are far too lonely. Your three lines squeeze out yet another sex and when someone reads your poem written in quatrains, they have been rubbed with new genitalia. They have been covered with a new kind of jelly that will have to be brushed and washed out later. They think will this never end. They wonder where the new loud barking is coming from. They are barking. There is no basement with spiders overhead. They think this is like a handful of California grasses, without the sneezing or the fog-lifting.   

Fantasy Feature No. 2

You were the only schmo in your row who had to place your 3-D glasses over your real spectacles. If you didn't wear glasses, you would be a nerd only by proxy. You wouldn't fog over when coming in from the cold. You would ride mechanical bulls and play basketball. Someone would punch you without thinking twice. If you had perfect vision, you would see things like street signs, hibiscus. You could wear headbands. No one would look at you funny, the way they look at you funny when you take off your glasses, as if they were seeing your face for the first time, as if they were learning what it was all about. They say, "Why don't you wear contacts?" as if it were that simple, as if sticking plastic discs onto your eyeballs were somewhat easy and enjoyable. You remember the time you tried to wear contacts? You were also quitting smoking that week and the practice contacts were somehow ripped to shreds and found stuck to the bottom of your favorite kidney-shaped ashtray. They tear easy don't they. When you were in Paris, you went to a fancy spectacle shop and was really having fun with the rather artful glasses until you realized how depressing it was and after you asked for a lunch recommendation, you high-tailed it to a fancy underwear shop.      

Fantasy Feature No. 25

If you were tall, you’d easily reach for things on high shelves. Your old man would ask you to do this on a daily basis, kissing you thanks afterwards. He’d feel so lucky for having such a tall bed partner. After all, you saved him the trouble of having to clear all the sweaters, coats, and pants hanging on the stepstool, from having to move the stepstool to another place, and from having to climb to the object in need—only to fall after missing a step. If you were tall, you’d swing higher than short people. (Evidence of this was witnessed firsthand in Santa Monica last Christmas.) If you were tall, you wouldn’t be invisible. If you walked your tall self up to microphones at poetry readings, you’d twist the little lever that makes the microphone stand stretch up to meet you. The audience admires that you do this. The next poet to use the microphone must use the lever to decrease the stand, for shame. Being tall is very sexual because you have more body to cover. Your old man would look up to you and he would stand on his tippy toes to peck your chin, which you lower. If you were tall, you wouldn’t have to wear heels, which is like foot binding anyway.