Rocco de Giacomo writes

Park At Your Own Risk

A charming hotel in Kenora's thriving downtown

district the guide book reads, and the tattooed concierge

in the Iron Maiden tee-shirt will attest to this as he

tells us the noise from the band won't make it

to the third floor, but it's 9:00 on a Saturday night

and the windows are twitching. The finger-smears

on the upholstery, the phantom stains on the bed sheets

and the knuckle-marks in the walls are all the signs

we need to try someplace else, but the Shriners have taken

The Holiday Inn and the bird-watchers have occupied

Best Western, so now we are standing

at the check-in counter at Nancy’s Place

swatting at flying ants as tractor trailers hurl past

as baleful as comets. The elderly woman behind

the desk turns the pages of the local telephone

directory with the frail grace of a seer, I wonder,

she says, phone in hand,  I wonder if Bill

has any vacancy tonight. Two ants, wings fidgeting

like fingers, crawl across her left shoulder and under

the neckline of her blouse. Nope, she says with eyes

that don't match the hope in her face. You might try Charlie's.

The drunk is angry.

Outraged.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE CLOSED?  

IT'S FUCKIN' ONLY TEN O'CLOCK!

Charlie sighs and gestures at a bar devoid of glasses

bottles and stools and covered with sawdust.

We're renovating.

We’ve been closed for two weeks now.

Can't you see? 

I SEE A LOT OF THINGS, replies the drunk

SO FUCK YOU!  He says. AND FUCK YOU, TOO!

to the middle-aged women behind the clerk’s desk

with a face as weathered as a smoke-house wall.

As she butts out her cigarette, however, and motions for us

to approach, scratching a long chipped nail

down the motel registry, she the Virgin Mother

of God. Room 323, she says, on the train side.  

I misinterpret the last bit, as in "train" being the cart

which will bring us breakfast in the morning, served by

waiters in white flannel clothes. The thick, double-paned glass,

the two layers of doors, are but meaningless anomalies,

the inconsequential quirks of Charlie's mismanagement.

The moist carpet is the floor of a boreal forest

and the lumpy mattress a soft bed of moss where

I will lay my head and let the comets and meteorites

augur the windows and herald what warnings

they can, for I now, will sleep the sleep of the illiterate,

the ignorant, the blissful.

 

 Femme allongée sur un canapé (Woman lying on a couch) -- Pablo Picasso

Rocco de Giacomo writes

The Book of Tiny Revelations

1.

It was my Dad’s fault. I don't remember much 

about the car that hit ours - totally his fault - but

the couple inside were middle-aged, and each

had the look of one who'd spent the night

on a friend's couch, something I noticed

in the aftermath; all of us on the side

of the road, wearing coats like corn husks,

mouths open, palms out. (It really happened

in the heat of summer, but winter is memory’s

season for car accidents.) I know this. 

2.

Our wheel on the driver's side hits gravel

and snow - at this point, it's been a long time

since we crossed the yellow median. My Dad

has been gripping the dash for years, gritting

his teeth for centuries, and the trespasses

of my driving - let’s be honest -  date back

to the Crucifixion. Needless, it’s been a long wait

on this precipice together, and it will be a while yet

before the car’s undercarriage makes contact

with the far side of the ditch, and our dogs

are launched headfirst over the backrests,

and my hot chocolate rises from my cup

in the form of zero-gravity globules; I

confuse it all for my blood.

 

3.

I am sixteen, a social outcast in the most

un-Hollywood ways; neither brave nor hygienic,

(a John Hughes film with grimy teeth and body

odour); I will never appear in the Technicolor section

of any yearbook. My father - like myself,

but with chutzpah, charisma and a steak-knife

in his bureau drawer - settles the matter of the two cars

in the ditch by turning stones into warm bread.

Well, what am I gonna do with this kid,

beat him? He talks, he kneads, with his hands. Our cars

are pulled onto the road. They're having an affair,

Dad winks devilishly. It takes me another

twenty minutes to understand why no one's called

the police. I am the Lamb of God.

4.

In my life, there must have been a moment when

I realized what exactly Mary Magdalene did

for a living, but I don't remember; it was something

that caused my mother to click her tongue

as she loaded the oven. Christmas TV specials

always showed chubby Southern Italian men

sneaking from Mary's tawdry little shack. Now

I think of those men who first wrote her up

as such; a gaggle of pimpled virgins (hostile

shrivelled penises under silk robes) in a room

not unlike Wilma Flinstone's kitchen. The Messiah

would never have such relations! They announce,

hands clutching skywards, their fingers two thousand

years shy of the stock and grip of an AK47

(You, my boy, are very special; you are

God's one and only).

5.

Jesus’ wife has been throwing forgotten articles

of clothing down onto the bald heads

of shame-faced men for centuries, but don't

tell the Son of Man. At 16, I am Him, a lamb

on the side of the road, palms open. My father

is in the details. They’re having an affair,

he whispers. And with that, if anything, come

my first doubts - mortal ones - about Kingdom come,

the white horse my mother promised

and my chances of becoming Prime Minister.    

 

 Wilma Flintstone -- William Hanna & Joseph Barbera