Nestalgica

I put Pine-Sol on cheddar cheese squares for a living. It goes between the wet wax lettuce and red lipstick dripping acrylic like pinup fantasies. That’s all it is, anyway. You’d eat the mirrors if I made them look like jicama. And I can. I’ll make you want it. Just a brushing of Elmer’s All-Purpose and we’ll be good to go. All artists are liars, so why would I be any different? We do what we love. Once, I spent seven hours on a steak. Ant poison bubbled the best - really picked up the color of the steak. Stank like hell, though. The fumes made me hazy, so I broke for a cig out in the alley. The rats scuttled aw

Grandma Wedding fought against her rebellious pancreas for two years before she died. My dad and I had gone to visit her a year after she'd been diagnosed with cancer, and he had told me to be prepared to see how skeletal she was. I have a feeling he said it to himself, too. As we sat around the dinner table playing cards, I would look over and see her thin, grey hair falling across her skull in loose spindles; her fingers bulging at the knuckles; her skin clinging to her tendons and ligaments like they were the only things keeping her together, strung taut in skinny belay lines down her arms and neck. When I knocked on the table, signaling t

Alanine lets the biceps take a break. Cysteine thinks that sweater looks good on you. Aspartic Acid would rather be the crew than the cast. Glutamic Acid puts its fingers all over your food. Phenylalanine knows how to perk you right up. Glycine is the biggest baby. Histidine builds bullet trains for the daily commute. Isoleucine keeps its skeletons nearby, just in case. Lysine has no problem being the main attraction. Leucine writes the code. Methionine waves the green flag. Asparagine started this whole thing off. Pyrrolysine is the oldest newbie. Proline thinks the Ramachandran plot is just so passé. Glutamine looks like just another f