Alamo Theory - Josh Bell

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Ezekiel’s. Of course, you were off busy,

      revising your plague journals.

      Bringing clock to the beltline

      of Orion. What could’ve you done

      about the remaining days

      no longer outnumbering us?

      Voice of the dying groupie

      like a deck of cards being shuffled.

      One last electromagnetic pulse,

      one last electromagnetic pulse,

      and the neutral bodies of the dead

      dropping from our larger, living bodies.

      The truth? I thought the castration threat

      a touch on the heavy side of the tonality.

      But you got your point across.

      And by then, we were a much

      cleaner people, anyway.

      Night falling once like a horse

      through a bridge. Page God

      refusing to be survived. Page God

      hollering over one dirty haystack

      at whoever’s hiding behind the next

      dirty haystack, and no one’s getting

      off this tractor alive, no one without

      a pod of vanilla, stuck like a witch’s

      finger in the throat. Often who goes

      there isn’t the bees. Isn’t the cherry trees.

      No one’s darker than me. No one’s

      big enough for pogroms. No one’s

      grammar gets a pass. Can’t you

      hear the popping of the karen-gun?

      Why the Hittites, why the Etruscans,

      sore and lost between vast greatness?

      See the mountains, their trauma halos

      of power line? Okay now show me

      your anagram. No I don’t even care.

      We bury a prom dress in the sand

      of every coast; sew a new prom dress

      from the flag of every coast. Jesus

      sat down, calmly, fashioned himself

      a whip of leathern cord. Page God

      had never recorded premeditation

      at such levels. We never really learned

      the correct usage of the voice box,

      either, but when we took ourselves

      by the neck, it was ancient, our language,

      brave the living mammal pinned

      to its duration, the problem with the orgy

      always witness, witness, witness.

      Your breath comes out in a pretty

      cloud of blue, which is a different color

      than most people use. What a brand-

      new giveaway. Students of the game

      have noticed that often, before I shoot,

      I take the time to mention vegetation

      fretting somewhere across a fact-lit

      red hill. It’s getting late and I’m the only

      American on the dance floor. Still.

      We thought it walked a lot like Josh, clean white shirt down the soybean rows and toward us at the tree line, Josh walking through a field so green and real it made us feel like getting married just to look at it. Except for how the cricket-sound had moved inside of us, the crickets stopped their buzzing as he walked, and we took our eyes off Josh for a second, cows on fire in the pasture neighboring the soybean field, saw them crashing, tallow and sulfur, into golden hay bales. Again we turned our eyes to Josh, and we really thought it walked a lot like Josh, closer now, coming through the rows, with two large birds (this was strange) braiding what looked to be a length of red ribbon into his hair. Of course he was still a pretty good ways off — close enough that we could hear him singing, and I thought it sang a lot like Josh — but it was still just a little ways off now and the ribbon was a thin red ribbon and I couldn’t say for sure it was a ribbon. So I asked Earl about the ribbon and Earl said Ribbon, and I asked Kim about the ribbon and Kim said Ribbon, and we agreed the ribbon made us feel like getting married just to look at it. And we agreed it walked a lot like Josh, except for now it was crawling, vines poking through the cloth of its pants legs like insect feelers, and we asked the ribbon birds to keep their eyes on Josh, and likewise we kept our eyes on Josh, or at least we thought that they were eyes: it was getting late, they worked like eyes, they followed Josh, and we felt the ribbon birds were on our side in all of this, that our parents would be calling to us soon, that the streetlights would be flickering on in the neighborhoods behind us, and Josh still closer, holding out his hands and opening his mouth as if he’d ask a favor, and I thought it would be smart if we could all agree upon an answer. So I asked Earl about the answer, and Earl said Answer, and I asked Kim about the answer, and Kim said — and this was just before we learned the truth about the ribbon — Kim said: I don’t think that’s Josh.

      Back when my voice box

      was a cabinet-full of golden vibrators, and my hair

      fell white across the middle of my back

      like a child’s wedding dress,

      I made love to at least a dozen girls

      dressed up to look like me: the hotel bed a sky

      filled with the flock

      of our south-flying mic scarves,

      the back of my head and the front

      appearing simultaneously

      in hotel mirrors, and the twin crusts of our makeup

      sliding off into satin

      like bits of California coast. I heard my own lyrics

      coming out of the tent

      of their beautiful wigs, my lyrics driven back

      toward me, poled into me, demanding of me

      the willing completion of vague circus acts

      I’d scribbled down, once, on the back of a golf card

      or a piece of toilet paper. Sometimes I myself

      wonder what I was thinking then, but those words

      went on to live forever, didn’t they, radioed out

      into the giant midwestern backseat

      and blasted into kneecaps and tailbones

      by that endless tongue of Berber carpeting

      blanketing the American suburbs, boys and girls

      strung like paper lanterns from here to Syracuse

      along my microphone cord. Who rocks you now

      rocks you always, I told them all,

      and all of them somehow wearing

      a homemade version of the same leather pants

      I’d

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