I sat upright in the boat of freedom. All around me Congress held sessions of menthol and linearity. I was deposed of my inhibitory rights and swelled into ports of call. A crowd deployed and there he was: dressed up in desert clothes and grinning digital and “Iraqi”. On the back: Me as the Enemy. Love, Matt.

There’s another source of face interference. That’s Timbuktu. Here, in this timbuk kind of place, faces are engraved into treasure trunks and on the sides of royal sitting chairs. Here, where the ancients display their sex appeal, we challenge them with our sex (face) appeal.

Capisce?

I pulled the hackneyed freedom over my head. It could have been cashmere from Hermes or Chanel, but we don’t eat frittes with mayo. We don’t pronounce the word Taliban anymore. We don’t say hakim, instead: evil.

Schmevil.

There’s a face. It’s unctuous. Every time it proposes to me I fibrillate, sneezing. We’re all kind of heartbreaking. The reason we don’t know stuff is because we only use a fractal of our faces. It’s true. Count them.

I heard that it’s not worth knowing stuff because we destroy things in the process. (See marriage.) I also heard the economy of the future will be innovation driven, a kind of economy where artists and artisans will spew ideas that will save us all from the current milieu of non-ideas. It will be a grand place, such as Rome without emperors nor gladiators. (See Nirvana.)

Rejoinder: tree hugger, sugar gum, strawberry tomato. Or: no way Jose.

We brought forth loins and blessed Cuisinart. In this way we discovered everything before enlightenment set in. We were valorous and Americanissimo. We sat down on U.S. 1 and chanted. We put our hands behind our backs like ducks.

And of course we quacked but not until we roared around on all fours like tigers or aardvarks.

Salute: bark, bark, bark.

There’s a hill in America where two sisters sat holding guns across their laps. They had blood the color of sangria and they were ready to pitch forward at a moment’s notice into ebullient nothing.

There’s also a hill in America where two brothers died wielding a hammer and a cig between their lips. That hill was New York and the flag they bore looked a bit Irish from 80 stories below.

One pitch and they all fall down.

There’s a face. It rises in some smoke in my dream. I will translate it for you.

—

Maureen Seaton received the Audre Lorde Award for Venus Examines Her Breast (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004).

Kristine Snodgrass’s solo work has appeared in Tusculum Review, Gulfstream, Mangrove, Tigertail and, elsewhere. She teaches at Florida A&M.

Neil de la Flor lives in Miami. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in the Court Green, Hotel Amerika, Barrow Street, 42opus, and Scene360.