Alex Lemon - Hallelujah Blackout

Alex Lemon visited here a couple weeks ago. It was a very enjoyable visit. He did a Q&A after the reading that went for nearly 20 minutes. He was very generous and thoughtful, and the people here continue to think and talk about the evening.

from Hallelujah Blackout
Good Times


Strangers will spring from parked cars
and howlingly sprint toward our children,
leveling the snowmen the kids are rounding out
with their mittened hands, leaving them
holding a carrot grown limp in the cold.
It’s a fact: someone will unknowingly carve,
on the back of a bus seat, a secret equation
that might let us live forever, but the next
teenager who sits will scribble
a speaking penis over it with a felt-tip pen.
Like drive-by shootings, most of our good
ideas arrive, get a look at our crusty
mouths, then leave as fast as they came.
A creep is, at this very moment, staring
into the silver light that is your bathroom.

But sigh—this is the lesser of two,
as they say—the neonatal is still
at the hospital, warming under a heat lamp,
and the man the thug almost mugged
is now standing at another bus stop
miles away. For a limited time
all-of-us is playing at a theater near you.
The boy with glass bones becomes a karate
champion so he can save his mother
from her indentured servitude
in the fantasy service industry.
Droughts. French maids. Acid
rain. Locusts. And James Brown always
unburied and in the cartoons. Thousands
of first kisses will happen as the bulbs
dim and our globe warms with teeny-
bopper moans and steam. More
and more butter for all of us fatties,
and the cherry blossoms just past peaking
as we leave, blinking and rubbing our eyes
at the innumerable stars in the sky—staggered
as petals spinningly fall upon our misdiagnosed
shoulders. Our lips slick and salty. Our bellies
sloshing with all the soda we can drink.