Damon Hubbs

Life & Contacts It was the year someone vandalized the city councilman’s car. The paper said deer piss. Everyone is an informer in the end. If flight paths link heaven and earth, the angels have a web of aliases. Burrr lin burrr lin burrr lin. Hark— the irony of birdsong is as finely tuned as false teeth on a dirty whistle. There’s a warbler dressed like a Shakespearean actor. And another like a wall creeper at a lunatic asylum.

—after Joe Brainard I remember my mother singing Hold Me Now by the Thompson Twins and then looking at the universe for a response. I remember the song peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1984. I remember blue popsicles and stationery from Love of Pete. I remember Boris. He lived next door but claimed to have lived on Mars in his past life. His favorite TV show was Land of the Lost.

Of Thread & Featherwork I spell it large: Gloucester. It was her decade of love and mine, Le Beauport to Magnolia Pier, lending itself to the long poem pregnancy, polis, divorce, the Cut… Keith and his shittier-than-thou lobster boat and that time you took Dave’s car for a joyride; sitting on the steps at 28 Fort Square to read the Maximus Poems, Olson, to us, like Lycidas to Milton —pastoral, in that regard and watching the dance moms at the YMCA, after squash, the tattle-bogle rigging of bodies: pilates, barre, then that poor high school basketball coach who slipped on the ice and died six feet from home.