Fröhliche Weihnachten - Merry Christmas

Frohe Weihnachten - Merry Christmas

We want to thank you for your interest and wish you a very Merry Christmas and a creative and healthy New Year.

Wir danken für Euer Interesse und wünschen Euch ein frohes Weihnachtsfest und ein kreatives und gesundes Neues Jahr.

ARIZONA

You want heat? I’ll give you Phoenix

the year JFK was shot, a couple of ladies

sitting around the pool scorched

a leathery plum-tinged brown verging on puce

and it’s not even eleven in the morning

some local kid frying an egg on the burning

concrete at pool side, saying Hey look

at me and everyone yawning, oh like I’m really impressed, it

being an old trick usually reserved for relatives from Minnesota

or North Dakota pale soft creatures in bathing caps cowering

beneath the crushing weight of our solar existence

the lawns irrigated so you could splash people who

walked by on the side-walk then run away ankle-deep

in coolish water, that was the summer, 115 degrees every freaking day,

that mom farmed us out to a couple of bachelors who shared

the most cluttered apartment in the history of Western Civ.

and that my brother and I cleaned for fifty cents an hour.

Mom said they were CIA agents. They wandered around in a daze

drinking strong-smelling fruit juice early in the day, as I imagine  

Frank O’ Hara once did, joking bitterly with each other, promising

a dollar bonus if we didn’t break a single one of their sticky glasses.