Damon Hubbs

Job Requirement

by Damon Hubbs

the guy my wife hired to do the job sat in his van—

Heating & Sons, a white number with rust creeping

the wheel well like phlox —fucking around on his

phone and watching the neighbor’s daughter do

cartwheels in the yard. The daughter has really

grown up this summer so I can understand his

interest. The guy in the van doesn’t know I’m

watching him from my desk on the second floor

but I’m pretty sure my neighbor has caught me

watching his hot little daughter too, a blossom

in our princedom by the sea where watching is

a neighborhood event like a block party or school

raffle or a Saturday bake sale for Mrs. McKnight’s

cancer recurrence. The doorbell finally rings around

10:20 AM and when I open the door I think to myself

really, a guy like this can’t fill the job requirement.

And I’m right. As soon as he reaches into his tool

bag for the taser and lead pipe I’ve got him on the

living room floor half-choked out. In hindsight,

tenderizing his frontal lobe with a marble ashtray

might have been too much. But my wife loved

that ashtray. It used to be shaped like a turtle.

Year of the Rabbit

by Damon Hubbs

rival

dragons

dance

& burn

down

Hatseller

St., chasing

a rabbit

with a strong jaw

& a foot

like a gun

that doesn’t jam

I watch

fireworks

split-

screen

the midnight

marquee

try to

work

the angles

on the best way

to cheat

fate

Marathon Key

by Damon Hubbs

from the back cabana

the sun drops like a doomed voyage

by balloon

we disrupt leisure

with danger

on the edge of the continent

salvage work, really

but who owes what

to whom

autopsying in the glare

nothing connects,

it coincides

a bellwether

for the imps & iguanas

to hold high carnival

Pretzels

by Damon Hubbs

eight yrs old & hawking pretzels

on the corner of Aldine St

for his father, The Roofer

pretzels the watchword for tickets

to Newark’s East Ward street races,

The Roofer the guy who fixes those races

father liked a straight shot

never drive a crooked road, he’d say

little good it did

he ended up touge

like sourdough in a trash

compactor in Little Rhody

Times Argus

by Damon Hubbs

the paper isn’t the hundred-eyed

Greek giant its name suggests

and that’s how Jimmy

got away with it for so long

he’d worked the sports beat for years

covering Double-A games

down at Damaschke Field.

Jimmy knew the park well

he knew where the high school girls

got picked up for soccer practice and

how long it took their parents to get there.

Jimmy knew the way Umbros fit the leg

the touch

the dribble

pink high gloss and matte

rubbing the sheer afternoon sunlight

he knew if one

of the girls walked home alone

backpack over her shoulder

taking the shortcut

to a cold

mutilated mattress

in a dark, locked

room

Black-Eyed Susans

by Damon Hubbs

Members of the Garden Club

meet in the Little Red Schoolhouse

every Tuesday and Thursday

and believe, like Bonnard

that decoration is the principal duty of art.

Last spring, in addition to sprucing up

the traffic circle with black-eyed Susans

and hosting Stone Wall Appreciation Day,

the Club put together a cookbook that won an award

from the state and federal Garden Federation.

Sales from the cookbook helped restore

the original blackboards that hang on the walls

of the Little Red Schoolhouse

and the chimney the Historical Society

says was built from local river rock

the dormer windows, too

are no longer glazed and swollen

against the schoolhouse’s little red face,

shuttering attic secrets in First Period

bruises.

Girls’ Night Out, '87

by Damon Hubbs

what our mugshots

in the photo booth at Quarterworld

lack in terms of a getaway car

make up for with karaoke

you singing Culture Club

into a hairbrush you fingered from Claire’s

because the guy in homeroom

called you Medusa

we roofie him

when he goes to the salad bar

at Ruby Tuesday’s

and watch as he turns to stone

Invasive Species

by Damon Hubbs

Booth & Jackie ran a con at the RMV

smooth & tapered as the tail of a ten-foot blue catfish,

$1,000 bought a bogus test score if you lurched curb

during a parallel park or couldn’t read a STOP sign,

the only way upstream is on a lie filled with promise

& licensing promises was their business, saving two

bits to bank, working their Tannen’s Magic Shop

with no sign of the trouble boys. Had branch managers

under the thumb too, collected them like an entomologist

collects caterpillars—specimens posed on sprigs

twelve eyes, six on each side, teeny-tiny hillocks

arranged in front of a green screen or vialed

like dying vegetation. At night Booth & Jackie screeched

the highway half-mooned in love, eating pecan pie

or a stack of wheats at the diner on Route 150, watched the sun

d. t. the horizon in mad rattlesnake flames, the promise

of escape fresh on their lips, the swamps & mini-malls

& places where things are forgotten already taking it

on the heel & toe. But lovers live in a lair

made by draughtsmen dreamers & escape

was as counterfeit as the day they met. Memory is funny

that way, forever folding into darkness. At that party

on the rutted rivulet of road, in a house blotched against

the river like an angry bite, their bodies wriggled

like jeweled eggs eating their own egg cases

& after the third shot & fourth molt

Booth & Jackie left together, an invasive species.

But now April’s flush is on & they’ve run

lovestruck through their allotment of instars—

“hush, baby,” says Booth, his foot making

the engine sing as red & blue lights

fishtail the rearview. Her skin prickles

like a bug zapper, hush, a rich hiss of flame

& then it’s over— shards of windshield, a hideous

squish tweezing the thorax, the car

unwinged, careening in the understory.

Beachwood Canyon

by Damon Hubbs

loose and shaggy up the ridge telephone wires sag like earthquakes

the sky is blue eye shadow from Hollywood to Silver Lake,

and with the wide angle of a wooden Kodak camera

they see the matinee idol in a storybook gable

and the aging vaudeville star with a powdered white smile

and the actress from Moline destined for greatness

who told the Rock Island Argus she began her career as Jesus

then posed in a beaded kimono for Cosmo

now dances to a nickel piano in the ferry's bar to San Quentin

cut to the body, the blood, the birds like bit part players in the pines.

The News Bureau’s wire reporter describes a coyote with a strong jawline

and Beachwood Canyon’s secret stairs stop

and start again somewhere