Flush with the love of music and holiday cheer,
the Shonen Knife Extreme Fan Club parachuted
into Osaka from low orbit. As the fan-club members
slammed their forcefully-named energy drinks,
adjusted their feet on their skyboards, and ignited
in the atmosphere, Japanese schoolchildren oohed,
pointed, and made wishes on the gorgeous array
of falling lights. I watched the display on my Sony
high-definition black-and-white television, eating
nuclear hot wings, mourning 1995, and grading
student essays. One boy raised my ire by forming
his thesis as an acrostic down the left margin of
the second through fourth pages. Few received A’s
because few remembered to fold their final drafts
into origami cranes. For those who remembered,
I anointed the cranes’ wings with buffalo sauce
and hung them from the branches of my Christmas
tree, marveling at their switchblade acrobatics,
their elegant selflessness, their unbearable snobbery.
Christmas would come late this year, deferred by
the moral weight of these paper birds. Santa,
belonging to a union, refused to come to work
after December twenty-fifth, so the presents and
coal would be brought by the angel Pleuralshunt,
half-orphan, half-plumber, the one who had visited
my mother near the end, ready to drain fluid away
from the heart and lungs, ready to snake pipes and
bewail a widowed parent, ready to give the only
gift that keeps on giving, juvenile pyorrhea. In
countless holiday snapshots, it would look as if
the black-grinning youth of the world had again
discovered meth abuse, an august Victorian tradition.
is the author of five books of poetry: two chapbooks from Alternating Current Press:
Breach Birth (2011) and Leading an Aquamarine Shoat by Its Tail
(2012); a solo collection, Sky Sandwiches (2012), from Anaphora Literary
Press; and two collaborations with Martin Ott, Poets’ Guide to America
(2012) and Yankee Broadcast Network (2014), from Brooklyn Arts Press. His
work has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize, and his poems have
appeared in The Manhattanville Review, mojo, Off the Coast, They Said:
A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, Tule Review,
Waccamaw, and numerous other venues.
Buckley holds graduate degrees in creative writing (poetry) and English (literature)
from, respectively, the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of
Michigan and San Francisco State University. After twenty years in and around
California, he once again lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife.
Author’s website: http://johnfbuckley.net/