Goude, Gary

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finger and made it look like a thumb, only larger. He just walked over and made a crack about how the foreman could see him flipping him off better, then he passed out in front of me.WORKING CLASSComplaining to the subscriber service for the second time this week about my newspaper being thrown into the front yard sprinklers, I feel a power over someone's job that I don't like. Right after graduating from college the only job I could find was working as a janitor. The owner of a beauty salon that I cleaned used to hide pennies around the place and if I didn't find them all he would complain to my boss that I wasn't cleaning the place good enough. I've never forgotten that and I've tried to for years.MY BITCHGerman shepherd Nikki laps water out of my toilet, munches the marrow out of cow bones while lying in the dirt, licks her private parts clean in public places with a flourish, will kill instantly any rodent she can catch by snapping its neck, then leaving it, uneaten, on my back doorstep, and is more loyal and trusting of me than almost any human I've known who only eat off of plates, would be very uncomfortable about being naked in public, take showers at regular intervals, and attend church every Sunday.—  Gary Goude Riverside CATHE GRIDA friend of mine who owns three gas stations grunts his own tanker to the Buffalo terminal three maybe four times a week where he's ID'd at a checkpoint, then tails a cop chaperone to the end of the pipe where they all nurse at the same nipple —  Chevron, Shell,Atlanta, Exxon —  & there can't be gapswhen the stuff flows, so you'll see a sponge, say a blue sponge the size of a basketball, which means that now the flow is Citgo's, say,& maybe a dozen trucks will fill, & then a red ball150pops to the plug, & now it's Standard Oil's,& my friend fills up in his turn, & is billed,as the ancient forest pours through,all that toucan sunlight & lily photosynthesis, roses & pterodactyls that got me from here to you,& vice-versa. At the crux of the grid, someone somewhere drops these colored sponges to claim whose power & dough is gisming forthat any one moment. Basketballs parcel out the lucre for what it's worth, stock broker by broker all the parrot year, year after year while we all drive our asses off to find the last shade somewhere. Pop, it's pink. Pop, it's yellow, & what follows is the color of a dead chameleonagainst our particulate sky. Sort of an orange-citron.BISONI remember, on the shore of Lake Ronkonkoma when I was a boy, with both handswedging sand aside, & for once reaching solid bottom, & seeing, &feeling with my fingers before the sand washed back,a hoof-print .... I tried often again, but couldn't rediscover what I'd seen,that shape treble the width of a deer's foot or the mark of Wenzel's curled-horn ramin the soft earth of its fold, &solstice came on, but I sensed, already, the essence of what I've learned: that where I livedthe eastern bison, larger than the plains animal & "very dark, many of the old bulls being coal black,with grizzly white hairs around the nose and eyes,"had once herded. In Pennsylvania Buffalo Hunt,H. W. Shoemaker says that by 1790the countless numbers of this species that had migrated easterly from the Great Lakesacross New York to the valleys of Maryland and Virginiahad been decimated to "300-400 animals which sought refuge in the wilds of the Seven Mountains."These were slaughtered during the winter of 1799-1800 as they wallowed helplessly in deep snow.Two years later, a lone bull was shot,the last seen in Pennsylvania. Records exist of a few surviving longer: one killed151

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https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/wormwood/wormwood_a1994v34n4i136/wormwood_a1994v34n4i136p150.pdf

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