lovecraft and the girl under the moon

lovecraft had a terrible time in brooklyn
his cat,
badger,
ran away
and was stepped on by a horse,
on one of the fruit streets.

lovecraft hated being
paved over
tunneled under
and otherwise pushed around.

he also did not like
being named after
a creative demon.

the shoes of his name were
too big to fill
canoe shoes
lake shoes
ocean shoes
filled with
the smokey blood
of well-written spooks.

lovecraft would have rather looked out across the pacific. more hope and more water and sharks and better surf and more beach volleyball. and fewer fucking horses. but just as many streets named after fruit. there was a girl out there too, he had met her at a shifty tent-pole convention just outside of Clear Lake, Iowa- what had been advertised as a ren fest had shifted itself into an aluminum can beer fest when a team of local frat boys dressed in cardboard armor captured the maiden fair. he was instrumental in her rescue, after fashioning a sling shot out of a y-branch and an old alternator belt. the assault was over a small rise in a meadow. he was hit in the lip with a can of a torn pabst, but was able to get off one shot, a shot he felt good about. the sound, stone on skin and then bone, was not something he was used to. he was afraid that he had killed the frat boy captain when he nailed him in the temple with an cubic-egg chunk of granite. blood was spilled, and the drunk kid didn't move. but he was only in a state of mental shock- he'd been felled by a nerd-enemy, in front of his crew-cut peers. he was down, and he stayed down. the sling shot is not a traditionally a medieval weapon, but nobody seemed to care. there she was, with her back-pocket bandanna already on his lip. he had never seen her before, and couldn't be sure whose side she was on.

"those fucking idiots. i told them it was a stupid idea-" she had come to the fields, she said, to make sure nothing got out of hand. he believed her. "mike, the tall one, the one you... hit. he can be..." her sentence faded away, and they listened to crickets and bullfrogs. her name was opal, and she was visiting from california. she was a friend of mike's sister. "i thought i might sleep with him tonight," she said, which was awkward and hurt his lip. but then she smiled and said, "thanks for shooting him. you saved me the trouble."-they walked beneath the giant moon-ball and traded secrets. they both loved hills blanketed in waist-tall grasses, and the dew-ed tangle of spiderwebs on the hills in the morning. she was a third generation heiress. he was a second generation lumber-mill planer operator. "there are lumber mills in brooklyn?" she asked. "no. i do miniature lumber now, in my basement. for miniature furniture for miniature houses." she was perplexed. "people buy that stuff?" the moon-ball laughed and a short cold breeze kept their noses awake. "it's not much different than what we're doing. an escape. we escape to this world. it's the same scale as our world, but very different. some people want a world that is just the same as the one they are in, but on a much smaller scale."
at this point, in a field of knee-high wheat, he was kissed. the scale of the kiss was, in relation to the things around them, very small. but in relation to miniature furniture in miniature houses, it was very big.

lovecraft went back to brooklyn on the train. the next evening, he stood in front of his bathroom mirror. his t-shirt was dirty, and had two small holes. he hadn't shaved in eight days. his hair looked like abe lincoln's. there he was, in the middle of the city, alone, missing his cat, and looking authentically human. he smiled, his big gap-toothed, split-lipped smile, and turned off the light.