When I worked at Disneyland in the summer of ’65, it was strange enough even without what I found in the dumpster. This was the sixties, and the Magic Kingdom, no matter how many long-haired hippies it denied admission to, couldn’t escape the decade.

On September 28th, 2023, Art the Clown from the Terrifier movies accompanies me to poet Jane Hirschfield’s reading at the Anchorage Museum. Sitting next to me in a blue, padded fold-down theater seat, he wears his usual outfit.

We hear of people dying in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, reaching a twenty-year high in 2025 alone, and this is unsettling. But what particularly chills me to the bone is the February 2026 report on the decapitation of four Haitian women deported from Puerto Rico.

Four thousand two hundred years ago, an ancient Egyptian scribe named Ipuwer lived through the end of the world. Old Kingdom Egypt, one of the world’s first states and a paragon of balance and order, was collapsing into chaos and violence.

my lover has peculiar tastes;
her cravings are unnatural.
she apologises for her appetite