The Living Daylights or A Passage to Indiana, and: All His Fascist Wants, and: Hidden Valley Ranch, and: Quarantine Bardo

Abstract

The Living Daylights or A Passage to Indiana, and: All His Fascist Wants, and: Hidden Valley Ranch, and: Quarantine Bardo Jaswinder Bolina (bio) The Living Daylights or A Passage to Indiana "I'll beat the living daylights out of you,"she says, his blond head banged up against the blackboard, his collar squirtingblue between her brown knuckles, but later that summer, their pinkies grazein the chlorinated heat of the Park District pool. Their hands clasp sweaty beneatha picnic table outside the Super Dawg. Endorphin, milkshake, endorphin,cheese fry, she feels the first warm sphincter-tingle of love. O hormonallight, the nights chirp through her nightly until the morning of the Fourth whenhe randomly dumps her for Nicole Something-Or-Other in the gazebobehind the war memorial. Fuck, mutters the gut through its nauseous hollows.Puke, burble the heart's gory hydraulics. Nothing will ever be good again, she thinks.But she chuckles thinking on it now, so many election cycles later, at the umber endof summer, thinking on him and Nicole maybe together still in a bungalow somewhere, [End Page 68] Fort Wayne maybe, teeming with plump little Something-Or-Others, toaster wafflesand coffee, their table gummy with syrup, their youngest babbling something maybe,their youngest named maybe sentimentally for her: plump little Sukhdeep KaurSomething-Or-Other in her highchair. And I'll bet you something, she thinks.I'll bet she's their favorite. [End Page 69] All His Fascist Wants "It's as if we want to believe the fascistis entirely the man on TV when the fascist is mostly the man watching the man on TV wanting what the fascist wants,"I'd been telling the boy when he broke squealing free of the containment zone we'd attemptedaround the tub and hurtled through the naked chambers of our modest regime. We were hopeless then to stop him,we said to each other, so mad were we with affection at his indomitable overthrow, his adorable unrelenting. After all, we said,we'd invited him into this rapt world, and the world is all he wanted. [End Page 70] Hidden Valley Ranch The night mare trotted into a clearingwhere I'd fallen asleep, her clackety wagon filled with snakesand shame and everything precious to me. I should've done something,but I kept snoozing like a drunk Sunday with three stories of an apartment buildingsuspended above me and you and the baby in his potato sack in the bassinet beside me.I didn't do a thing as the night mare nuzzled him, her whinny glintingsome kind of moonlight, as she snorted and whined untilhe leapt up! took hold of her mane, and they galloped off togetherthrough a gap in the teeth of the curtains as I gasped and I gasped from the bedI rode like a Conestoga unhitched and careering deep into the outlaw night. [End Page 71] Quarantine Bardo for R. A. Then, today, we debated the selective logicsof cannibalism over hot dogs on the fire escape. Ragtag squadrons of housefliesgathered at the screen door plottinga next daring incursion. Like a suicide cultwith attention deficit disorder, we quipped. Pesky nucleotides dropped anchor all alongthe coasts of our bodies, but people were stillout walking their dogs and kids. A neighbor we once knew set upa celesta on her stoop and playedJohn Prine covers all evening long. All evening long, a live music stoleacross the terrain, off the urgent careclinic and through the bank drive-thru before infiltrating the ironwork fencingthe cemetery beneath the El tracks. A train flew over. Nobody was on it but me. [End Page 72] Jaswinder Bolina jaswinder bolina's fourth poetry collection, English as a Second Language and Other Poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in October 2023. His debut collection of essays, Of Color (2020), is available now from McSweeney's. Copyright © 2023 Jaswinder Bolina