So, you just weathered a really difficult Upper Michigan winter. I mean, the icebergs just melted in Lake Superior, and all these eager bastards are swimming in it already. What did you do to inaugurate the summertime, symbolically or otherwise?

I drank from the hose.

I have never come extremely close to dying—let me just say that up front. I have been very sick and in very bad situations, but my body has never begun the process of actually, physically failing.

Oedipus, inviolable,

pack your blackest knapsack
– stainless steel skillet,

extra virgin olive oil,
Dead Sea crystals, Piper

corns, plate and fork and knife.
Answer

the Sphinx’s snakiest riddle
(‘day gives birth to night

and night to day’)
and watch her suicide.

Dumb
jumper.

Pass through Thebes’s
gates where he awaits,

thick marbled meat.
Season fine ceramic

and invite him,
salt-and-peppered,

onto smirking, polished glitter
(Hadean syllables –

‘torturer’
‘denier’)

then crank the terrible blue-white
flame and scorch

him like the Phlegethon.

Tell me if this is a normal conversation to have while standing with the other groomsmen at a wedding.

“Never before has there been a generation of Americans so disillusioned by the American Dream.”

“Maybe in the 20s? It’s hard to compare.”

When I was young I often wondered what the world would be like if superheroes were real.

Now they are.

And I don’t mean that superheroes are real in the sense that single parents, hard working people, and people who go out of their way to help others are superheroes (though they are). I mean specifically that there are people out there who dress up in tights and help the city in costume as real life superheroes (except to be fair–it’s more like body armor instead of tights).