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Contents
4 Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (after Ezra Pound)
6 If Not Princess, Then Warden
9 Here Are Some Problems I Have with Your Wife
11 PSA
12 American History
13 Your Prime Minister Speaks
14 One Night in His Hotel Room, Vince Neil Reads Aloud His “Open Letter to the Men and Women of Malibu, Who May No Longer Love Me as They Have,” a Nice Bit of Writing about Which Josh Offers Very Little in the Way of Criticism
15 The Films of Tony Scott
16 We Will Begin by Placing You in This Bag
17 Blue Safari
18 Penultimate Letter to Your Wife
19 Sci-Fi Violence
20 While Josh Sleeps, Vince Neil Recites His “Love Song for Flight Attendant on Continental Express 1147, to Austin, Texas”
21 Alamo Theory II
22 Here Are Some Problems I Have with Your Wife
23 What It’s Like Outside
24 Notes Toward an Imperial Poetry
25 One Shies at the Prospect of Raising Yet Another Defense of Cannibalism
26 One Day, Alone on the Houseboat, Vince Neil Changes the Name of Everyone He Has Known, Knows, or Is Like to Know — Male and Female — to James
27 Yep, I Said Camel
28 The Record
29 The Creature
30 Vince Neil’s Report to the Malibu City Chamber of Commerce, in Which He Refuses, and Finally Agrees, to Make a Journey to the Underworld to Visit with the Known and Unknown Dead
31 Complaint
32 Alamo Theory III
33 Hidden Lake
34 Superwhite
35 Vince Neil’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, as Transcribed by Josh, in a Crowded Hotel Bar One Afternoon, Being a Poem Spoken in the Future, During the Upcoming AWP Conference of 2018, in Tampa, Florida
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Josh Bell
Copyright
Special Thanks
Dollar Dollar Bill
One more Jacobean kiss
and you’ll wind up related to me.
One more emotion
and I’m coming for you, like a sparrow.
Set your phenomenology
on the windowsill.
Filthy, meet Family. Family,
I want to get marketable again.
In the meantime, what are your thoughts
on a completely male garden?
As little closure, maybe, as there is
a permanence? This being, also, the time
of the wandering Miss Americas.
Loose thumb-bones, rattling
in a mint tin. One more emotion
and both Dakotas will explode.
One more condition
and I’ll be exiting my relevance.
And what was it, finally,
so dead about him, Family?
I think I just saw a fox.
Yes,