The Queen’s Farewell – David Lohrey
March 1, 2026
I, too, am dying to find out why the Queen’s skin looked so good
at 94. I don’t know. I’m just curious.
There are so many questions.
Like Max, the cannibal, I don’t know how a can opener works.
I always wanted to live on Chickasaw Bluff but ended up in a
motel room on Summer at less than $75 per night.
My neighbor is a skinny black kid with tattoos all over his
neck. He runs a couple of white chicks out of his room.
I eat over there at the Sunshine Taqueria, a huge hall diner with 99¢
Mexican tacos, pork with minced onion, radishes, cilantro; no cheese,
lettuce, or tomato. I eat three. On my first visit, I cried so loud
they asked me to leave. I had never eaten anything so delicious.
It has happened before, this act of public weeping, but never before
over tacos. Who can blame me? I have never cried over spilt milk.
I wept when my neighbor killed my pet rabbit. He set it on fire.
We are all shook up.
We are concerned about having clean underwear.
Beyond that we have little in common.
We are the lost generation. The lost generation…get it?
All the men I know are into bullfighting.
In Los Angeles, for over a thousand years, poets copied their work
on mimeograph machines. This worked just fine.
They stapled sheets together and dropped them off at the local
bookstore. This was good enough for Charles Bukowski.
Poets don’t eat at Jack in the Box. We sat on folding lawn chairs
in front of the laundry with Mazursky. The parking lot at Fairfax
and 3rd was our lounge. All you needed were a few hairs on your nose
and feelings of trepidation.
This was back before café latte was invented. We drank swill.
It took three hours for us to finish a breakfast of eggs and rye toast.
Men didn’t order waffles, not yet, and we talked movies. This was
long before people stopped having conversations.
On my twenty-seventh birthday, I received a $56 fan from my
parents. I placed it in my room. My windows were sealed shut.
There were bars on the windows. I could see the hanging fruit, but
couldn’t reach it. That was when Sylvia Plath came into my life.
Trish: yes, she was the varsity slut back then. It’s so great having
Memories. I remember all of it: Fantastic Features, male and
female electric sockets, Krystal’s hamburgers, four for a dollar,
And a delicious milkshake for thirty-five cents.
I remember the boy accused of brushing his pubic hairs,
and so much more, but the one I remember fondly was
a sixteen-year-old brother, Carrie Allen, a great friend, who
was in my ninth-grade class, when we were all fourteen.
Carrie, who walked with me every day after school and
bought us lunch at the burger counter in the back of the
neighborhood Montesi’s, a street-fighter I loved, because
unlike me he was not afraid to die.
Some understand friendship. Carrie was cool all right, as cool
as Johnny Carson. He was the only one I could talk to. He was
physically dangerous. He lived in a crummy shack on an
unpaved road with a broken fridge on the front porch.
We were set for life. We didn’t believe in sharing; ours was
a religion of hoarding. Membership was limited to the greedy,
deliberately. Fuck the needy. When my parents found out my
friend was black, they told me not to show him our house.
John Adams, a Founding Father, wanted his kids to write poetry.
I urge Trump to call his kids together. They would make fine
anthropologists. Someone in this country has to study ancient languages.
When the bombing starts, his artistic sons can try to save Nevada.
It’s all so heady. When I was young, the young made a point out of reading
philosophy. It was part of the humanities, along with foreign languages and
ancient history. We were all so curious about Aristotle in those days. We all
smoked pot but only so we could study our Greek declensions.
With Presidents this low, we depend on children to write their epithets.
They’ll suggest we not bomb ancient sites; an artistic education might
come in handy. We have no queen. Shakespeare loved the Romans.
Julius Caesar. Lincoln did, too. One should go to China to teach Latin.
Aristotle is seen now as part of the problem. That he was white has been
pointed out by the witty, while others think of him as just another male.
Being a man has become altogether unfashionable, although once a year
one is invited to prance around with one’s breeches down.
Today, people obsess over the right to bear arms; they carry weapons.
Of greater power is one’s tongue. A golden voice or a pistol? They’d
prefer to put a cap in their opponent’s ass. We’ll know America is back when
people once again value the power of words and the right to speak them.