DANA WARD

Dana Ward is a poet & works (gratis) as a full time childcare provider for his daughter Vivian. They go to malls & parks together in Cincinnati, OH. You wouldn't believe some of the weird & interesting things they've seen in the mall lately, wow!

Under the urn cork, confetti

From Things The Baby Likes (A-Z)

Delirium Tremens: I worked at a liquor store in coastal Maryland when I was nineteen. My boss had worked there since he was nineteen, &, because he fondly remembered the privileges bestowed on him by his boss he allowed me to not only buy bottles from the stock but more extravagantly to run up a tab, which meant every night, since I was young I longed for sugar, I’d settle on a pint of E&J or Southern Comfort, & an airplane bottle or two of Yukon Jack, the latter I'd pour into a fountain Mellow Yellow & nurse on the long commute inland, getting home by nine or so half drunk to find Brandon painting or reading or looking out the window, at which point we’d share the other bottles, talking some, or working in our rooms.  Mornings at the liquor store some of the regulars would come in with a look of pleading shame in their eyes, dt’s flaring badly, & we'd try to make jokes to deflect the abjection but it was like being an apothecary, all of the colorful bottles in the sunlight.


Quitting Your Job: On my last day at my previous job I was given a watch stopped at 4pm (“Quittin’ Time”), as a farewell gift. It’s beautiful to be in possession of a broken clock that’s right not only twice a day but always, or more precisely, never, with an intimation of always. I have it on the windowsill beyond my computer  & I move my eyes from the face of that watch to whatever I’m doing on the screen, just as I once flashed my eyes from the screen to the working clock above the office door.


Winning the lottery: There must be some kind of Marxist numerology one could employ to uncover a secret yet meaningful ratio between the current price of gasoline & that day's lottery jackpot.  Their physical proximity on gas station signs suggests a deeper, occulted significance, some mathematics of extraction, risk, fantasy & labor, which, if discovered, might turn out to be the phantom denominator long thought to have been scribbled beneath Debord's famous graffiti "Never Work". Examined by experts in 20th Century insurrectionary forensics, the ink in which this ancient graffiti was written has been revealed to be the same ink used to print lottery tickets today.