Amelia Earhart was born daughter of a stupid drunk man in the flat of Kansas and when she was a little girl she would wear flowers in her hair like orange animal’s eyes and boy’s pants on her little girl legs and her grandmother would frown at the shape of her.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born son of a dead man in the heat and breath of Louisiana and when he played cops and robbers in the back yard the game always ended with his brothers killing him with their imaginary cartoon bullets and little boy’s hands in the shape of guns.

John Wayne Gacy was born a city boy in the thick streets of Chicago and when he was a kid his father would call him junior goddamn sissy and drink and smile at his son and when he was a man he loved and murdered a soft and beautiful thirty three and called them goddamn sissies.

God was born in an old tenement on the edge of New York against the lips of coal factories and the flanks of stock yards and when the sun came up in the morning he would look out onto smoke stacks and flat faces of cows and shapes of women and men

Lee Harvey Oswald was nine days dead before he rose from his grave on the grey Fort Worth morning of December 3rd. He brushed the dirt off the cheap suit the state of Texas had buried him in as best he could and found his way into the noise and swift bodies of downtown. The newspapers mixed talk of Johnson and Vietnam with Kennedy’s death. He had meant to buy one and read it somewhere quiet, but there was no money in his drab dead man’s suit. Instead he walked until he found himself in some small city park. He sat at some old park bench and watched the people of Forth Worth. Fingers briefly resting on the bullet holes in his belly.