FIFTH CHAPTER: Karma Sushi & The Replacemates

I was fortunate to find a person who would solve my solitude. She would use her hands on my person until it was soothed. She would chop at my husk, then spoon out my sorrow and be its keeper. I located her at a castle. My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. It was a tangled area of preening people, mostly diaper free, with real feet and hands, and each was traveling alone. You could ask about the weather there, and people would answer you in English.
The great Horace, childhood lover to Homer the Blind, when asked of love and its effects by the town council, who were conducting their Survey of the Mysteries, gathered his robes, stood up, left the auditorium, and never spoke again.
The time was technical summer, a season that had been achieved by nature so many times, so incessantly, that a clotted arrangement of birds created splotches of ink called shadows, and whole days went by without gunfire. Shadows were simply blind spots that everyone shared. Kill holes were called graves, and apologies known as writing were incised in their surface. Rotten bags were called people. Milk was never sprayed from a fire hose at children until they skittered over the pavement like weevils, but the children wore shields of clothing regardless, and the people who guarded them were often trembling.
There was a chance, however remote, that we—among all the others who also famously walked the earth—would not breathe again, however much our mouths looked wet and ready for action. If we pictured ourselves in the future, we were forced to imagine our coffins shifting on a loosely soiled terrain, slipping into their pre-dug holes.
In short, it was necessary to establish a romantic alliance and to publish the results inside each other’s bodies. In short, when we referred to our fear as “tomorrow,” our only solution was to seek aerial sensations with each other. In short, although we pretended to choose who we would destroy in the name of a relationship, we were instead forced at each other, feigning admiration for the way our bodies lacked fat, hair, and color.
We together conceived of solitude as a math problem, such like the ancients must have encountered when they saw two different suns in the sky: a daytime sun that was hot and burned out the eyes, and an evening sun that was cool, pale, and white. Each would soon have its own name, but for the time being the suns were anonymous, and they careened to a complex logic, and they were frequently misunderstood. People often died of heartbreak because of them. Maps of the dead called snowdrifts gathered in the mountains. An obituary water called rain fell everywhere, and the ancients turned the hammered surface of their faces into it, but still could not feel better.
Questions we did not ask, because Ovid already asked them so well: in what way would commitment to each other differ from a commitment against our own solitude? In what way would our daily compromises, our small shifts against our own nature, build into bulldogs of resentment that we would soon unleash upon each other? In what way would our displays of affection toward each other differ from advertisements of what we most wanted done to ourselves?
A relationship between us—two average-sized people who could not be mistaken for chess pieces, however much our faces looked chiseled and wooden and over-noticed—would be a chance to mutually seek solutions to the dilemma of solitude. Other people, we discovered, had a plus or minus charge, similar to those colored beads called electrons. To be around the minus people was to have one’s solitude erased, whereas the plus people seemed only to add to the solitude, which had a limitless growth potential, a way of swelling inside the skin, creating an aroma called disgust. If one of us experienced a deepening solitude in a crowd, a so-called Spanish Moment, we might conclude that a majority of the crowd was plus capacity, so overflowing with their own solitude that they could do nothing but share it with whoever entered their sphere. These people hated mud. They did not wish to be killed.
We were partners in a puzzle, then. The difficulty level was 9, or 9.3. There were no clues. We would have to wait until we parted from each other to discover whether we had won or lost. This was incentive enough to over-explore each other’s eccentricities, to enter a race toward bored familiarity.
This took place in an area known as the world, where people cannot fly. Cocoons called nightgowns adorn the bodies there. When the cocoons are lifted, an investigation occurs, and the result is often a wetness, a smearing on of fluids. In this country, we breathe into each other’s genitals with a periscope called a straw. We blow on them. We make a fan out of notebook paper and wave it over the area, using the age-old excuse that we simply love to read, and what better narrative than the one inscribed upon the genitals of our familiars? We play pipe organ music out of a stereo that looks like an old wooden shoe. Sex is not an event that someone is invited to, however much we sit by the phone anyway, waiting. Oh, there has been so much wetness between the people that streets have been built to collect the runoff.
As Cicero, the great sage, said: And an old shoe is beaten against the pavement. Yes, when the lovers meet, us destitute ones hide in the road and beat our hard old shoes against it.
We met inside the fat clear globules known as air. There was no fudge in the room. Swimming skills were not required. There were no weapons. A pocket-sized emissary named “Joe” introduced us. I did not love myself.
Afraid of the predictability of my attraction, I started a project with her called “I don’t like you.” It was inter-cut with other popular projects, such as “I am tired and scared,” and “You are so beautiful that I am afraid to have sex with you.” Her project revolved around the “Everything’s fine” model. She held her cookie up high, and I jumped and touched my cheek to it. Through several mutual misunderstandings, we grew to need each other, a need that could be charted on a calendar. The parchment was signed with an evidence stick. Many children clapped.
It was agreed. She would chop at my husk, and I would begin publishing my name inside her mouth.
Courtship is based on hatred, according to one of the great thinkers, Robert Montgomery, a man who ate a series of meals, belched into a well, and then died. Hatred was a tactic the Phoenicians used when they met an enemy, and it has been the reigning wartime model ever since, however plain, however obvious. She and I, my solitude defeater, were no more enemies than any ancient man and woman bagged in cheap skin and fading hair, yet a battle was afoot, employing weaponry such as indifference and laughter, kissing and ambivalence, rubbing upon each other’s bottoms with a bath brush, and waiting to see who would have the honor of starting the first argument. The goal was not to admit that we each suspected a future dependence upon the other. We commenced a theater of attractive indifference in order to seal our obligation to each other. We engaged in a strenuous denial of need. A holiday might one day be made out of this behavior. It would be called “Monday.”
It was not illegal to know each other. It was just difficult. We used different cities as launching pads, when cities were linked by layers of chuff called roads and roads were not called devil carpets.
The ancients were so disloyal that they died and never thought of their loved ones again. Homer called dead people “traitors.” The greatest loves were simply forgotten, and the bodies of leaders and slaves alike began to melt. The love between two people has never been stored in a vial and sold in a shop, yet sometimes she and I, the two of us, on the threshold of no longer caring for each other, a precipice called the Waking Moment, lay together in the bed shaking at each other’s bodies as though we only had water inside us and could be just so easily poured away. We used a wringing technique called a hug, and squeezed at each other with great force, hoping that somewhere on a floor beneath us there was a drain big enough to take the water part of this stranger we had been loving and wash them away, quite far from us, and then further still, until we could only hear the faintest sound, which we might mistake for a river.
The trees are upside-down chandeliers.
The light engreens.
Here, on this balcony, everyone is pardoned.
O regret! It is the unwanted dog
that follows one home from the wound
of a stabbed person, from a wall
where one has chained and beaten
a person for no reason. Many people die
without a miracle. Many die in hospitals
deformed by years of crippling endless loves
that end in Texas. No one has ever died
where I now stand, but disease takes many in its dark
sack and they simply vanish. Everyone is swept
under the sea eventually, and everyone comes back,
but backwards, and is lost; and I’ve been angry
at the resurrected, their big eyes, their teeth;
and I have taken everything from them
because I’m sick.

I have dug my own grave with my mouth.
Here I am, eating you, full of outer space;
growing feathers, but inwards, and it hurts.
I walk by myself to the desert and beat up angels.
“Slave makers!” Why is our suffering
so important to them? They must be insane,
or so remote from our reality
they have simply lost the thread.
So I push them down, and kick them for an hour.
And I tell them the following:
As an ideal woman, I am a man. My shimmies are punctuated with a little pouch of fat just above my pubic hair. I have a high salary working with the subaltern; I close on a house but choose to stay in the motel. I buy a stack of black ties at WalMart and also purchase a dog. Of course the dog barks. I am thinking of jiggling breasts, the way a woman’s shoulders flick when she dances. I hire an Asian to teach me how to be fortunate. He asks me to repeat my sentence and I say, I want you, I want you, over and over again. Still thinking of the hips and toes, hips and toes. My head is stuck between the bed and the dresser and I am singing, There will be a brown baby, there will be a brown baby, bring the baby out in the sun. He hangs me out the window so everyone knows.
Dear Detective Erlendur,
I am on a beach. Does that make you mad? No snowstorms, no horses, no murders, no mothers who can't make a go of it. I couldn't be further from your world and yet I feel close.
Yours,
Ellen
Your servant and oppressor, son.
I permit your blossoming
along the sticks inserted in your brain:
Socialize. Intellectualize. Capitalize.
Socialization implies original sin.
Play Ambrose-as-Iraq: I’m mighty
and I’ll direct him polite before he interferes:
Dear other nations: your servant, USA Catherine Anne,
I”ll tidy up your house to look like mine;
you’re free now to be me.”
There’s no analogy.
Iraq’s dictator was evil. Baby’s not evil.
But Iraq’s dictator was naughty,
And the baby wants things he should not have.
There’s my analogy.
I have learned best.
I’m free, right, and point a gun.
A stupid pun can’t end this section.
A stupid cunt can. Bye!

When Poe tells us there is nothing more poetic than a beautiful dead woman, this is just one poet’s fancy. Surely a beautiful dead man is worth a second look. Lay him out nude on the bier, and fold his hands between his gently arched pectorals. Wrap about his thigh a loose white sheet and drape him across the pathologist’s table. Dig him up, just one week dead, and cover his eyes with new copper pennies. Braid his sepulchral tresses, a nest for mice and sparrows.
Like most beautiful creatures, these male bodies are selfish. They will continue to disrupt the poetic with their yawning, farting, and gabbing. Do not lose hope. Much can be made of them pre-mortem. While we cannot deny the male body participates but squeamishly in reproduction, The New York Times reveals the potential of the fragile male nipple. Nearly five percent of male bodies experience mammary swelling during their partners’ pregnancies. Their timid ducts produce a fluid akin to breast milk. We must encourage these fledgling efforts. Photograph, paint, and compose odes to the weeping male nipple. Envision the holy suckle—a halo about the fatherly head, the infant crown, the male areola glowing.
Further, admit the male body into commerce. Allow the male body to follow the female body in its utility as objet d’art, from fine to commercial. Where Calvin Klein has gestured with hip bones and abdominal muscles, let us extend and explode. The shy glimpse of shaft in the open toothed zipper. The youth, barely legal, stripped with his wrists and ankles bound to the gears of a printing press. A stubbled chin and ripe tongue pressed to the bleached grout in a shower stall.
Consider the societal benefits. Our eyes tire from centuries of pierced female bosoms and coy female buttocks, from the many abstractions of the labial fold and the endless parade of pubic hairstyles. The beer is skunked and the couch on the porch stiff with spunk. Let’s get the party started elsewhere. Think how new, how underexploited the many attitudes of the cock, the ball sack, the little strip of flesh between scrotum and anus. Consider the artistic benefits. Women poets, from our privileged position inhabiting and constructing the body, must reach out to those who merely construct. Must pierce and abrade, crack open and diagram, until they too experience the immanence of skin and bone. Do not allow them to remain with their senseless noses pressed to the glass of our exquisite coffins. Rather, grant them the opportunity to consider with every word written, with every article of clothing donned, and every step taken—Is it me or my body they admire, deface? Is my greatest creation the poem or the child? Which one shall I feed when both are hungry? Is this violation an act of sex or power? Would I be better loved headless and always, always erect?

The baby falls out of the window in the most obvious and beautiful diminuendo. The street below is full of iced garbage, the dumpsters blooming the alley, nest-deep and solidified. Everything stinks, fuming as the air warms; everything melting and stinking in spite of winter...
When the baby diminuendos in the most obvious, beautiful flight, our windows rattle. A plane is too low to the ground, our ears pop. A siren in the distance is deaf, dumb and too far away. The pressure from the airplane. We shake a bet on which direction everything is headed; the plane, the siren. We sit and listen for a long while. When the siren’s mouth is faint, is disappearing, I pocket my one dollar bill. We are two girls chain-linked, arm in arm, side by side. We are the game of telephone, where something said follows down a line of ears and mouths until, at the end, the something said is no longer what it was, taken on a new muddle. We keep shifting to something that never was before, as if nothing was ever uttered in the first place.
The baby’s diminuendo lives inside the pop of our ears, the airplane, the melting, the siren, the music from brother’s room, fuming garbage. We run to tell brother of the baby and he is slumped on the floor, many perfect cyclical holes in the wall above his head. He is laughing. Everyone’s sirens hurt our ears, everyone’s velocity is laughing too close. The brother won’t listen about the baby, screams at us to leave the room, points the BB gun in his hands at our faces.
We run to the open window, our heads huddled together in a line, figuring out the distance between point A above us and point X below us, how easy it is to forget how flights create perception. Look at the baby I say aloud once downstairs. We can hear the sirens again, closer but coming only as close as the snowplow will come.
His jaw swallowed six buses of children,
his eyes watching them from beneath
peel themselves from the leather seats,
no seatbelts, just early summer heat.
He shook them down like terrible
pills, these inner city youth who
had never seen the ocean, each leaning
their heads over the edge of the old pier.
My dad said, no ocean until I’m grown,
but he told me stories about the pier, about
the creatures hanging out in the deep, how
he swam each day with a giant spear, waiting
for one of those sea bullies to open its mouth.
a god God rises up early rising early
Christ slept or Christ wept a god
God rises up early. Early I up ter
na God ter chrrr early God I
say Christ. I say Christ closed
he slept as god is sleeping God
I am sleepy llll snap God ll
Christ tires me as God tires
I'm sleepy null ter rrr
God tires me early I am young
and early Christ tires me I
don't remember weeping I wept
Christ slept or Christ wept a god
god God ll chrr I must have
slept.
I heard you gave birth, that you named your kid for a star, but here you are with a beret, in charge of this cadre, and herding us into the basement of our building to be registered, photographed, and given new jobs to support the revolution.
It’s pretty funny and you look great. You just gave birth but your skin is as supple and your eye is as bright when I saw you at that party in February and you were six months pregnant, shiny hair, high heels, aqua scarf that matched your eyes, skin-tight black jersey dress hugging your “bump”. Now even though you’re running the show in the basement I’m close enough to you to see the wrinkles around your eyes and I wonder again how old you are like I did at the party and whether it was hard for you to get pregnant let alone get in charge of a cadre.
I think maybe you are going to get tired of me acting like friends with you while you’re ordering everyone around. I’m not sure yet what kind of revolution this is, nor is anybody else. Is this the kind of revolution that likes or doesn’t like intellectuals? And for how long? The only history I know is literary history and that does not have a nice story to tell about intellectuals and revolution. I wonder what to tell the guy with the computer when I do get to the front of the line and he asks me what I can do, what I can do for the revolution. That guy wears a trench coat and non-descript collared shirt and khaki pants, he looks like an IT guy, which is a kind of intellectual, I guess. He may actually be the guy who ran the tech at our Obama office last summer. Having tech in the Obama office gave us an invaluable, glamorous, indefatigable feeling, as we were told and believed that John McCain had no tech in his offices, even though our office was in Mishawaka, Indiana, a place that in no respect could be described as glamorous but in fact was the nadir of glamour, could strip a star of its glamour, just by sulking nearby.
The skills I can give the revolution include: writing, teaching, editing, and performing. Is that going to work? Good enough? Should I just say no skills, request training? I can’t even cook, I can’t watch babies or keep my car clean. Will you blow my cover? What answer do you want me to give?
The line is long and I’m at the end of it so I have a long time to think about the right answer. Because I feel so collegial with you I can’t keep my mouth shut even when you’re addressing everyone else in the basement. “I’m just excited about the career counseling!” I quip to the crowd, my neighbors, who laugh nervously. You also kind of laugh, but not deeply. How shallow or deep does it need to go in? Is laughter like a needle that can inoculate you, make me safe for you to have around? Is this that kind of revolution?
My mom is also here holding my baby, who’s not really a baby anymore, she’s two. If my mom’s around I don’t look after my baby too much. I wonder what my mom thinks of my baby-minding skills. Well, I don’t have any baby-minding skills. I have art-making skills. Last week I did an art project with my baby instead of turning on the TV, which was like my new year’s resolution for Spring. We dipped colored tissue in glue and stuck it to a card. It looked pretty excellent, like a garden, but when I put it on the wall she freaked out. ‘No painting!’ she whined until I took it down. She rejected the art we made together.
So where’s your baby? I want to ask you but I don’t. I want to joke, having a baby is like a reverse amputation, it’s like a graft, like a protrusion. When I was a kid my brothers had these soldiers cast in some kind of metal, probably lead, they had a seam down their legs where they were made in the mold. That’s what having a kid is like. Not the seam, but the soldier, made of toxic, and soldered to your mold.
Anywhere you turn they’re lined up on the sill of your line of sight, with their sights on you, blocking your view.
Babies.
I don’t say this because it’s not strictly true, I don’t see your baby anywhere, and I can only see my baby out of the corner of my eye in my mom’s lap wearing a dirty white shirt and no pants.
I know, it’s bad the kid has no pants but we had to come down here like immediately and what was I supposed to do? The revolution turned out to be like a tornado, for a couple hours we saw it coming, then it came, then we had to go down in the basement. It must be a pretty intense revolution if it has cells and cadres and chains that reach all the way out to Indiana.
And you look so glamorous here, again dressed in black, with your mascara and lip gloss, glowing like you’re still pregnant, packing us all in, ranking and organizing us, and no baby in sight.
Everyone’s staring at me, I feel like, because I’m not taking care of my baby, so I go over and grab her and plunk her down in a corner where all the other babies are playing with toy cars, toy trucks, toy motorcycles. Every one of these vehicles is plastic and red. Is it that kind of revolution—red? Or—plastic? Or—interested in transport?
When I saw you at the party I wasn’t drunk despite my best efforts. You looked so glamorous, you and your husband had been in Mexico and were buying a house in Chicago, he was receiving serious accolades for a new project based on erasure, but your own project was even more interesting, a stack of index cards with typewritten mottos, which were piled on a pillar in a plasticine box and were taller than a stack of Russian novels, already.
Text was something that could be erased or accrue, and it was really a material thing after all, and you could see it build up over time like a coastline, or ebb away, and there were kelp forests, deep water trenches, feeds of cool fresh water that mixed up the bios, a shipwreck, canneries and hotels and motels and whore houses and strip bars and family aquariums that made a go of it and flourished for awhile and fell into disrepair on the edges of it and finally sunk into the water itself to be reclaimed by the kelp forest
was literature
in so many words.
Now I look down and that kid from school with the stringy blonde hair is about to bite my kid’s arm in a fight over a toy so I pour my water on her head, and her mother comes over and grabs my wrist, and I pour out the rest of my water by accident on the floor, and now I’m worried, because how long are we going to be in this basement I should have saved my water. I look over and my mother is clutching a bottle of water and watching me, so, ok, she’ll give that water to my kid before she drinks any herself, so I know the water thing is covered, I also look at you and you’re drinking from a bottle of water and you hold your lips back a little bit so as not to get any lip gloss on the mouth of the bottle. I can see there’s some flats of tiny water bottles behind you like at a youth soccer game. Are there oranges, too? Are those for the hundred or so of us down here or just for you and the cadre?
This does not appear to be an environmentalist revolution.
I knew your husband first, before I knew you, and actually before you knew him, I don’t remember not knowing your husband, I can only imagine all the shit he’s talked about me over the years, he’s an inveterate gossiper and I love to hear gossip, though then I wonder what kind of gossip he’s going to spread about me, of course I assume I’m boring, have nothing gossip-worthy for him to spread, but that’s what everyone thinks, and my life is hardly perfect, for one I’m a failure as a mother and everyone knows that, partially because I tell them. Are you going to tell him, later, how uncool I acted at the revolution? Because I have been acting very uncool since this whole thing started, I agree. I was certainly acting very uncool at that reading party, you were amazing, magnetic, your bangs made a kind of shelving and I remembered how you had gone to a residency in the Canadian mountains somewhere, its name was onomatopoetic, I asked you, but I couldn’t remember the right onomatopoeia, how was Wham, I asked, or Oof, is it, and you said gorgeous, gorgeous, I got nothing done but it was gorgeous.

I remember once we stopped to have lunch at your apartment while you were at work and we went in your husband’s office, which was long and slim like a laundry closet or something, and we watched a little animation piece he was working on for a local band’s video, which must have taken a ton of time and what’s worth more, time or money? and I saw these books on anxiety disorder tucked up among his art books, so then I didn’t know what that was, research for a project he was working on or did he have anxiety disorder, and he had photos around of when you two went someplace grey in the off season, Nova Scotia, but you didn’t do any Elizabeth Bishop tourism, but the whole thing is Elizabeth Bishop tourism, stand with your toes in the marl and have a drink, the shoreline torn open by the storms like a fish’s gut, noone could breathe inside this root cellar, sorry, wrong poet, wrong flavor of dread.
It is getting hard to breathe inside this basement, psychologically, at any rate, though I can hear a motor and the electricity is on and the airconditioning is keeping us cold as a catch, on ice, for what purpose.
Then I feel so bad for my kid and I take her in my arms and try to hold her close which she hates, she stretches her jaws to bite my shoulder, which she learned from that other kid, so I crouch down and release her and she toddles over to my mother.
You wouldn’t know it, I say to you in my head, but at night she insists on me, she rolls over in her sleep and hooks an arm around my neck and knocks the air out of me, or if I’m sleeping on the floor next to her, she dive bombs from the bed to my chest, she lands on me heavy as reality and wakes me out of whatever dream I’m having, of an aerial bombardment or a revolution or whatever.
Your head turns back and forth, memorizing the crowd. Now I remember when your husband greeted me at that party and said, ‘How’s having a kid?’ and I said, ‘It sucks, don’t do it’ and he said, ‘You know we’re expecting, right?’ and then I glanced over and saw you looking so beautiful in your blonde hair, seablue scarf, bump, and etcetera.
We both laughed as if it were an urbane exchange.
An urbane exchange does not a revolution make. Or?
Once when we were students you said you wanted to write poems like the Sonnets to Orpheus. Or was it the Duino Elegies? Either one seems a bit far fetched, not just for you but for anyone living in this century. Can you have a Rilkean revolution? Are you one of those instructors who assigns Letters to a Young Poet to your undergraduates? Who promotes the apprenticeship as a pedagogical mode?
The revolution is about apprenticeship, that much is true. All revolutions are pedagogical, that much seems sound.
Everyone is stepping into a little glassed-in office to give their information to the man with the computer, several at a time, they can’t seem to restrain themselves, and really you’re being pretty lax, and why shouldn’t you be, we’re not exactly an ornery bunch, women, children, older and younger men, none of us conducting our lives with much of a sense of purpose, most of us just anxious to see how this revolution is going to turn out, what is going to come next, and we’re happy we’re not out there in the elements being exposed to whatever was in that milky rain that showered the crowds we watched on TV. It put those kids to sleep right in the stadiums, and the cameras didn’t stay on them long enough for us to know if they were going to wake up. Maybe the camera crews also passed out, they weren’t in their bio suits just to cover the graduations that were naturally happening across the country this May weekend. Harvard, West Point, The University of Maryland, community colleges alike were hit with this milky rain that panicked those of us watching at home and caused us to just pull back and stay inside and out of it, out of it.
When you arrived to take charge of us, to tell us our part in it, we were relieved.
Finally I manage to get close to you and lean with my elbows against the wall. “I just can’t believe you’ve been part of this revolution and having a baby at the same time! How long have you been involved in this?” I ask you.
“Eighteen months!” you say laughing.
“I just don’t know how you get it all done! I’m so impressed! And you look great, I’m jealous!” I say, and mean it.
“Thanks!” you say. “But I’m still so fat, that’s the one thing.” Up close you look not quite as slim as usual, but, I know, the weight doesn’t come off right away, and actually you look nice this way, you definitely aren’t now nor were you ever fat, with your cheekbones and tiny ankles, I tell you.
“How old can your baby be, anyway?” I ask.
“Five weeks!” you practically squeal. Your lips are this gorgeous color like where liquor and liqueurs meet in a glass, and one of them is fruit, and I never order those, because all I can see when I look at that drink is spill.
“I love your lip gloss!” I say.
But what I mean, is, I love you! I love this revolution!
i love you like a cow but i'm a wildcat
you're a worm giving up
we're taking turns and we aren’t safe

i love you all over the place
all over my sweaty city
my city is a wildcat

when i love you like a cow
i'm covered in sludge
so stop chasing me
it isn't safe

i'm chasing worms
because i'm alone in an expired city

i'm giving up because you’re a worm
She’s a cum vampire.
What are you talking about?
The chick across the hall…
E3, the new girl?
Yeah, every night for a month now she knocks on my door, sucks me off and leaves.
Bullshit.
She says it helps her sleep, that she can’t sleep unless she swallows my load.
That’s kind of sick.
I know but.
Your load or anybody’s load?
I think just mine.
It’s in our DNA.
What is?
To think that way.
When we see it from above we will know the sea is near, as is the gray, as is the end. When we see it from above the plane will be circling, destroying low clouds. When we see it from above we will be listening, we will be watching, we will go there as fast as we can.
“Outside the bar sirens flash and pass as I walk away from the priest and back to my coffee and notebook. I think for a moment, then start to write something: He was 18 when he decided to be a priest, I begin—but then nothing comes and I put my pen down and sip the coffee. I listen to the rain and watch the sad priest keep on with his drinking. McHugh keeps on with his channel-surfing on the muted, closed-captioned TV. The priest doesn’t look like a priest. I write: The boy who would become a priest didn’t look like a priest. I start flipping through a wrinkled Post someone left, a Sudoko game halfway empty. I write in two numbers. I stare out the window. I see an orange flame of sky caught between two high-rises some blocks away like a Rothko painting. What does it take to drive a priest out into the rain for a half dozen pints? I ask myself. No, ask it a different way. What does a priest dream about during a thunderstorm? Yes, he never wanted his life this way. No one wants their life this way. The world seems wrong to the priest; the world seems wrong to everyone. But we can’t question how the world is. Angels appear, Caravaggian figures. Among divine oily shadows we are presented with our callings. Like priests. When he was 18, his mother predicted he would become a priest. I spin my pen around my thumb; I feel my throat tighten; I see my mother’s smile; I sense that I am smiling. And so I write: When I was 18, my mother…”
I wait to feel my heart breaking

i want to start a new branch of porn
i’m calling it the surreal porn
this porn genre will involve special effects
and foley sounds and rubber duckies
there’s this one scene where a giant
neon penis like serpent
goes into this female robot
and it goes in through her metallic pussy
and somehow it comes out through her mouth
and then another female robot comes along
and she starts performing
fellatio until she swallows
and you can no longer see the giant
neon penis like serpent
and you can only see two female robots
french kissing going so fast
you can no longer identify them as two separate robots
and you think they’ve morphed into one
and you can listen to rubber duckies
as you watch them make out
and then the lights go off
and everyone starts clapping


if a giant penis shaped car runs over me
one day i would appreciate it
if hot paramedics came to my rescue

they would start yelling at each other
saying things like 'oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck
i think she might be dead'
and they would worry a lot
and they would give me cpr and
they would shock me with their penises and
they would try their best to make me come back to life
but they would fail

i want to be run over by a giant penis

i want to see iggy pop crying desperately
when he realizes hot paramedics are unable to make me come
back to life
i think iggy pop would be disappointed
i think he would think ‘well holy punk rock
this girl is frigid’
and he would cry desperately
and he would be unable to say anything else
because he would probably go
into severe depression
i want to dance with a vacuum cleaner
walk backwards then towards your feet
inhale your shoelaces
make you trip

my organs are like external hard drives

some cables go up and occupy my throat

if you suck my tongue hard enough
you can keep it forever
if i orgasm this means ants are dancing
all over my face and arms and legs and feet and hands
and everything

if we meet in real life and i decide
to wear red lipstick that day my face
is going to camouflage itself with my lips
and if i don’t talk you’ll think
i’m a mouthless mutant
A mysterious bone with a heart-shaped hole. An infamous brotherhood called Ye Ugly Face Clubb. A lineage that bequeaths mysterious relics to an unsuspecting descendant, who shares the Author's name but is not her, led through this labyrinth by none other than Dante's Beatrice - at least, a deformed reincarnation named Bea. Galerie de Difformité is unlike any book you've read, yet traces of many books masque themselves into its fabric, challenging your notions, in the best ways, of what can be what, and how, and why. With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, Galerie de Difformité sphinxishly avoids simple categories, except the one where you recognize that something astonishing is happening. Structured as an art catalogue, with "choose your own adventure" directives, this hybrid who-done-it invites readers to become active participants in its characters' destinies and in the story itself. As each copy of the book physically and psychically deforms in any given reader's hands, the Galerie deforms not only Beatrice Portinari, Gloria Heys, Gretchen Henderson, and the ties that bind them, but also contemporary "Subscribers," who collaboratively inhabit its pages. Akin to a funhouse and curiosity cabinet, this novel-as-poem-as-essay-as-art grows outside of the bounds of the Book and, in the process, redefines deformity.

I am walking down the road and I see a sign and it says 4.5 miles.
I ask the sign “What is 4.5 miles from you” and the sign says “4.5 miles.” This is true I think, but not the answer I am looking for. I tell the sign “Don’t get smart with me.” It says 4.5 miles.
I dig up the sign and bring it with me so as to put it 3.5 miles from something thus teaching it a lesson. But every time I try and get close to a restaurant or a hospital or a landmark of some kind it always stays 4.5 miles from me.
I am a stubborn man so for weeks and even a month or two I try and teach this sign a lesson, but I always fail. Until I am walking through a field and a hummer pulls up to me. The hummer is full of ten men, each with 27 beers and must be a part of a tribe because they are all chanting and all have tattoos of black lines that I can’t decipher. The chief asks me “Where can I find the nearest liquor store.” I say to him “We are in a field.” He says that I am lying because of the sign. I tell him that I speak the truth. But he doesn’t believe me and is quick to anger.
Out of the hummer he comes and hits me over the head repeatedly with a tire iron. And it hurts, but after awhile it doesn’t any more. And he says “O.K.” and drives away and finds his liquor store 4.5 miles away.
Now I am bleeding profusely from my head. I lie down and get ready to die because that’s what you do when all your blood leaves. It takes awhile and I start to get bored.
I dip my finger in to the pool of blood around my body, causing a tidal wave for all the bugs and small animals going for a swim and I draw on the sign “Hospital here.” I pass out.
When I wake I’m in a hospital and the sign is nowhere to be seen.
Death to the officers! O my latrine, hug me stronger. I give you my wife. Throw my babies into the fire, to the dunghill, trample them under the foot of the marriage bed heavy with your intermingled bodies. She caresses, she kisses your worried muscles. Tear with your teeth rotten by the black meat and the bromided wine, tear with your tanned cock the linen hanging in the toilets, the linen fragrant with the talc and the vomit of the new-born. Ransack my furniture. The room exhales, you erect naked and wearing wool up to the knees, a fragrance of snow and grease. Strangle, knock senseless in their bed my father and my mother. Slaughter on his exercise books my brother dozing at the table. The bites of the native whores reopen on the lower part of your belly under the hair. Dig with your dagger, ear cutter, the polished flooring and free the spring singing for me child in the foundations. Lie down in its water and the cuttings and the earth and the cement powder covering your jaw, fuck my wife to death and, standing up again, squash her head in the stream blocked by sperm. And feeling light, rifle hanging from the shoulder and the mosquito net tied around your loins, push the door and, once you reached the border, thrown yourself into our arms laden with dying game. O ear cutter, hoist yourself up with us in the hollow between the branches warmed up by our turds. The smell of the married men’s blood is shrouding the city. To it we prefer the fragrance of the bugs gorged with our blood.

Since my last confession I have committed many more fallacies
the ad hominem fallacy
the agnus dei fallacy
the peccata mundi fallacy
reductio ad absurdum
ad misericordiam
ad ignorantiam
tu quoque
the sounds less shameful in Latin fallacy
sounds more authoritative in Latin fallacy
the moralistic fallacy
the naturalistic fallacy
the pathetic fallacy
the false analogy
the weak analogy
the red herring
the slippery slope
the use of straw men
the fallacist's fallacy
the irrelevant appeals fallacy
the appeal to antiquity
the appeal to tradition
the appeal to authority
the appeal to consequences
the appeal to force
the appeal to novelty
the appeal to popularity
the appeal to the masses
the appeal to poverty
the appeal to wealth
the bandwagon fallacy
the circumstantial fallacy
the fallacy of compulsion
the fallacy of composition
the fallacy of division
the gambler's fallacy
the genetic fallacy
accent fallacies
the equivocation fallacy
fallacies of relevance
fallacies of ambiguity and deception
the rhetorical fallacy
suppressed evidence
denying the antecedent
the prosody fallacy
the poetic fallacy
fallacies of presumption
the fallacy of accident
hasty generalizations
biased statistics
false dilemmas
the after this therefore because of this fallacy
ignoring contexts
affirming the consequent
arguing from ignorance
invincible ignorance
unwarranted persistence
unwarranted repetition
begging the question
circular reasoning
My horse is eating my head. He started off with my hair. I guess I can understand that, since my hair is blond and pretty dry in the summer, so it probably looks like hay. You wouldn't think that horses could bite so hard, as they normally munch on grass, but their teeth are enormous -- not very sharp, but quite hard. The horse jaw can exert pressures of up to 2,000 pounds per square inch. I made that entirely up. Horse teeth, however, are the size of dominos, and look like thick brown curved dominos, but hurt more than dominos ever could, even if they were thrown quite hard at you from a near distance. Horses' teeth grow indefinitely and have to be filed down with a large metal file. This process is called "floating". I did not make this up. I, on the other hand, grind my own teeth very hard at night. Sometimes I wake up with tiny bits of teeth on my tongue. They don't taste like anything -- I spit them out in the sink. Every time I meet a dentist, he becomes very depressed. He often starts to tell me about the country where he came from, how he misses the weather. He inevitably avoids looking in my mouth. He opens my jaws with those rubbery gloved hands, then stares out the window, shaking his head and sighing theatrically. I was surprised when my horse tore off my ear, but since then I haven't felt many emotions. From where I lie on the floor of his stall, I can hear his noisy chewing and crunching, and watch his hind hooves shuffle and tip. Sometimes he swats at a fly with his tail. I find the swish of his tail comforting, regular. It sounds a little like a broom, as if someone were sweeping the stall next to us.
Roadside stranded, he keeps the need for her in his teeth. Smokes out an hour of shakes as the rearview clouds. Then comes the darkness the animals know. They open mouths to his cause. And every tongue like a spurring drum brings snips, hics, and snivers to knee him down a thistle bank. On and into blood trails, he hunches, snorts cold grass of animal bed for spines, for pushing on, for laying down under pines so white the moon can't help but clean, every little needle from her name.
This flower is tough and dusty. Nonchalant as grass and so's its friend. And its friend's friend. They die during snow, then revive in warm weather. They are incurious, though years ago they were bright and nervous. One of them should've been famous. It is tall, faded red. They know a lot of history, that the world is not naturally cool. No one has the balls to cut them and press them in a dictionary or a bad diary about boys. There are three main flowers, and one exotic weed. In the seventies, they had a band. They made music in their spots. They understood something people understand, to make a whine wiggle through air. A bit of marijuana would burn and talk nonsense. They condescended to any drunk beer, but this comes with all music.
When the band was active, the flowers were the center of a scene. A song was mumbled and loved, and took its time. Dogs walked by and the flowers made fun of them. People made noise in the apartment building and threw bits of cigarette off the balcony. The flowers stayed up all night. Classic rock makes people realize things they already know. My grandma has an album. The art is out-dated. I can't find a thing to play it on.
They tremble in the wind. The flowers have felt everything before. They are a faded red with dark age spots. Spider webs use their stems. Bees do not sniff these. The band broke up vaguely. A song hung in the air awhile, before anyone bothered taking it down. Song structure can get so automatic, a song finishes itself with no heart, with no surprise, and is leaked and made real, even though it lacks artistic integrity.
A sound can mutate hi-tech. A sentiment can weigh down the honey. Drugs are always a problem. A band becomes a hobby after things lose their sheen and stall. Band members see mirages of solo endeavors, and lean into these blindly, like a smell.
In this band there was a lead talent. Inspiration funneled from nowhere into this talent. Talent can be overwhelming, and the lead shared it with its friends. The other two grew confident with the extra talent. One grew charismatic, the other grew morose.
I heard their hit song once on a Classics Special. Only a guitar can soul-twinge like that. The bulls-eye center, the pupil, the good small details, a toothbrush on the asphalt, the exceptions. The other day, I went to the butterfly conservatory sweaty, and the butterflies swarmed me, very unlike usual. “It’s stabbing me,” I yelled, and they tickled in a painful, yearning way. Such is the exhaustion of all fans. The flowers are no longer so talented. They can only watch what happens around.
'You're even more beautiful when you come,' he said. How would you know? she thought.

Draw a circle around Iceland east. Go south at least to Britain, then to Rome.
The west resides in ocean north where arctic lights fluoresce.
↓
I wrote to salmon, trout and otter, bottom creatures on their bed, crab and coral, sea poems in pens, starfish armed a decade, a dozen arms that fold, the hands that bend limestone with pink polyps, build coral among plankton and aconite digits, poems of fishing banks with just one line to the hydrozoa net of amphipod for cod.
We walked the summer floor of white humpbacks in lamaria forests. I took his hand, pointed the skipjack and the coal fish, like buildings in a strange museum, galleries up circular stairs, but it was below the fjord, out on skerries among seals he took his abc, in his parlance the futs, my futhark, soul mate son, to whom I keep saying:
“no matter what you have done, in transfiguration of dawn the universe is filled with redemption, regenerate son. When the last sin is counted redeemed amphipods and dead men’s fingers, redeemed mountains folding a complex plunge, emergent mountains of gravel or shale, the whole west sea floor, sediment, sandstone, coral voices pressed up into long axes of recharged magma all transformed, all made new, basements of our unfolding. Redemption is massive, deep seated from its crust in octagons to the crystal ice sheets that cover us, heads of moraines, shell rich shaved lines of iron and copper ore morning.”
I wanted him to know the image of himself as far as he could see the land, the arctic foxes’ hundred exits among weasels and voles, lemmings and interest rates. Of shrews and hare, badger and hedge hog we took views. It was the stone tunnels all over again to me, the transit of verse in endless epic north of the Krillion among bird rocks. Little nests of poems concealed in rock falls among the vertical cliffs, a puffin in the peat, islets of shag statues, rock razor mots, flocks like white clouds surrounding cliffs.
We ended up on the bird rocks of Helmsay, nesting cliffs of rookeries, colonies of hijacked lapwings, herons among hens, that’s as noble a place as any, still holding his hand, murmuring the kindergarten greenshank and black gull beak, the god tit and stint, the bean goose, wagtail, wood cork geeing spirits of pipits and tits and buntings.
You’d think he could have gone to libraries to read books but instead to the frost and pine roots, bugs in bogs with raised domes among vaginatum. We went to mires and fens, brown moss mats that covered bed rock, our office up East Finnmark in the birch belt among geranium and angelica, rested in alpine heliophilous and snow lilies where the snow lies late under eaves of willow and saxifrage, a constant damp rill of lichen. The heather boys in their boulder streams run beneath the nanatak sculpture of the mountains. We were the refuge of circumpolar, the pseudo-frigida marsh and mallow. We were the milk vetch and hard fern among fescue and woodruff.
Futhark Futhark, I would call from miles out or up and he would sense it and come breathless and we would run miles together like two herd animals steam making, laughing, sometimes collapse to mock fatigue, call out to each other, “help, help me I’m drowning, I think I broke broking,” at which he would flip.
When he began to flip I knew the training took, elan as marrow, willow hair flowing, gold M star. I was fool-covered with love with what, yes I had made, but had nothing to do with it, not himself or the sea, though I can’t imagine the mother ice so huge in him except it was. We were pens to write the flowing. I never turned to look behind. I would rise with feeling and words in the crevice of the rock where I hid and found Futhark hiding. I pulled him out and said, “Futhark you are more joy than I can stand.”
I mounted the fake stag.
This one had necklaces hanging on his antlers.
I predicted he could actually hear me.
I was tired.
See, I had been blanching and icing all day.
Also making delicately fried chicken.
I provided cloth napkins for everyone.
They all came over and we drank.
Some said this was a happy moment.
Some promised to never return.
I mounted a cold fake animal in the night.
The highway glittered out like real America racing in circles.
Why, why, why, did they all not go home?
I provided chicken, napkins, opportunity—all of these things.
Still, those crazy cold stags refused to leave.
With a tender stomachache I pretended to dry heave into a bucket.
This sent them galloping into the uncertain night.

The crappy film Robocop is used to explain the scam that property developers use to make money from the city. Crime is a tool for bringing down prices of properties which are then taken over by the developers. The author presents us with the stats of crime that make the theory more than blag. The author develops a theory of domesticity as a trap and examines rape as a function of the home. She says the rapist is an individual caught in a whole network of machinery that makes the rape possible. These things include all the normal things you can’t avoid if you’re poor as not everyone is. In New York this is the line crossed when you go North of Central Park.
She writes about the difference between homes and apartments. She theorises. She expands the theory to explain how prisons and tourism are linked in this theory. New York is also explained in terms of its districts of poverty and wealth and crime. Violent crime is contrasted with non violent crime and these are related to her theory of the trap of the domestic. Violent crime is crime for the poor areas, non-violent crime for wealthier sections of the city. Interiors of buildings are analysed in terms of the cover they offer for criminals as they move invisibly across the city. Broken locks open up an alternative grid of interlinking routes, portals to interred private space. Flats and their corridors, lifts, stairwells and laundry rooms are spaces that separate themselves from public sight. Apartments enclose the woman into an invisible cube that holds them for the time men need to do them. They are private cells for criminals to act. All a rapist wants.
Holy shit, people, I'm telling you that I don't want to work in the cafeteria of the Van Nuys government building. No sir, I'm talking about DOPE, FUCKING AND GUNS ON VENTURA BOULEVARD! Hey society -- I'm making a living making living hard for suckers like YOU!
WAMPA will train you how to read! After our WAMPA program, every text you read will be a series of pithy WAMPA slogans.
For example, let us say you read this: “War and poverty, disease and hopelessness, are ravaging half the world.” As a WAMPA, you will interpret this as follows: “War and poverty are two threats used to attack the potential peace of mind of WAMPAs. War justifies the theft of money that should pay for WAMPAs to sleep and eat at ease, as relaxed as a gentle flower in a controlled climate! I demand to be a gentle flower in a controlled climate! I will fight for my right to live free of fear, with medical insurance, daily direct deposits of unlimited credit, a nation that asks only what it can do for me, and an ideology concerned only with what I deserve!”
See? With WAMPA training, even the tiniest nugget of text can be the occasion for an almost infinite series of inspiring WAMPA responses!
Another example: “Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free.” As a WAMPA, you might interpret this as follows: “A home where I can be free includes huge couches and beds as wide as lakes, where I and my friends can sprawl around for long terrific hours in a limitless half-daze! It should be in a fertile plain where tiny robots that blend in among the trees and grasses gather fruits and flowers in sweet little baskets and bring them to us with little hand-written (by robots) notes that say: YOU DESERVE MUCH MORE THAN THIS. I will be the pioneer who breaks that ground: who cultivates a life of futuristic surplus luxury! And America will then finally be what it has always dreamed of being: an adult kindergarten where multi-ethnic grown-ups running free like unworried children can enjoy perpetual Thanksgiving!”
Dialectical Fuss was a WAMPA event to determine the future of progressive thought. WAMPISTAs Maximus Kim and Oliver Hall were assigned to represent relevant research positions.
Thesis: Enigmatic Nihilism
According to Maximus, all Humanistic propositions of universalist relations are invalid. The desirable form of social relation is subcultural. The subcultures from which we must learn seem Nihilistic from the outside; the embrace of Nihilism, and the scorn for established norms of value, makes these subcultures into laboratories for the values of the future. Seen from within, the Nihilism of many subcultures becomes Enigmatic; the Nihilism is laced with a new diffuse morality that is meaningful to participants. Maxi offers Enigmatic Nihilism as a model for the horizontal spread of difference and variation in values. But does this mean that Maxi argues in favor of (gasp from the audience). . . Tolerance?
Antithesis: Radical Fire of Love
According to Oliver, WAMPA must marshal the power of Intolerance now! Love is a vision of Intolerance that can guide us into action or (better yet) inaction. Love requires only as much from us as we're willing to give, and yet it enables comprehension. Far from being old-fashioned, Love is simply unrealized. . . but is always at the ready to rise Phoenix-like from its deferments. The evasive half-moralities and indefinite licentiousness of Enigmatic Nihilism are, in Oliver's view, a sideshow at best. WAMPA seeks unity, cadres, squads, platoons, societies, bunches, clubs. . . Love is a proven unifying agent to bundle these disparate beings together in one-size-fits-all robes of WAMPA! WAMPA must take on the same old hoo-haa and renovate it for new and specific tasks, and in so doing. . . we shall find it is no hoo-haa at all, but rather that our own inner radiance washes the hog and demands that infinite supplies of tofu-bacon be immediately available to all!
I want to vomit. Vomit up such ecstasy of the terror and caffeine pumping up against my cage yes like I am a wild heart. I will vomit and I will most likely apologize and I thinking about this why is Katie apologizing for all the mess why does everything need to be clean and tight and orderly please please don't let me die in the house not the house the clean house.
My Identity Was Stolen
By a group of poets. Drugged with cinnamon, bound in silver cloth, flown low and slow in a coughing Cessna, over treetops, under radar—to Guam. With all the noise, my Identity could just detect a discussion on the smell of camels (or possibly candles); the delights of a dancing girl named Sheila; and then a fervent argument over the optimal term for treading lightly: tympanum vs. flower. The airplane corkscrewed to the earth. And the silver bag unfurled. The poets laughed; offered a strong cappuccino, the real Italian, oily and earthy, with clouds of spun sugar. The next three days a blur of disc golf. Pogo sticks. Offshore fishing. Then a guided tour of the Territory’s mentally ill, a hilly land of crumbling asylums, sitting bedside for hours with those forgotten souls who never once had an unpaid visitor. The rooms smelled of almonds and dripping rain. My Identity sat silent, listening. Felt a surge of genuine goodness, the first in a long while. Felt like it was no longer just rowing upstream in a leaking red canoe. Something fluttered by. Thunder spoke; lightning lashed out on hinges, a rainfall of rat terriers! Excitable, head-shaking, running in loopy circles of verve. My Identity leapt up, ran after, to capture what makes rat terriers hum with joy. But you can’t catch a satisfied dog. So my Identity felt regret. The itchings of self pity. So asked directions to the nearest casino. Binged on breadfruit and saltwater taffy at the buffet. Drank nine mojitos. Stumbled outside, into a flooded river, and was swept with broken sighs and brushed-aluminum trees down, downstream, out into the riptide, to drift away...to be cast ashore, to lay curl humped and bleeding, below the left rear tire of a Subaru. I walked outside to my Subaru. Bent to my knees and peered beneath. Saw who was back and said, “Damn.”
The spider and salt hearts were retrieved from the 17th lacustrine vault of the robots, and it is to the robots with their worship of Quaterniana in all its varieties that we must direct our thanks for the majority of the images herein. In all fairness, I, the author, should now answer your questions on the relationship between the robots and trains (in which year of the occupation, for instance, did maps of the perimeter of the Green Zone first omit the railroad station that nestled so lovingly between the Isolation Hospital and the Iraqi Dates Commission? and why do the sedimentary tunnels three leagues beneath the Tigris and Euphrates not crumble as the trains howl through?…in that perfect darkness, skull pressed to the window of your Pullman car, you could almost hear it, listening your way past knocking pistons, through the giddy tweet and hiss of live steam, beyond the vastly dulled ticking of giant wheels and the whoosh! of the firebox—the pleasant slippy sound of the bivalves (Pseudodontopsis and Corbicula are fellow travelers, though ideologically suspect and not to be trusted with your best secrets) crawling up the sedimentary walls with sighs of pleasure at the exhaust steam that blasted them into an indestructible enamel…but that is only one theory) however, I’ve forgotten too much, and here in my boxcar it’s all I can do to listen to the same scratched sarabande, the vinyl stuttering and popping in rage at the corvid quill I inflict (rooks aplenty split cuntwise by my Beretta 92F, which even now only pretends to sleep beneath my left hand; as the safety clicks off, my right hand takes no notice, preoccupied as it is with these scribblings), and in any case, you’d sing out your canary soul the moment the interrogator whisked the cloth from his cranial drills and water pics. In lieu of information, shall I offer you my sufferings? But this sadness of mine no longer pleases—your yawns rattle a last tacked-up shred of tympanum from a thousand miles off—and END TIMES, after all, provides its own strange happiness. Like the humans, the robots will fall victim to the sycamores and perish, but not before you and I, my child—for I have seen the future.
In the same way that a lamb, fed a fat diet of seeds and stems, can grow larger, and thicker, and eventually become another thing entirely—a sheep—power is simply the adult version of something smaller that each of us are born with: cruelty. What cruelty feeds on, then, is the Other.
As everyone knows, the streets of New York are hollow; their paving is the shell of a dark egg. When you walk along them, you hear your steps echo in the city’s smoky inner cavity, where fires that eat up the evidence of unsolved crimes are kept burning by workers who’ve grown allergic to sunlight and slightly translucent over the years. It has been this way from the earliest days of European incursions into the New World, when Dutch settlers first hollowed out Manhattan Island’s interior to store contraband, liquor and slaves en route to the Caribbean.
Sometimes, at night, a hole will crack open in the crust and buildings will begin to sink toward it. Because the buildings are so tall and close together they almost never fall. They tilt inward until their upper stories touch. Then they rest, propped against each other, as though they were kissing or telling each other a secret. Their residents slide down the floor to one end of their apartments in their sleep. They wake up pressed against a wall, crushed beneath their own books and furniture and houseplants. As they fight to free themselves, they often find things they thought they’d lost years ago but which were really only buried in the sediment of their possessions.
In the morning, workmen from the city come and set these buildings upright again as though nothing had ever happened.
A man in New York has nothing but fists for fingers. Fists for each finger. For him, guitar playing is just punching, punching.
Behind him is a box and a very large guitar amp. Around his waist is a heavy chain. The chain is attached to a gurney. On the gurney is the box and the very large guitar amp. The wheels are squeaky and there is no grease to fix them.
The man in New York is small and thin. His heart is weak, so he sucks on his fist-fingers to get blood to his arms and hands. So he sucks on his toes to get the blood to his legs and feet. So he grabs a rubber tube and sticks one end to his ear and sticks the other in his mouth to suck the blood into his head.
He could ask someone to suck on his ears, but he won't. He could ask for help pulling his amp, but he won't.
He wants no one to touch nothing. Or anything. He wants someone to touch nothing. Or none of anything. He wants you to touch nothing of his. Yours, yes. Not his. Nothing. Not anything.
It's his.
It's like razors, his shoulder blades. It's like razors.
It's like barbed wire, his eyes. It's like barbed wire.
It's like spoiled milk, his voice. It's like spoiled milk.
And all that's fuck it, fuck all.
was the fact that Masao had sex with women proof that he wasn’t a faggot? He thought penises were dirty and he didn’t like the idea of sex with men, but he felt no qualms about sticking his dirty penis into my mouth at the same time that he emotionally felt closer to men than women. He was so confused, his emotional life so riddled with contradictions, he couldn’t possibly be normal! . . . But then who was I to talk? I had a penis.
The Mexican Conspiracy Theory™ claims that Mexico, The Real and Mero Mexico™, exists in a parallel universe, somehow independent from ours, and that the country we know as Mexico, that upside down triangle located south of the U.S., is an elaborated Aztec illusion. Furthermore, all things we consider traditionally Mexican are simply a facade intended to hide and protect Mexico from uninitiated and ignorant foreigners, like us. Real Mexicans, I’m told, don’t wear sombreros. Nor sing rancheras. Nor carry pistolas. They don’t even like chimichangas.
Don’t think I’m ordering these entries alphabetically for the heck of it

Since we are unable to reach the true essence of Mexico, we have the right to appropriate the fake pseudo-mythology they offer us and do whatever we want with it. We can make it true, in a way, defining what we would like Mexico to be. We could—and we should—compile a methodical glossary redefining every possible word related to that unreal Mexico. Everyone could have, in fact, her own (alphabetically ordered) private version. Rodrigo Fresán’s version, for instance, would be called Mantra.
This is what I think, my friend, my travel companion: the plot can be the hero and the hero can be the style. Can’t it? Here we go, Martín Mantra told me . . . and then he added: Mexico in Náhuatl means in the navel of the moon, and I, traveling toward that x, traveled toward me, from the screen, and I didn’t dare to ask him what Náhuatl was because I was afraid of getting lost forever and, not having reached anywhere, find out I would never find the way back to everywhere.”
A dense cloud of indecipherable news. Sketchy ideas that went into the mirror. A false night behind the glass. A stain like red wings fallen on the back of the chair. A ribbon of smoke crossing her face, like the photograph on a poster, stuck to the side wall. No one would notice the difference. I’m sure of it. I could be on the wall, well removed from my sadness. And nobody here would move an inch.
There is a story, and a very good one at that, told by Bernardo Atxaga. He says that one day, as he walked through a town in his native Basque country, all of a sudden he came upon a man by a door with a hole in it. He chatted with the old man for a spell and then the man asked, Did he know why there was a hole in the door? Atxaga answered, It would be for the cat. No, said the man. They made it years ago, in order to feed a boy who, having been bitten by a dog, had turned into a dog.
The stories I like, the ones that make me wildly jealous and yearn to be able to write that well, have the bedazzling logic of that old Basque: they lack a piece, and this lack transforms them into a myth, appealing to the lowest common denominator that makes us all more or less equal.
His body was voraciously searched by the children. The soft contact of those hands hurt him infinitely. . . . They took off his clothes amidst laughter and insults they were hurling at each other affectionately. . . . A boy with messy hair placed something sharp on his throat, broken glass, perhaps. Julio did not move. They placed a paper bag on his head. They don’t want to see my face when they open me with the glass.
They both know people who are chronically single. They two are not, by definition, chronically single though it should be said that it feels to her as if she has not had time enough in her life to be chronically anything.
"You have to meet people where they are."
"Things have to align at the right time."
This is not synchronicity. There is no such thing as synchronicity and they know it.
Studies have proven that people will pay more for vanilla extract that is labeled as Tahitian. When they hear this on the radio, on the public news station she likes but he finds to be "the best of the worst," they will say nothing: as if vanilla extract means nothing to either of them. She makes a world in which he can share this symbol telepathically. The real him could resist. This actual omission can be held representative of her largest dishonesties.
"You're more vulnerable on the page."
Apropos of nothing: People die. Famous people die.
Today, everything you could think of in the nature of a regular day was made of snow. Houses had little window shutters made of snow, and trees made of snow stood proudly in the front yards. There was a snow restaurant where flavored snow was served on round snow plates and the waiters, made of snow, had charcoal for eyes like snowmen. We drove our snow car into a desert of snow, camels of snow leaping around snow dunes, snow cactus all bent over from the great weight of snow, thick snow snakes writhing and hissing between snow fissures. It was all so beautiful that we fell into each other’s arms and wept. A snowbird trembled overhead, and we recalled then that it could not last. Just one day is what they’d promised—one day in the great scheme of things.
Homo sapiens have 78 organs. Homo sapiens have 660 skeletal muscles, 206 distinct bones, and 50 trillion cells. Homo sapiens have human skeletons. Homo sapiens reproduce internally through sexual intercourse. Homo sapiens have a head, a neck, a torso, two arms, and two legs. Homo sapiens have pubic hair. Homo sapiens have the ability to understand loneliness. Homo sapiens have friends. Homo sapiens drive different cars and live in different cities. Homo sapiens build satellites. Homo sapiens are able to experience both sadness and love, sometimes at the same time. Homo sapiens frequently work in office buildings and may spend up to eight hours each day sitting in office chairs.
Finally, the Project has shown us the most important truth, a truth we continue to refine. This is the truth that we are moving toward something, an indefinite object, a chimera roiling on the horizon, and that the movement is difficult, long, and tinged with the bitterness that we will not reach it, nor the people who come after us, nor the people after them, that we enlist a chain of failed pilgrims who will never arrive at their sacred place, but that we will be moving toward it all the same, always getting closer.
With no more big boyfriend to shield me I broke a lot of lawn ornaments met a guy who said he woke up having sex sometimes paused after every sentence offering me space to agree in the movie Frankenhooker a man rebuilds his fiancee from prostitutes' body parts creates a horny monster covered in scars she talks dirty and kills people but I rolled a bowling ball into a fire pit excuse me if I break my own heart.
The way back from Aunt Linda's. I am sitting there in my swimsuit. That morning, the landscape rills around us in green and heather. Sheep stand on bridges and in the shadows of wide-leaf trees and the horizon is yellow like old glass. My brother's face is burned bright red around the outline of his goggles.
There are various games. If a livestock trailer passes us, my brother tugs hard on my earlobe. If we see a truck with naked lady mud flaps, I tap the red and peeling skin of his scalp. Later, we bake quarters in the hot pool of sunshine gathered on the seat between us and test how long we can hold them to our inner thighs. We count everything: thirty-eight sheep, sixteen white cars, five grasshoppers dead on our windshield.
Nearing lunchtime, the heat draws the chlorine smell from our beach towels and we see signs for Muddy Roads Ahead. Dad is gripping the top of the steering wheel and grimly humming a bouncy monotone. My brother and I stare ahead: at the highway's sloping ditches, grasshopper bodies, the wood-paneled station wagon spinning past us, at Dad's hands and neck. I poke at my thigh where a quarter has left a raised white circle.
We approach the construction zone. Men are standing around broad holes in the ditch. The road is cracked and coated with mud and plywood. Dad jerks the steering wheel around the craters and his groans shake through his seat. There are seven workers in the ditch. We pass two red cars, one black, and one silver. Twelve more grasshoppers on our windshield.
Dad swerves to avoid a truck with a swaying livestock trailer and our front tire grooves in one of the jagged fault lines. A pop and we are zagging through the mud, rocked by each rotation of the tire. My brother digs his fingernails in my earlobe and I scream—Dad hammers the brakes and we heave from the highway through the sludge and plastic piping in the ditch to a pasture of brown grass.
The day is whistling. Dad turns and buries my brother's face in his palm. Dad's forehead is dark and pulsing and my back is wet and my stomach folds itself. I open my door. Dad searches the trunk for the jack and the spare tire, throwing our clothes out in a pile in the dust.
We get out of the car and sit near a fence. My brother won't open his eyes. I try to whisper to him but the field is buzzing louder now and grasshoppers land in our hair. They cover our feet and our kneecaps. I stand and look where Dad is swatting and cursing. My brother lies down eyes closed, and grasshoppers gather in the lip of his shirt collar.
Dad looks at us. Green bodies coat the windshield and bore in the bare wheel socket where Dad was kneeling. He calls to us. I grab my brother by the elbow and we go to the car. "Sit there," Dad says, pointing behind the car where our clothes are. We sit and he stares at us as he finishes putting on the tire. I try to smile but it's hard to look at him. I'm still counting. Five blue cars since we crashed. Eight sheep pass over the hill. Fifty-eight fence posts.
When he's finished, Dad blasts the ground with his fist. He collapses near us, gathering us to him and we crush grasshoppers between our bodies. He leaves our clothes in the dirt but we will still bring the bugs with us—their bodies will lie in the floor mats and seat backs long after we get home, after we scour the car, after we vacuum. I will find twenty-three grasshoppers clicking in my bike helmet. With a kitchen fork, I will stuff each of them through the slit in my piggy bank.
I TOOK THE bait. I want to know where I left it. The aerogram, dispatch, kickback for being born. I remember how it look, not what it says. The Euphrates must dry up before this happens. They say. High-level sources. It's not of this lifetime. Instead, we get left with exorcisms & a block of salt. The throat swells in this climate. It won't be long now. You hear the empty rooms when they die, the four walls slammed closer together. The space between the sheets. Stars come both at night & day as though the titles for them & the sky were never separate. You want what they say where they go. Tracks & buildings were the river stops short. Such things are unknown to the unknowing. Such things are in the river, that paper floating by. These are the very last pages of your murder mystery. Who knows the sky from there.
Were you surprised when it finally happened or was it just, like, okay, fine, whatever?
General revelry.
Is it legal, this feeling?
No, that family isn't even mine, I don't know why I carry their photographs around.
What about your mistresses?
Like improvisational musicians, we have nothing to hide. The cognitive process—the gears—are on the outside.
In your opinion, how many American dreams go unrealized over the course of a month? A year? A lifetime?
Chain letters, Petitions, Amendments, Commandments, Accidents, Wild Applause
Remember a childhood game called Jumping in the Leaves for Fun?
Yes, red all red like fall. Even the simple heads of sparrows.
Where is your mind?
On the airport shuttle, traveling from Terminal A to Terminal C, on the airport shuttle, traveling from Terminal A to Terminal C, on the airport shuttle, traveling from Terminal A to Terminal C. Every other secret is just a tributary.
When you met your Maker was it a love connection?
It's like watching him work in real time. He's making decisions with us in the room.
What kind of room?
Handsome.
Could you elaborate on your meaning of 'handsome'?
He was on the airport shuttle, traveling from Terminal A to Terminal C, when he realized everyone there was part of him. He was on the airport shuttle, traveling from Terminal A to Terminal C, when he realized he'd be there forever.
He is downstream, lambent in this dusk. He turns and I can see the umber film along his feet from smashing the eggs. He can wear the dead better than anybody. Once on the porch he stomped a carpenter bee into the plank with his bare heel.
He tells her the birds are dying. "All of them," he says. He says they're dying out. He wants her crying so he can console her. Now she is crying, but he can't console her. Later he finds her bleeding through a dishtowel. She has slit her wrist crossways with a kitchen knife.
He comes to the hospital at specified hours to watch her crying or watch her not crying. With cold coffee in paper cups and with magazines: fashion, culture, special interest. She finds the advertisements calming. She points to one. "In these shoes," she says, "I could go anywhere." She is wearing socks with rubber-tread bottoms and a smock and another smock just like the first one over the first one but backwards.
"You could go anywhere without shoes," he says.
He can't say why she cries at that, but the birds are doing fine.
The birds are doing better than anyone.
LOG IN RIGHT NOW OR I WILL FIRE YOU.
I sit down in the chair in front of the computer. It is damp. It has a cushioned fabric seat. It is not the seat of a businessman. I press the power button for the computer. I hear a series of whirring noises and some electrical movements. I am finding it hard to be my normal self in this space.
I feel something happen. Something strange is happening. I cannot move my arms. I look at my arms. They are held in place by rusted and pitted metal hoops. There is no way that I can move my hands or arms at all.
I can not remember what is happening to me.
You are stuffing doves into burlap bags. Three doves sport bicycle tattoos. Five doves wear bowler hats. Seven doves trill through red clown’s lips instead of appropriately pequeno beaks. One dove never stops winking at you. Once, you paused to scratch with a missing finger. What algebraic relationship moved you to bestow on mundane pigeons the halos of peace and other faux debris from trawling old memories of a desire-ridden imagination that would come to plummet into ruin? The question had to do with a burlap bag’s capacity for birds—a question your struggle with Fate compelled you to create to mask another question: What is the world’s capacity for your most tiny of footsteps? You, who even has memorized, “I promise to be good”? And how many hours was required for you to concede the irrelevance of any question you might author? Is that measure more or less than one day?
Discovery:
We walk down the passage and open the door.Opening the door,we walk into the room. Inside the room, we find the bodies. One after another after another.The bodies hang from the walls on hooks, meat-slabs, butchered. Dressed in what was once called white. Six eyes,all blue.All cold dead.Once Papa took me with him to the market.A boar hung from a hook,headless.Blood fell from its jagged neck into the traw.Drip.Drip.Drip.The stone floor beneath them brown, rust, the leftovers of red. I vomit green on those rust stains at their feet.

Fear:
My vomit is thin, watery. It spreads out from itself in a circle. Above the center of the circle, dangling, slippered toes. One is tall, a long nose and close-set eyes. Purple bruises ring her throat like jewels. Another’s plump. Opened stomach leaking out between the pearl buttons of her dress, pressing skeins of guts against the straining silk. I do not look at her face.The third hangs farthest from the door. Body suspended from a hook in the back. Head hanging beside it by the hair. Her hair is blonde, long and smooth as silk. I close my eyes. I mop up my vomit with my skirt. My skirt stains brown, then red. I back out of the room. I close the door. Keys in my wet hand, I run fast and then faster, down the stairs and back along the hall.

I looked into her eyes and she was not afraid.A wonder, this. Not like the others who have come before her. Sweet pale girls in white, eyes turned down toward their shaking hands.She looked back at me,her cheeks were flushed,and she raised her little hands,and unstrung the laces of her dress.
Ms. Braverman is interested in the concept of Writing as a Criminal Act. As writers, we employ the methods of professional criminals. We break and enter, we rob, we assume aliases and false identities, engage in fraud, lie, omit, impersonate, autopsy the living, exhume the dead for interrogation and deny everything. Recognizing the full extent of one’s writing tools should be liberating. We will use them with the ruthless conviction of people willing to be incarcerated for their acts.
Pieces of machinery
Visualized me without a dress
On
Inside a mansion
I visualize how my organs work
And in my stomach sits a little
Jar Jar Binks
And in my colon sits Captain Howdy
Inhabiting my little-girl brain
By running amok in the body
And making the blood the servant boy
Conceptual Writing is allegorical writing.
Conceptual Writing is the poetics of the moment.
Conceptual Writing is more interested in a thinkership than a readership.
Conceptual Writing is prominent among emerging writers in the U.S.
Conceptual Writing is framed through the discourse and economy of poetry.
Conceptual Writing is made of language but not of what we use language to produce.
Conceptual Writing is only one sign of the recent interest in the tensions between materiality and concept.
Conceptual Writing is an art of appropriation.
Conceptual Writing is failure.
Conceptual Writing is writerly.
Conceptual Writing is dry.
Conceptual Writing is good only when the idea is good.
Conceptual Writing is achieved by relating concept to concept instead of concept to people.
Conceptual Writing is populist, political, etc.
Conceptual Writing is a movement of the 21st century and the future, not the late 1980s.
Conceptual Writing is the writing of the new new formalism, and far from being a relic of the period.
Conceptual Writing is a crisis in interiority. A crisis in interiority is a crisis in perspective.
Conceptual Writing is not utilitarian.
Conceptual Writing is automatic. It operates most efficiently.
Conceptual Writing is infinitely flexible. It is obvious yet discreet.
Conceptual Writing is as much a form of literature as it is.
Conceptual Writing is the same as it is.
Conceptual Writing is as difficult to define as electronic writing since much of it is also considered part of the conventional art.
Conceptual Writing is actually even more comprehensive.
Conceptual Writing is mean't (emphasis on mean) for screenplays. So here is the same scene problem, oh I mean the problem seen time and time again.
Conceptual Writing is best left to screenplays.
Conceptual Writing is to some extend used in PAS (Partitioned Annotations of Software).
Conceptual Writing is important to success in Stage 6 studies.
Conceptual Writing is made to engage the mind of the reader rather than her ear device.
Conceptual Writing is what hipsters do.
Conceptual Writing is the comments section.
Conceptual Writing is necessarily exploratory.
Conceptual Writing is not necessarily logical.
Conceptual Writing is feminist.
Conceptual Writing is likely to find a more sympathetic audience.
Conceptual Writing is secondary to speech.
Conceptual Writing is helpful.
Conceptual Writing is a bit over the top in places.
Conceptual Writing is not as easy as it looks.
Conceptual Writing is sometimes called speculative. Here the metaphor of the mirror (speculum) recurs.
Conceptual Writing is elegant, and because the book is written to teach, and for use in practice in the social agency.
Conceptual Writing is writing that is extracted from other writing, cut out of its point of origin. This may be the point in language.
Conceptual Writing is the government’s.
Conceptual Writing is Andy Warhol. No matter.
Conceptual Writing is to conventional poetry and other forms of creative writing what gruel (we’ve all heard of it but hopefully never tasted it) is.
Conceptual Writing is Apollo B. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf, Arf, Arf, Arf!
Conceptual Writing is usually more like talking.
Conceptual Writing is only one sign.
Conceptual Writing is, could we define what it is not.
Conceptual Writing is that it is elitist and out of touch ... 3 hours ago.
Conceptual Writing is writing.
Conceptual Writing is still imperfect.
Conceptual Writing is rocking my world right now.
“I have nothing to do with birds.
When the wind blows I blow. I smoke in the garden with my dirty fingers. Her well-groomed hairstyle, cosmetics and nails sneak in the back way and hiss, I come here and search. She is so un-crazy that I become crazy when the wind blows I blow.
Women are always searching for something. That is why I am not a woman. I turn the soil up and down, up and down until nothing happens. I live in Bodega Bay until nothing happens. Then it happens.”
It’s this thing about being a girl. It’s this thing about being a bird. To sexlessly rush straight up in the sky and disappear into the shriek. To turn around but not to return.
“One time he saw her on TV. She was in an ad and was pushed by the future perpetrator. First she was scared but then she saw that the perpetrator was still an innocent boy-child she got happy and stopped being guarded. She was perfect.”
She did not look like a bird.
“Everything begins in San Francisco. Everything begins there and ends there.
1: Begin by looking at the sky. You can see birds there. The birds are from San Francisco. To San Francisco you can move, escape or dream. The birds migrate from San Francisco, around The Bay Area along the coasts. It doesn’t matter what they’re called.
2: I come from San Francisco. In San Francisco there is a pet store. On the top floor they sell birds. The birds sit in cages and control themselves. Outside on the street she walks and repeats herself (she’s pushed by a future perpetrator, becomes scared, sees that the perpetrator is still not a perpetrator, relaxes, becomes limp, becomes perfect).
3: I come from San Francisco.”
Lee points at the sky, and with his finger pushes it down against the ground like a torn balloon. It twists around his finger and will later dry there. It’s possible to see where hisn fingers have touched because of the grease from his fingertips. Lee writes a book about all the points and is exact in his quotes and vocabulary. It’s easy to get knocked out by that kind of stuff and this is guaranteed to knock someone out.
“In Bodega Bay there is nothing to search for. Here are children. One does not need to search for them because they are always at school. Sit in the jungle gym outside and think about it. Surely one wants throw oneself on the ground once in a while or be transformed into the cigarette she is just about to light between her lips. The weather is always on the lam here when the wind blows I blow.
I see her through the window. I need something to look at. Here in Bodega Bay there is nothing to look at or search for. I search for her through the window.”
To be a girl or a bird and to be constantly rushing upward, rushing past everything and everyone on the way up. To not have any breasts inside one’s green bird outfit. To be constantly convincing about one’s beak.
“San Francisco is a beautiful place. Beautiful places are full of beautiful people and big feelings.
4. Begin by looking at the sky. San Francisco’s sky is full of birds that migrate along the beautiful coast. San Francisco’s birds have many different names that nobody is really sure about. The names depend on what language you speak. What language the birds speak nobody really knows.
5: In San Francisco you can search for things. A pet store for example. In the window sits a kitten and looks at her when she walks in through the door. She has just repeated an old pattern from an ad that Alfred once watched. But she is not searching for the pet store. She is already in the pet store. How un-original of her.
6: She feels forced to look for something. She comes from San Francisco and she lives in San Francisco. She is searching for somebody else from San Francisco but meets someone from Bodega Bay. Later she will meet me. I live in Bodega Bay but I’m from San Francisco. I have migrated along the beautiful coast.
7: There are so many birds. Begin by looking at the sky. You see birds there. Try to count them. They move for inexplicable reasons and are therefore difficult to count. There are reasons that cover other reasons. It is so unoriginal that I go crazy.”
Lee writes his book. It will be a great success. One can imagine that he already knows that even though he’s also a little sad. It is easy to be sad deep in one’s heart and write Fuck the Pope Fuck the Child Fuck the Future so that somebody will most certainly be knocked out. On the cover of the book Lee will press the children’s pig-pale pecked-apart faces and the book’s title against a white and cool-green background. It’s easy to become nauseous.
“If you have anything to do with children, you don’t have any time off. I have actually nothing to do with the events, I lie outside in the garden and lift the soil up and down, smoke cigarettes with an incredibly erotic gaze.
It’s teeming with children. They demand my time. When they stare up at the sky they are scared of the birds. They are absolutely right to be scared.”
Lee writes about the small fetuses inside girls’ bellies, the small girl-fetuses inside the bird bellies. Girl fetuses and bird fetuses are both pink and blind. Lee advocates abortion, lets them rush high above the pro-life perpetrator’s pro-life billboard in downtown San Francisco. It’s time.
“The birds fly over San Fransisco. It’s a wonderful sight.
8: Open your eyes and look at the wings. See that there are no breasts. The breasts are picked. The fur hangs loosely form the shoulders.
9: In San Francisco there is much to look at. For example shop windows, trolleys and birds. In Bodega Bay there is nothing to look at. In Bodega Bay there is no future and therefore it looks like a utopia. San Francisco’s birds have migrated to Bodega Bay and peck apart the children. The children’s wide faces represent The Child. The concrete child lives hey wild and asks stupid questions for the rest of its life. But The Child has to die so that Bodega Bay can be a future-free utopia to long for. The birds are sitting in the jungle gym out side the school thinking about the shop windows of San Francisco. The school’s window is made of the thinnest glass. She lights a cigarette.
10: I’m from San Francisco.”
Everything begins in San Francisco. Everything begins there and ends there. The birds raise up on their toes, become longer and longer, peak in through the window high up there. Inside sits Lee and interviews a butch in tweed who is from Bodega Bay and knows everything about birds. Sometimes she lies but to Lee she tells the truth. They are dangerous, she says, that’s agreed, they point together toward the sky. The bird-girls will definitely be knocked out.
“The girl-child is pushed by the bird. The bird comes from San Francisco. Nobody understands why it has to be like this.
11: There is a connection that ties it all together. You have to look closely. Begin by looking closely. The connection ties content into double knots. Someone is pushed and the birds’ behavior is exceptionally rude.
12: The girl-child is named Cathy. Play with the idea: the name is foreshadowing and everything will have a happy ending. Cathy turns around, she doesn’t see who’s pushed her. The girl-child suspects that it must have been the grown-up boy-child in the shape of a brother and immediately feels better. It’s like this it has to be.
13: To San Francsico you can move, flee or dream. Play with the idea: the girl-child Cathy will grow up and change the C into a K, and escape from home one beautiful day. Somewhere in The Bay Area Cathy with a K will make her plans. Nobody will know exactly where Cathy is living, someone has heard something about New York or Kyoto. This is a fantasy about the future before it has happened and the future is located in place just before the future-free utopia.
14: San Francisco is a beautiful place. It’s impossible to count all the birds in San Francisco.”
Lee doesn’t play with the thought in his office, but considers it with the highest degree of seriousness. The book will be finished and it will be a great success and many will certainly feel offended or be knocked out. Lee laughs and wraps the balloon sky around his finger, wraps it around his finger like a hurricane. The birds circulate, rise and crash in order to rise again. if one looks very closely one can sense a kind of laughter in the corners of their eyes.
“For the future-free utopia I have prepared a garden where nothing happens, I turn the soil up and down, up and down when the wind blows I blow. The children hang around my hips and demand my time, their faces are full of horror but my gaze is dark and erotic in an inexplicable way. I am from San Francisco, she searches for me, sees me through the window at the same moment I see her. Nothing happens. Then it happens.
15: She comes to me. In her green bird outfit. None of us look like birds. It’s treacherous.”
There wasn’t much in the way of hazards for miles until we picked up a clean-shaven man by a dusty cliff. He was squatting with his head in his hands.
“Need a lift?”
“I lost the tour bus behind a chimney rock,” he said.
Dusk was seeping into the sky and I said we’d take him as far as town. He lay across the back seats.
“All by your lonesome?” My wife said.
She flashed the man a smile and then he sat up and blurted out the whole story: how his three hissing kids, full of important solitude, had dropped themselves into the dark crack of the cliff.
“They did it to spite me,” he said. “Their own father!”
“Am I supposed to turn around now?” I asked.
I was still driving on. The father frowned and sadly clicked his camera at passing objects.
“We’ll wait until daylight,” my wife said. “Missing boys always return in daylight.”
But just then another unpleasant surprise: a pack of dogs running past our car with the swishing limbs of children in their jaws.
I didn’t know what to do except keep driving.
There was a growing darkness in the clouds. My wife turned the radio down then back up again. The father didn’t pay anything any mind. He just growled and snapped all the way until all our mouths were struck with thunder.

Sometimes I feel like punching someone in the face until they can’t breathe anymore and that’s the end of it. I feel like smotthering someone and choking the life out of them and not letting them breathe and then when they are good and dead take them out into the bright sunlight and stare at their dead fucking body and smoke three cigarettes and talk to the dead body about how great life is without them being around to ruin things and then I would like to laugh and call it a day. I sometimes feel lioke this is the only way to make myself feel gopd and I wonder if this is a bad thing or if this is just my way of being normal? I can never tell if this is completely crazy or if my way of being normal is just so different from everybody else’s normal that they can’t see what it is that makes me normal and so they call me crazy but really they are the ones who are really and truly crazy. I hate to judge things, I hate to say that some things are good and somethings are bad and I actualy really dislike people who do judge everything and for the record I can think of nothing which is so despicable as someone who all they do is sit around judge things and with such a cynical attitude that everything is a negative and I hate the fucking lot of them and the rest of fucking everybody and that they would come up with such stupid things to say and to pawn them off as their thoughts when really all they do is say negative things it is completely reprehensible and it really fucking pisses me off and I can barely handle myself around these types of people they make me so fucking mad all I see is red and I want to jump out of a window to get away from the negativity and I wish that there was a way to get away from it without dying but it seems completely useless to even try so I squint my eyes as tight I can get them and I buncvh m,y fists up into these tight clenche4d fists and I shout and scream and want to0 kill the fucking sun and bleed the shit out of every fucking animal on the fucking earth and take all that blood nad wash the rest of the qworld with it oncve and for all and to never lert up on the entire grip iof the throat of the world and I weish that I could grasp the entire workld with one big thrust and take iot and shake it loose of all of its negativity and I wisdh there was a way the world couldf ber rid of all the bad and negative shit and ih ate when there are people whhjo think they are so fucking smart and really they are sub opar intelligent and they try to pawn themselves off I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate I hate Ihate Iohate it sop fucking much I can barely hardly see straight I want to take the gun out of the drawert and pouint it and shoot the shit out of it and never look back and so help me I could care less whatever happens and whatever happens that is what will happen and they rest of wverything will be over and I could really care less I ham so sick of the fucking negative I want to take a suitcaqser full of my things and disappear to a place over the border where no one I know is and there I can disappear and not have to0 deal with people who are stupid enough to think that they are smart and talk sshit and think they know everything and I hate the fact that I even have to write anything at all this should be understaood and I think that the fact that I am even writing this in such a fucking frenzy is cause enough for the whole world to take notice and take ab reath for me and then hold that brewath u ntuil the entire world suffocates and that will be the end of everything, I can hardly contain mysklerf right now it is no surprise that I would do something ghastly it is no surprise that I hate the fact that people aare trying to make me feel bad and are trying to hinder me well being, I hate the fact that there are people who are trying to hinder my well being and I wish there was a way to get to the bottom of thingas and let the world be rid of alpl the negativeity and I think there ios no good way to fdo that, it is usules to try and rid the world of bad because the world is fukll of bad and it always will be because it is usless and this life is useless and people who are negative are usless and it pisses me opff royally and I can think of nothing nice to say and I want to say nothing GH I WANT TO TAKE Back off for Atigf and forget the whole entire thing, I want to get back on a plane and fly to Atigf where the fudckign negativbity will disappear opver the fucking ocean and I can let everything seep out off m,ky skin and try to make my life better but it won’t be it will be the same I can’t fix it, it just gets worse and no matter what I tery I take a puill or I take a this that or the other thing and smoke it all turns out to piss me off because of all the fucking negativity and I can’t see straight though it it is so frusterating, I hate the fact that there is negativeity I hate thfact that there is negativity I hate the fact that there is negaativeity I hate the fact that there is negativity I hate the fact that there is I hate the fact I hate the fact I hate Ihate I hate Ihate and that will be the end of it I can say no more it all too much for me to bear I want to get risd of the fucking shiot and let it go, fine it will go and thjat wjuill be akll aaaaaaaqaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh that will make me feel better won’t it, just bang away at the keys until what ????? Until I bleed? Until I die? I won’t die typing I am sure of that anhd there is nothing I can do to prevent my death but I am sure that the fact that I am well is bullshit because obviously I am not well it all a joke, I am sick I am angry and it will not disappear, it will not be a big deal it will not be a big deal it will all be ok in the end some day dome day some day some day I will forget any of this haoppened I will forget all of this I weill forget and that will be the neenenenenennenenenenenend of it all and that will be the end of it the end of it the end of it owf it ititit of of o it and that will be the end of it all and I will be alone and I will be alone and I will be alone and I will not have to deal with any more fucking negativity and I will not have to deal with anymore negativbvity and I will not have to deal rwith any more negataicvity and I w3uill not have to deal with any more negativity and (h ah tae hate harte hateha56tehyatahhet hate the fucki9ng negaticvigtiy n nmegativity negatovioty I been here lonbg wnough to know that I cannot take any morwe pf this I cannot at takle take taketaklet ketakletakteklaterkl tahet hatehate hetahet hateh tahet I ccannoot take any morwe ofg othis thias this tuihbs I cannot take any more of this I am do o o o os sof ucking mad I canno0t take ny more of this this is the thstehthetehbthetrthetthetthetth I am am out of my ducvking head wioth angey asndgry angry anghry aI napa I am so0 fucking angry I canno0t type straight and tyhei sh with will j be the ben end of it theis will be the end of it this will be the end of it iIIIIII I cannot take much much mcuch mcuch mcuchm uch cuchm,cuhcmicym juc 7hmjcuycmmkcughcnmmcygcjkighyc more andf this i9sd what I have to say about it this is what I havr to day this is all I can sdsasay at thios pouint I am deeing bl8ue and this is not red any more I am seeing red n n no red no bluer no green and no now it is a differwent color a differenbt co0olor or oco.rolror orlrorlcorlrocl I cannot see zxstraouigh I cannot see astraighht I cannot see straight I weant out Out out out out outou ioutou outo uto touto uotu outio tutouOUI cannot see straight this the end end nend nenend nend nend nthe te the the the end and this is the end and this isd the end and this is the end is the end and this is the end an d this the end and there is nothing more for me to say at this point there is nothing left for me to say this is all I have to say and I am complete ly insane and I am angry and insane and I want a reaon to get iout and a way top get out and IIIIIIII cannot get the reason I cannot find a way, I hate hate hatehat hetaheta hat het h tahat h hate hate the fact that there is so muchy fucking fucking fucking negatiovtyiy negativity and there is no reaon for the way in which a…….it isw fucking stupid and stup-id and I am completely mad and frusterated and I cannot take nay more of this this is isisisisisisisisisisisisisxiaswasdfjulo
Were shadows over his head. The boy did not raise his chin nor cant his eyes or search with the eyes overhead. Her foot was in his hands. One leg fell to one side and he shouldn’t have. He had heard of this before. The boy had heard before and he had touched a girl before, and this one’s neck hung to the side and he could not see the face from her hair. A khaki patch ran between her thighs. And there were lines between her toes. There were cunts in the gaps between her toes, he saw. He spread a toe from a toe and pushed his finger in there. He branched a toe from a toe and slipped his finger in. It was moist in there where the powdery skin had collected. Her neck hugged to the side and he slipped his finger from there. He smelled his finger and slid his finger back in there. He put a finger between two of his toes. It did not count, he said. He left it between his toes and put another between hers, and he felt them together and he felt. She exhaled a slow caught breath and he breathed this breath along with her. There was a catch in her breath when she exhaled. He had already touched a girl before. He had imagined boys’ toes as being drier than girls’. He had thought boys’ toes would be dry in the hot days of summer. He remembered friends he had had. He wanted this one to like how he liked when he touched her. No. That was not it. He wanted her to like that she liked when he touched her. This was it. He wanted her to feel how he softly he touched in her sleep. See how softly she sleeped? See how softly, he whispered. See how soft, he whimpered. Even to sleep; he felt a feeling like he felt in his pants as a boy. He remembered feeling it when he stood and when he sat and when he kneeled. He remembered when to kneel and how to sit and when he stood. He remembered a statue up front he prayed to when he kneeled. He remembered its cracked and putty skin. He wanted to know what it was like for a girl like her. He wanted to touch and press and put his thumb inside. But there was no place for him to put his thumb into. There was only skin and it was flesh and there were bones. He thought how to sit and when to stand and when to kneel. He stared at the khaki crotch and did not want to even put his thumb up there. He did want to want to touch this girl up here. What kind of boy was he who did not want to fully touch up there? Who only wanted to what? He was a sweet boy and that was it, he thought? Everyone liked him? He remembered how he had rubbed Mother’s feet when he was young. He thought how he had sat and how he stood and when he kneeled. There were shadows that moved when he pressed his thumb. He watched her closely and her neck stayed to the side. Her neck tightened and then it hugged and then stayed to the side. He did not know what it was like for a girl like this. He breathed when she breathed and he liked it here. Maybe she liked this about him, too, he thought. How softly, how softly. Even in sleep, he thought. Even to sleep. He had prayed, that was all. He had prayed. And he stood.

I go to a shop where people sell machines that keep you up. People flow in and out of the infrastructure like haywire birds. It doesn’t matter what you say to the recording device. Nothing can save the face blowing across the face. Someone catches me and shoves enough wire through my dream. Someone getting out of bed to the sound of someone showering. Someone eating pieces in the dark. It scares me through another night with no ideas. I need artificial clouds to give. If we are ever in a car together, I hope light pours through the windshield. I plan to be another language in the body of a deer.

I hover in front of a chain link fence for hours reading signs. My day is a long protracted silence. I pour myself into a phone call to avoid a little rain. Wind comes through a crack in the glass. They put lights in the basilica months ago, I didn’t notice. I program a future version of myself to remember a face slick with seawater, ringed with wet hair. The message is sent back with nothing inside. I can’t believe my life was like this three years ago. I would have sex and just lie there, thinking about things I had to do. I woke up in a grocery store. I was buying broccoli.

Thanks for coming to 12 Galaxies.
I’m not calling the Vampire anymore.
I can’t keep thinking of August.
You don’t have to drink about the boat.
You don’t have to take off your pants.
Sorry about the boots on your bed.
I just want a job with an income.
I go down on the breeze.
The earlobe is wet.
Silence can occupy space with the stealth of fine white sand in subtle movement, an unoccupied chair in an empty room, an abandoned car, sifted flour falling on a chopping board, the cooling of boiled water.
The first few months behind bars were the worst of my life. Every night I'd stare into the darkness, waiting for the nightmares, waiting to hear those horrible screams all over again. Even here behind these thick penitentiary walls, there was no hiding from what I'd done to that poor family.
Then, one night, it happened: I lay alone in my cell, my only companion the visions of wickedness that filled my head. Suddenly, there was a light, and somehow the light spoke to me. It was the voice of Jesus Christ. He told me he had died for the sins of mankind and all could find peace through his salvation. Was I ready to repent?
Uh, let me think about that for a sec. Yup!
It was a stroke of unbelievable luck. Here I thought I'd spend the rest of my life agonizing over that night I broke into a random house and methodically tortured all five of its residents, but Jesus was like, "Nah, you're good." He took all those years I expected to wallow in suffocating guilt for having forced a mother to choose the order in which I strangled her children and wiped them away in a jiff.
Which is ironic because the family I murdered in cold blood was praying to Jesus like crazy the whole time.
If it weren't for the Savior, I'd still be living with a horribly tormented conscience like some chump. I used to think that maybe, just maybe, I could ease some of the unrelenting pain after a lifetime of good works and contrition. But once God's grace washed over me—and that took, what, maybe 15 minutes at most?—I knew I was in the clear.
Bing, bang, boom. Salvation.
mean, it's too bad I'll never get back those days I squandered on unbearable guilt, but Jesus bailed me out big time, so I'm not going to complain. No sense in living in the past. The man who took five innocent lives in brutal fashion and made himself a glass of chocolate milk afterward might as well be a totally different person. I walk in the Lord now.
And man, is it great! All those remorse pounds I lost came right back with my renewed appetite, and I'm sleeping better than ever. Sure, every once in a while, my dreams are interrupted by the image of that 6-year-old with a broken neck pointing at me, but that's why I keep ol' 1 John 1:9 taped to my ceiling: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Pretty straightforward, right? And it's not like that kid isn't in heaven right now, bathing in His loving light and everything.
See, God's looking out for both of us.
I now know the power of forgiveness, because it was hand-delivered to me by the highest authority in the universe. It'd be nice if the friends and relatives of the Robinson family forgave me too, but you know what? That's between them and God. All I can do is forgive them for having judged me. If they harden their hearts and turn away from His love—well, I can only pity them, really.
It's a shame not everyone can move on from that horrible night, with its choked sobs, desperate pleas for mercy, and senseless bloody killings. But thankfully, I have.
Jesus has led me to a new path. I don't know what lies ahead, exactly, but now that I'm not so sad all the dang time, I've thought about maybe trying to learn a foreign language. I'm leaning toward Japanese, even though I hear it's pretty hard. The grammar's supposed to be tricky, and there are all those weird characters you have to learn, too.
Of course, the laws of man will keep me physically behind bars for the rest of my life. But my soul has been set free by the Lord and by the sacrifice of His only son. Despite all my earthly sins, He has redeemed me. He always does.
Had I known that sooner, I would've killed way more people
I’ve seen boats as big as this whale. I’ve seen gryphons the same size, with teeth growing in even as they were taking their last breath.
You have not. And not a live one.
I’ve been to sea, I’ve seen all you’re supposed to, being at sea. I am sixteen, after all.
If you’d stayed at home, you would’ve seen to Ma. I’d be a pirate twice, with two voyages under me, if I didn’t have that.
Quit your carping. Go stand on its middle. Maybe it will release its wind if you jump on it.
For sure it will stink to heaven if I jump on it.
Let’s poke out its eye.
It’s a wonder you’re not tired of poking whales, a-roving on the ocean like you do, with all the new sail.
Here’s the stick–let’s do the eye.
Cap’n Peters says there’s luck in a whale’s eye. And money. Some men use saws on such as the eye, to examine the socket and take away the skull too.
You told this Cap’n Peters about this whale?
Cap’n Peters can see it himself. He’s anchored out beyond the neck, nearly done scouring the fresh-wrecked Abingdon. He’ll come.
Our greasy luck! Then the sooner it dies the better, and not for anyone else but us to collect it.
It’s alive all right. Look at the eye.
Help me with the stick. A donkey could haul it out, where could we get a donkey?
If we had a donkey I wouldn’t be walking the beach looking for rope to catch the mussels on, would I? If we had a donkey, you wouldn’t be shipping out every time the wind blew and leaving me here with Ma, myself only in short pants still and no cutlass.
We need a donkey. The smell alone will bring Peters.
Do you believe in whales? I mean, that they talk?
Two fiddles can talk. One calls, the other says Yes and then some.
Whales dance when there’s boats coming with harpoon.
The way pirates do on the gallows.
Not all of them.
They’re crying whales, not singing. Poke here.
They swallow the pennywhistle and dance on the tips of their tails on top of the water. And sing.
Whales cry about their future like all creatures worth killing. There’s a tear now, with Peters coming. Look–I can make it dance without singing.
Let it be, it’s starting to bleed.
I’ll let it be with a cut of the knife. If only I had a good one, if only Ma hadn’t sold that bit of a blade while I was gone.
She’s sold all her brooches, down to the tin-and-garnets.
She sold the true baubles after you were born—or gave them up, cleaned out by whoever she had after you had a father, cleaned out clean as a pike in a trough.
They use beetles to clean the skulls when they’re empty. Cap’n Peters says so.
Peters, Cap’n Peters–would he be the one seeing Ma now?
He’s seen all of her, if that’s your actual meaning. How huge those skull-cleaning beetles must be, so big they can’t walk after all that eating, beetles that could eat all of every one of the colonies.
Slippery here, whoa.
Cap’n Peters’ has got his glass on us now. There, over the wave.
No.
Tease me like you don’t know he’s watching. Play foot-in-the-water. He’ll think we are but boys and won’t beat us then when he sees us.
We are but boys. If I only had a knife—
If you grouse and slaughter the whale before him and he balks and whines, Ma will tie herself to the rafters and I will have to cut her down. It’s a poor revenge for her living from one man to the next, though she swears Cap’n Peters is her utter last.
I told you to get her set right, to take Ma to someone while I was off at sea, a woman with a cure.
She wouldn’t go, she said she’d have no business with someone like that, she didn’t need no one other than Father. She talks to Father from the rafters where you can see the sea out the little window, she talks to you out that window too.
She doesn’t know who Father is.
This be true, but still she talks.
This fish is leaking like a ship come ashore.
Whale, it’s a whale, not a fish. And if you would quit your poking at the eye, it wouldn’t leak so much. Poking it like that makes the sound it makes worse.
You talk like a sea captain with your Don’t this and Fish that, a bloody captain, the kind I don’t take to.
It’s the life of the sea, you said. Yo, ho, ho, you said. You toe the line, you said.
I will give you another punch to match the first.
It breathes–hear it? Cap’n Peters says they are cousin to us.
I can’t hear anything while you blather on about Cap’n Peters.
I say we leave it alone because Cap’n Peters will pay us to chop it up. They’re bound to want the steaks and oil even if it be old, and some of the bone to hang hats on,
and bone for those who truss up the women.
That’s real work, all that chopping.
Aye.
The bone is all I want–I can carve “The Apostle on the Desert” into the bone.
I can carve that–one cut meeting another.
You are a stupid boy. Look–it thinks it is a creature of the land now, it wriggles so, it wants to walk about on its tail.
With the next big wave, let’s push it in with our backs.
Let’s kill it.
Die, die.
What’re you whispering?
Nothing. Die, die, or they’ll get you, you whale of us all, you fool whale.
You are whispering.
I’ll whisper if I want to.
The whale’s dead anyway. Why else is it up on the beach?
Not breathing like this it isn’t dead. Not yet.
Look, Peters is bringing hooks and axes. And a cutlass! There’s a knife.
It’s so soapy-feeling on the outside.
Pitchforks and pries. Let’s poke it through to the brain before they get here, let’s poke it to make it dead before they poke it, so we can claim it and get the bone. I am grown, after all.
Die, die.
Why do you cry like a girl?
I’m not a girl.
Whale-lover, then. Crybaby.
Listen to it breathe.
I can’t hear anything but Cap’n Peters and his men beaching loud like six blacks banging dishpans.
It’s breathing big.
There–I’ve got the stick through, no thanks to you.
It still breathes.
If I hang on it here and pull down, the whole side will rip and they’ll know it’s ours. Give me a hand–
Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight Spectators cheered as entire Cambodian Midget Fighting League squared off against African Lion
Tickets had been sold-out three weeks before the much anticipated fight, which took place in the city of Kâmpóng Chhnãng.
The fight was slated when an angry fan contested Yang Sihamoni, President of the CMFL, claiming that one lion could defeat his entire league of 42 fighters.
Sihamoni takes great pride in the league he helped create, as was conveyed in his recent advertising campaign for the CMFL that stated his midgets will “… take on anything; man, beast, or machine.”
This campaign is believed to be what sparked the undisclosed fan to challenge the entire league to fight a lion; a challenge that Sihamoni readily accepted.
An African Lion (Panthera Leo) was shipped to centrally located Kâmpóng Chhnãng especially for the event, which took place last Saturday, April 30, 2005 in the city’s coliseum.
The Cambodian Government allowed the fight to take place, under the condition that they receive a 50% commission on each ticket sold, and that no cameras would be allowed in the arena.
The fight was called in only 12 minutes, after which 28 fighters were declared dead, while the other 14 suffered severe injuries including broken bones and lost limbs, rendering them unable to fight back.
Sihamoni was quoted before the fight stating that he felt since his fighters out-numbered the lion 42 to 1, that they “… could out-wit and out-muscle [it].”
Unfortunately, he was wrong.
My new novel, The Flame Alphabet, has a single narrator, a man telling a story about a world in which language has become toxic, an epidemic that has led to the loss of his family, and pretty much everything else. In this book it has made sense to have much more functional language, like “I went in the room and fell down the hole.” I’m not interested here in trying to reinvent the sentence every time I write it, and the narrative calls for modest, transparent language sometimes, locutions that hide in plain sight. I love the simplest language, and I love complex, syntax-bending sentences, but I don’t really care for either for their own sake. Each book is different, and I lose interest pretty quickly in things I’ve done before.
Before you left, you tended to the wound festering on my breast as though you were a child with light exploding from his skull. After, your mother’s cats pissed all over your clothes and ran screaming across the floor. There was nothing I could do.
I searched for something hurtful among your childhood belongings so when you came back, you would find me in a corner, eating dust and vaginal yeast. I wanted you to run to me, cover my wet face with your hands, and cry oh honey, honey, honey.

I could have been your lambwife in an apocalyptic dress,
in our warm nightmare with a fanged Christ on the wall.

This wound won't heal. God, the itching. Hallelujah. Before you left, you said there's new skin growing. The skin is a liar. Something's scratching inside the walls. I think it's that girl. I've been reading up on ways to look seventeen, as she is, again. Cream, contortion. I'm prepared. Nails scratching inside the walls, this wound, your return.
This time: aliens. When they open their mouths:
tangled skin. The aliens are the new Jews
of the Oregon Trail. Their spaceships were smoking
when they crashed into the Kansas River, & now
they stand before us, piñatas that move.
That was the opening credits. Now we whisper
like loose change. We stand with our rifles
slung over our shoulders, our eyes the size of half dollars.
Mel says My heart is riptide.
He looks up to the sky where God is not looking
down at him. He says Who cares if they bleed,
I want to try anyway. (They do bleed—think ripe
pimento. They bleed through their mouths, through
the slits in their sideways eyes.)
There are no more Indians on the trail, just bones
crushed up like seashells. This sequel has a larger
budget, bigger special effects to make the aliens
more menacing, more Indian.
Mel says Pretend these aliens killed Jesus.
He carries two rifles at once. When it snows he shoots
a bison, climbs inside. Watch him sweat from the eyelids.
Cut.
Cue: the small pox welcome wagon, again.
We have Manifest Destiny in our cocks.
We will grow to be gray & weak & we will
feel kind enough to not kill in our old age.
Alternate ending: I marry the bluest woman I can find.
Mother Mary of the third kind. Racist.
God sprung into the folds highlighted by tongues.
Skin wet with bank conspiracy, a priestly glitter.
Lights evade, indulge the earth.
Sun a bloody hamper. Tombs of clover noise.
Powdered romancers gargle sky.
Ginger erased by stilts, slow.
Uniform melt and spine.
I stand insane. A compelling opposite.
Crawl palaces that shadow.
Air latching smaller until you are.
Red hair starred my crying.
Everyone’s facedown mother
prosthetic, sloppy, there.
We are now dying in our young old bodies.
What if I return to the open space, only to find that the body writes itself, pen on finger, bomb in hand? The universe doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes I find that beautiful and sometimes I find it horrible, but either way, it owns me. The texture of light; the holes poked in space; paper being burned. Cells relate and embrace. Cells remember a time when they had each other but were separated by some mannish thought-bolt. The indefinable blur is where everything everythings. We used to be together in our fear instead of hurting one another because of it. The potential that wants. The threshold where revolution bakes bread. Love-junk. Muscle folds. The blood-brain barrier. The blur of my body writes me into existence and you out of it. You had to go and die.
Why does the word “sausage” appear to me? Why “cracked wheat?” Some things:
- The flavor of your kidneys. The time you took me aside at the famous diplomat’s wedding to show me a crack in the wall within which, you thought, lived all types of potential gods.
- Rollerskating with you over other peoples’ lawns and trampling geraniums with our wheels. It was the 1950’s.
- The color of the tie you wore that one time, and how you hated ties.
- I threw my hair over the balcony and you climbed into the window via my braid. It was midnight. I didn’t know whether or not you were a monster, but I didn’t mind monsters.
- The toaster oven exploding with wet oil, at least that’s what I think I remember.
Think with me, shit head. There is no god, or maybe there is. You are dead and heaven is shaped like a small cave near an ocean at the Tropic of Capricorn. The universe is a novel and a poem and a painting. Smoke doesn’t really exist, because you can put your hand through it. I hate the things I love and need. If you watch paper burn, you can understand the nature of nature. Pain persists without elegance but it doesn’t reign, shithead. Life has the potential to be a lullaby. In some significant but foggy way, you will always own me, even though you are dead and no one dares say your name. The seventh dimension makes no sense.
Fuck maps. Where I am headed is not on a map. Where you are is outer. You can’t just go around trying to map everything. Some dimensions simply defy maps and re-create them. As for here, you will never be able to get here—I am gone. My map moves behind me and will never catch up. Its inherent lag causes it to outdate itself immediately. What map do you use in death? Right. Fuck maps.
Eternity’s blood smells like a basement and pours itself out in the shape of a too-long tie. So I don’t store, but I don’t burn, either. I dance by myself and I collapse. That’s all.
The man found he could register downtown to be unborn.
“Does it hurt?” he asked the receptionist.
“No, it's quite painless,” she said. “Fill out this form.”
He sat in the waiting area with a few people. A child, a woman, and an elderly couple. The form was long and complicated and required his blood being drawn. The receptionist told him to go home and wait for the paperwork to process.
“Then, wait for it to begin,” she said.
I bought these sunglasses before we got back on the freeways. I wanted to stay in Indiana and feel religious. I wanted to stay near the small houses and grass. I wanted you to speak to me like the clerk at the gas station who smiled the whole time I argued over which glasses to buy.

Sometimes I think our hearts have disappeared because we’ve spent too much of our lives sending messages through satellites. Imagine the debris in orbit, all lost left arrows and threes.
We were lost, for example, because you had your cell phone in your hand while I was watching Christ drink Starbucks on the walk of fame.
You want to laugh at these moments and when you can’t it’s because you are being tied down by an ethernet cable.
It’s not that God isn’t listening, it’s just that they haven’t invented the right air card for our feelings.
Yeezy and I are in a tye-dyed airplane used for parachuting. The Artic Sea chugs below and Taylor Swift watches us with disinterest. Yeezy is near the open door and Taylor sits on a crate filled with fragrant pomegranates. She is dressed like Marilyn Monroe from Some Like it Hot, but her body isn’t curvy enough and the clothes hang from her limply. She smokes a long cigarette and coughs.
“Yeezy,” I say. “Don’t do this.” But I have no idea what I’m telling him not to do. This must be the future.
“I have to. This is the only way,” he says.
He leaps out of the airplane. There is nothing but blue sea beneath us. He does not wear a parachute.
“Life has become ostensibly boring,” Taylor Swift announces.
I jump out as well. I am fat and reach Yeezy lickety split. He asks me why I jumped and I cannot say. The ocean races towards us.
“This is it,” Yeezy says. “This is it.”
There are brown and light blue eggs in cartons.
There are shovels by the door and old water staining the carpet.
On the screen are images of earthly ballerinas and their skirts.
There are also acrobats and tight ropes.
And Jupiter, you are ringed with moons.
You are helpless.
And then this is you in life, and this is your lawn.
You have just read a book about earth and you wish to be there.
The Jupiter house is covered with violet rust and the flowers are hideous.
There is thin air, moths, and evidence of small trees.
There are fat candles and a snuffbox.
This is winter and you are surviving another reverse snowfall.
The walls hum and there is newness all around.
A cosmic dew forms outside.
Jupiter is oblivious and keeps spinning.
All the moons are kindly spinning along in silent company.
I was dragged through the desert until the desert grew trees and rain. I lay on the ground where I could and held my life’s story in my mouth.
Every morning murders of birds filled the sky and circled around every piece of me and every night the sky was the same color as the birds and I could not tell them from the air.
I decided then and there that they could pick up all my pieces and bring them back together again.
I looked right into the eyes of those birds and I wondered if there was something else in their minds and if their minds were in fact giant empty stomachs full of hunger.
I thought about asking about their intentions.
BIRDS I would say WILL YOU PICK ME RIGHT UP AND PUT ME TOGETHER AGAIN.
BIRDS I would say WHAT SHOULD I USE TO STITCH ME BACK UP.
ARE THERE SOME OTHER MEANS OF CATCHING YOUR ATTENTION.
COULD I HOLD YOU HERE IN MY MOUTH FOR A TIME.
It's so loud in here with this map of Ohio, this suitcase
of dentures. Start to count best friends on your fingers
and it's deja vu all over again. Trust me about your mouth.
The mornings are the worst. What would you give
for a woodgrain sandwich? To orchestrate a showerbath
with the ones you love? People like to sit on the back porch.
To pretend that razorbacks aren't what they sound like.
You have the gift of gerrymandering on your side.
*
The family reunion is angry. They want more babies
to hold, fewer false dilemmas. If there are nine trains
traveling in the same direction it is too much to bear.
They want to see a marketing strategy. They want to see
your motorcycle outfit. You tell them we are in this
thing together. That we need a giant blinking signal.
Together we will write a giant book of miracles
and it will not be illustrated.
*
All day there is a glow around
that means slow down, townie.
A better animal doesn't exist.
When you build an underwater dream palace
people will come and they will be hungry.
Honk if you're still covered in sand.
If there is a meaner lifestyle.
Down here is a subterranean hero
and no one knows its name.

If I am stuck here with this moonface
it is not a best moment.
All night I am collecting water
glasses and flooding your aquarium.
I have snuck a thousand tiny tubes
under your door and still the ocean
is wrecked. I have learning to do:
wipe my spit off the mirror
take my organs in stride
grow a gunmetal heart in the bathtub.
When I go to the kitchen I can't stand it.
I pour my drink down your shirt and say
What is the duct to your memory bank?
How gigantic am I with my hair dripping?
You look at me inflated. I am dressed
impractically. I am ready to be slapped
with this umbrella that won't open
You can’t see them or hear them
but I have silent, invisible question marks
on the end of everything I say.
This is how I can seem so confident
when I’m as insecure as I am
which is really insecure, the more I think about it
yet this statement is insecure
if I am. I’m so tired of having
the same thought.
I also have silent, invisible quotation marks
floating above every word I say
like wings that won’t work.
I also have massive black invisible slashes
striking through every letter I use.
They’re so big, if you could see them
they would completely cover each letter
so you wouldn’t be able to read anything.
I also don’t believe in generosity.
Or rather, I believe it exists
only as blinded self-servingness
so that the most generous persons
are just the best at blinding themselves
to all the subtle ways they serve themselves.
It’s my indictment of art.
Also, there are these little, silent
invisible feathery flourishes
on the ends of all my sentences.
Plus nine hundred ninety-nine thousand
nine hundred ninety-nine tiny
silent chimes.
There alongside the stone gargoyle is the placid arch of the window, with a trefoil at the top, but this does not mean "radioactivity" or "fallout shelter" or "recycling." Stone was the first thing and will probably be the last thing, but it cannot laugh or weep. On the face of a church the trefoil symbolizes the Trinity, the triune godhead. Sometimes I wish it meant the human spirit: the mangy dog gargoyle next to the aspiring, lifting mind.

That was my sister's thinking; she was alive then, of course. My own ideas ran to unconsciousness and its advantages. Oh, to be a stone thought in a stone shade. We were girl scouts, my sister and I. She was a believer. Perhaps she is resting on a cloud. The dog’s eyes are bulbous, his ears stubby, his mouth gaping with laughter at human attitudes. The dog is smug and undesiring. He does not wish for anything. He laughs at our preoccupation with sex, our untidy activities, our obsession with cathedrals dedicated to passion and hope and eternity.
The dog is unashamed and ridiculous, with his tongue lolling out the corner of his mouth. He does not build dog houses nor cathedrals; he does not write poems to his coy mistress; he does not play poker at a baize-covered table.
The artist who carved him perhaps wished to carve a Madonna and Child but was assigned a dog’s head, and elsewhere–behind a pillar–a dog’s rump. The dyslexic agnostic insomniac stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog. That old joke could not have gone through the sculptor's head.
But maybe he heard the gargoyle growl. I blink: the dog just moved. At home I have a cat, demanding, sometimes anxious, wanting food, mice to hunt, and sleep. But I have no dog at present.
"Bow wow," the stone dog says. "Woof. Grr-r, give me that bone, that church, that universe. I want to be a cat."
I mean there’s no other story you can tell somebody who has lost her daughter to cancer, say, to make her feel good. You know, it is consoling to believe that the daughter was just taken up with Jesus, and everyone’s gonna be reunited in a few short years. There’s no replacement for that. There doesn’t need to be a replacement for that. I think we have to be . . . We have to just witness the cost of that. There are many obvious costs of that way of thinking. One is we just don’t teach people how to grieve. You know, religion is the epitome, the antithesis of teaching your children how to grieve. You tell your child that, “Grandma is in heaven”, and there’s nothing to be sad about. That’s religion. It would be better to equip your child for the reality of this life, which is, you know, we . . . death is a fact. And we don’t know what happens after death. And I’m not pretending to know that you get a dial tone after death. I don’t know what happens after the physical brain dies. I don’t know what the relationship between consciousness and the physical world is. I don’t think anyone does know. Now I think there are many reasons to be doubtful of naïve conceptions about the soul, and about this idea that you could just migrate to a better place after death. But I simply don’t know about what . . . I don’t know what I believe about death. And I don’t think it’s necessary to know in order to live as sanely and ethically and happily as possible. I don’t think you get . . . You don’t get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don’t know.

I am swimming out alone with a bag of frozen peas in my hand. I watch the reef beneath me, wonder how many generations separate these fish from those before. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn; my grandfather is there, suddenly, unmasked, grinning, reaching out to where a giant turtle appears as if by magic, slow and graceful as an elephant, until we are all carried apart by the current.
"Kralik! Kralik!" the other kids shouted, dancing circles around the homely half-breed with the hawklike nose while her secret mother Sister Orca watched from the Menstrual Hut, bleeding from her jumbo soul.
It was 1942 and the Whore Army had been abolished over a decade ago—when Lolo, who hadn't been able to keep from bragging, ran straight to the other bangtails laughing about Jimmy Seattle just up and dropping dead.
This news, of course, had reached Madame Skeeza instantly. And since Jimmy's demise meant the economic collapse of the failing island, she'd summoned her forces within minutes of the crime. Then glaring daggers and marching up and down their ranks, she finally came to the smirking little Lolo. And since the hag could tell that the girl was guilty as shit, she forced the strumplet to fess up. And she did, indicting — "That fat jizzbag Sister Orca!"
Who, when confronted by Madame Skeeza, blubbered up her intentions to shitcan the Whore Army by gaining control of Jimmy. Which is why the biggest fucking fuckhole in the world had to pay the fucking price.
Rather than slaughter her, though, or torture her to death like Lolo (who was crucified and left for the ravens), Madame Skeeza ordered Sister Orca to be taken down to the Dirty Dogfish and spread naked upon the bar. A funnel was then inserted into her central salami-hole into which all the sluts spit the jism collected from the most massive handout of free blowjobs ever made available to every fudge-packing bastard on the island.
It started with the thirty-six sailors in the saloon, but then the whores went door to door, sucking cum like it was going out of style. Until all in all, three quarts of international helmet broth went squishing past Sister Orca's feta-flaps.
Since Madame Skeeza had been able to stare into the fuckhole's mind and see that she was ovulating, the idea, of course, was to fill her jizztrap with so much semen that she'd get preggie by someone and have no idea who the lowlife father was. Plus, pumping her full of sausage sauce lowered the odds that Jimmy's splooge would make it to the grail-egg first; since this spur-of-the-moment baby lottery had taken place within fifteen minutes of Jimmy's death.
The suitcase
open on the bed. My grandfather is packing up
his organs. This completed, he takes a taxi to my grandmother’s
house for supper. Exits
the empty car to Taipei alley.
Dissolve. Now the Los Altos lot.
Ok, so I didn't go too far…a few hundred miles south and west…It called itself a city, but that's all als ob…more like a rural hub, an agglomerate of farms that traded in its pastures for insurance towers and dilapidated housing…at least on the east side where I held office…The downtown was deserted, all the businesses folding up like umbrellas, either permanently defunct or making tracks for those uber-malls and box-stores out in the burgeoning suburbs…Nothing left downtown but strip clubs and pawn shops…Undesirable elements that make the bourgeois stew awful …And in the north all the mansions, the university a bit south of that…The streets all broken cookie crumbs, the buses rickety jalopies one would find in Ethiopia with a thousand people clinging to with pigs hanging from the sides…The mayor a bible zealot, a corrupt city council that sponsored neo-Nazi gay bashing “family values” festivals in the park next to City Hall. In my end of town, everyone looking like a Dickensian character, a Tom Waits song…so many abnormalities, deformities, displaced aboriginals, dipsos and schizos, crack junkies and battered women…I worked twice a week at the methadone clinic, and once a month at the recovery house…real down-and-outers…I worked at the emergency emotional disturbance ward, too…On top of my already fat list of patients, most of them needing the same care I was providing at those shelters, wards, houses…Circumstances had beaten them all to a pulp…Middle-aged people looking 85…No longer the joking drink binges of college kids, but real serial alcoholics, a career in crack and everything else…It begins to weigh down on you after a while.
Kylee Reese is a lean sucking and fucking machine with something to prove. James Deen is more than willing to let her speak her mind, if by mind she means "vagina" and by speak she means "get fucked" by him. Such a giver that James, like when he gives her a spanking, eats her hole, fingers her while she blows him, then lets her ride his rigid rod off into the sunset. The phrase "rode hard and hung up wet to dry" springs to mind by the look on her face after he blows his load all over her deep crack.

Junk Jet n°1 wants to capture and transfer junk’s ambiguities indicating non-function, or at least bad-function implied in the nature of technology, and various forms of mis-use for aesthetic purposes. What could be the aesthetic (non-) function of junk within clean computational aesthetics of electronic media?
Therefore, relevant fields are all sorts of re-use, of wrong-use and non-use, and of tinkering (bricoler, basteln) of forms and found objects, of theories and (small) narratives, of fashions and styles, and of course of computers and other electronic devices. Junk Jet n°1 wants to explore do-it-yourself works of computer culture, accidental outcomes, deviant and normal aesthetic forms that result from misused media, subverted customary tools, and jammed common practices.
For this reason it has collected works from theorists, artists, architects, and musicians who treated in various forms counter use of electronic devices, or who produced counter works (and counter counter works) of counter aesthetics, tunneling mainstream (above all architects’, designers’, and artists’ stream) practices. Processes of deformation and variation are more important than linear chains of formulation and fixation. This includes works and concepts on collage (Holger Lund), on chance, cut up, bootleg and sampling (Jan Jelinek, Rank Sinatra, Mowblind), and on hybrid techniques (Nicole Sudhoff), all of them turning electronic devices, and other forms of computation into machines of indeterminacy. Open experiments in which someone or something may fail are of great importance: Through the lens of failure Junk Jet watches authority falter, methodologies crumble, tests getting tested – until they crash. Failure is regarded a means for confronting the seemingly fixed hierarchies implemented in technologies, but above all in procedures.
Junk Jet n°1 claims itself political, not in that it handles political topics, but in that it goes after medial techniques that show alternatives to the tautological and exploitative practices of our mass culture. Junk Jet n°1 wants to cultivate its anti heart by “introducing noise to signal”: by distorting the digital hype and collapsing the technological seduction, by subverting the computer, and exploring the aesthetics of noise and the beauty of collapse and crash – perhaps the crash of the beauty.

Junk Jet n°2 was looking for the Speculative, focussing on works of unpredictable architectures and volatile spaces within real and virtual environments.
The speculative haunts all systems of production, threatens them with the destruction of their order and with collapse. It continues to appear to all orthodoxies as artifice, as a black magic, which is to be unveiled, because it is somehow effective effective in an illusive, but absorbing way, which is characteristic to an occasion for a game and its stakes. It is not a rational process, but something that contradicts this frame, something that is recognized as irrational, as feverish, and that therefore is suspected to be dysfunctional, inhuman, or even monstrous. The speculative is daring, because it is open ended, and it is spectacular, as it is highly medial. It harbours the novel.

Junk Jet n°3 asked for fluxing architectures, boogie, buildings, rolling rocks, flying architectures, provisory pyramids, and temporary eternities; for all kinds of practical concepts and conceptual practices, for stable happenings and unstable thoughts, for lifted cellars and dugin landmarks, for curtains, mobiles, house boats, bubbles, zeppelins, flying saucers ...
... it received fantastic forms of material, immaterial, physical and mental flux. Not only were immovables made movable, but also were put forth moving ideas of aesthetic, social, and political concern. We recognize that it is in microarchitectures, where architecture resides today, that speculations cannot be hilarious enough, and that the post-digital is the era, we already live in.

Therefore, Jetistics reports revealing details and secrets of world’s most important periodical publications dealing with junk data. As evidence, the exhibition tracks and compares changes over time, showing overall trends and local details, analyzing patterns and breaks of junk.
For the storefront of VAMOS Architects, Jetistics builds, in neo-neo-classicist style, a monumental micro-architecture, or an architectural micro-monument.
What you see is what you jet: junk data, statistical landscapes, golden rate graphs, bumps charts, purchase waves, classical façade, trend analysis, random walks, empirical measurements, data paths, dot-dash plots.
What do 18th-century wax "anatomical Venuses" doing a striptease in which they expose their internal organs; cutaway views of the imaginary anatomy of Loony Tunes characters; the X-Ray Specs and Visible Woman toys familiar to boomers; and artist Wim Delvoye's X-rated X-rays of people performing sex acts have in common?
Mark Dery makes these and other provocative connections in his lecture "The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen," a cultural critique of the eroticizing of the scientific gaze. In his hour-long lecture/slideshow, Dery will touch on the pornographic fantasies that swirled around the X-ray from its inception; adolescent dreams, fueled by comic-book ads for X-Ray Specs, of the potential uses for Superman's X-ray vision; current fears of the potential for abusive use of airport scanners that penetrate clothing; and the artist Wim Delvoye's series of pornographic X-rays.
He'll theorize the eros of anatomy revealed, with digressions into the weird cartoon subgenre of imaginary anatomies (of everything from Star Wars At-Ats to Loony Tunes characters) and the premonitions of X-rated X-rays inherent in the baroque medical mannequins on display at the Museum La Specola in Florence, Italy---wax Venuses whose uncanny seductions Dery reads as examples of the abject aesthetic he calls the Pathological Sublime.
Along the way, Dery will explore the idea of X-ray as metaphor for our socially networked Age of Oversharing, when the polarities of public and private are reversing themselves, and the Death of Shame prepares the way for End of Privacy and the Transparent Self, whose innermost thoughts (and bodily functions) must be Tweeted, Facebooked, and blogged.
Genres: humor, zany adventure, social satire, crime/Hollywood/media send-up
Perfect Gift for: Anyone seeking a few hours of escapism, a light read/laugh with delicious doses of satire and sex.
Who should pass: Anyone offended by the Kama Sutra, absurdist humor, spoofs of sacred cows and the occasional firearms accident.
Sex/violence level: a few shootings with a tiny .22, sexy suggestiveness in adult situations (for mature audiences)
After his last one-night stand--a new baby and a crushing mortgage came hand in hand-- the last thing Hollywood has-been Hayward West expected was to fall in love.
But as 19-year old Valentina, fresh from a border crossing, wolfed down four tamales in a row, he was wildly, uncontrollably, passionately in love. She needed $25,000 to save her father, and he needed $250,000 to stave off bankruptcy. There was a way to raise the cash and win the woman he desired, but it required a marriage--a marriage of many things... The first chapter.
Ritual Hymns of The Process Church reProcessed by Sabbath Assembly
Printed on Gold Vinyl!
Restored to One is a modern response to the musical activities of The Process Church of the Final Judgment, who used music to spread their visions of Gnostic reconciliation in a time of cataclysmic change. Sabbath Assembly has re-charged the original hymns of The Process Church and worked them into moving renditions that unite the trinity of rock, psychedelic and gospel into one triumphant re-awakening.
Your mom spies her Thomas Kincade print, suspicious of the bubblegum pink tree – how naive she once was to sit underneath it, to follow the creek past the bend.
Your mom drives to the grocery and stays in the parking lot for seven minutes after she turns off the ignition. She lowers her head and feels a thick slow pulse in the tip of her forehead. A fly buzzes inside the car.
Your mom she was young. She made out with a boy named Stu who drove her to a place overlooking the town – only the town was small, so the lights at night were sparse and dim. Stu told your mom she was pretty.
Your mom would have liked to be beautiful but pretty was enough. Your mom doesn't marry Stu but marries your father. Your father is not part of this story.
Your mom gets out of the car and enters the grocery. The content inside gives her vertigo and she tries to blink it off. A customer service representative asks "can I help you ma'am?" Your mom tries to blink him away. Her eyes feel tugged by her optic nerves.
Your mom is back in her car with pot roast in her lap. She places her forehead on the backs of her hands which are grabbing the steering wheel. She accidentally honks the horn. A young mom holding hands with her son walk past the car and stare. Your mom thinks of her son and how they never hold hands anymore.
Your mom's son comes home and asks if the pot roast is ready. She says it's for the church potluck tomorrow. He says those ladies are sad and your mom knows he's talking about her. The son is upset and goes to his room with a bag of chips. Your mom looks at his back as he climbs the stairs and imagines him climbing forever and disappearing.
Your mom has this reoccuring dream of two pieces of skin flapping together in the sky, like a human bird made with hands and no bones. The bird has no body so it is not a bird, just a limp handshake. The feet of the human making the bird are tiptoeing to make the bird fly higher but he is stuck. He left your mom with her son and every atom in the world. Your mom wakes up.
Your mom opens the lid and smells the pot roast. She adds marjoram, salt, and more broth. She closes the lid and the air inside her collapses to the floor. From her angle, the kitchen ceiling looks like the floor. Your mom's son comes down and says "Jesus mom."
Your mom's eyes are wet red and she asks you to lie down with her. You are angry but you lie down anyway. The linoleum kitchen floor feels like a tight loveless skin. There is no silence until every buzzing fly dies. Forgiveness is a baby which needs to be fed.
Your father is not a good man but you are trying to be. He lives only four blocks away, four little insults. You look over at your mom and say "please don't fall like that again." Your mom smiles and the saline watery sheen over her eyes turns you into a million kaleidoscopic pieces.
Your mom takes your hand and brings it to her heart. You can feel her heartbeat, a soft often thing.
She came for a marriage, but the salesman said that the model she wanted was no longer available. Down a labyrinthine hallway they walked, past rows of closed doors, rusty water fountains, a long expanse of plastic grass. "When I was your age, people wouldn't even look at a marriage." He unlocked a steel door and led her into a light-filled room, silvered with nostalgia, where there was a table with two cell phones and linen napkins. The flora was better than she had expected; the foam insulation, a surprise. Ivy had overgrown the bed.
"If anything should go awry," he said, "we offer thimble gardens, hypnosis, a two-week fragment of inauspicious lives. Of course we want you to enter the relationship with confidence." She had a reservation, but when she tried to voice it, he gathered the plumbing magazines from the bed, removed the frozen pizzas and the scissors. "Listen, take five minutes," he said and helped her lie down. "I'm going to dim the lights."
On the coverlet she lay and stiffened her heart. Was this a marriage? Mariachi music played, then the sound of water trickling on stone. Then snoring and the smell of maple syrup and something animal, musky. As if miles overhead came the long mournful cry of a gull. The sound of a hundred vacuum cleaners. "Yes, I'll take it," she said huskily, impulsively, and tiny drops of rain, or something wet, spattered the room.
We do not have to believe the things we say, though we may well. The things we say are objects, and we place them in front of us in order to consider them.
There may be some repetition in this. We may find ourselves making the same sounds over and over, writing the same words. Perhaps this has value.
I am proposing that we think of words as objects and of language as its own special kind of event.
We need to make mistakes.
Suddenly you realize you’re in the middle of it and it’s heartbreaking. You receive a telephone call from yourself in the future telling you to run. All I want to know is if you’re mad at me. If I could, I’d tattoo your name on my skeleton. I love to look outside. I love to be outside. I love when you touch the back of my head. I love when you hold me in your arms. I hope summer never ends. It’s twilight. I hear children playing. I hear sprinklers, a lawn mower. Airplanes descend over the backyard onto the nearby runway. This is where we live. Hell at its most tranquil. To flee is life. To linger is death. The only thing wrong with this picture is everything. It’s the eve of a hostage situation. Will you do one thing for me tonight? Will you put on your favorite dress and sit with me?

Every time I devise a plan, I realize it’s going to fail the moment I enact it. I think I’m in love with you but I don’t think you’re in love with me. I like walking with you across the wooden footbridge. Do we hold hands? Around us we hear the noise of insects and birds I wish I knew the names of. Is the sun low in the sky? Tell me the angle of our shadows. I feel sad but it’s the sad you feel when you realize the world itself is intrinsically sad and you want to drink tea with it while holding a neighbor’s cat hostage in a small mountain home heated only by a stove. Do I sound crazy? Can you believe I used to hate the wetlands? I thought they were boring. My plan had always been to get as far away from them as possible. It was even my quote in my high school yearbook: “My plan is to get as far away from the wetlands as possible. Stay sweet, don’t ever change.” What will become of us? There’s a gazebo here. Inside, we huddle together until you pee into my cupped hand. It feels warm. I don’t really know what happens after this. Do I already feel loss? It is the end of one life, it is the beginning of another.

Quilting a flower is easy. When beating someone with a musical instrument, never underestimate the piccolo. It’ll surprise you. I used to have imaginary conversations all night long with women I loved. The next morning was depressing. It’s the typical story. What begins as a fun family outing quickly dovetails into bitter resentment and anger. Who takes onions and Grand Marnier to the beach? Sometimes I call the neighbor’s cat C.R. Bottomsly, international super spy, and we take it from there. I think the cat likes it. We happened upon a restaurant that serves the best bowl of goo. They say at the moment of death to carry everyone’s suffering. I’ve seen a man shoot a cat in the head with a revolver. Are we watching a fight scene, an abusive relationship or a home movie? Richard Dawson sort of creeps me out. You need to wrap your medicine in bread. They say after death our experience will be choiceless. I would’ve written this sooner but last month I broke all my fingers and thumbs in a wide-receiving accident.
One mother was not impressed with his urinal routine. Marcel's aim was better than that she knew. Years later, when he changed the meaning of "meaning," she pushed all her potted plants off the sill. There was no point, and that was the point.
One other mother removed her undergarments and posed for her son's painting. "Is this a still life?" she asked her son. "Please don't do this to me," he said. Gustave was ten seconds old when the light slit open his eyes and that wild bush came into view. There are those who say vision itself is pornographic. Those people do not live in France.
Another mother made her soup from scratch and resented many things. "Soup is not a commercial," she thought. "My son is gay." In America everyone is American, probably.
This other mother boiled potatoes in the dark. She had man hands and her sons did not. Vincent and Theo never helped with the potatoes, so she never helped with the rent.
And then there was one mother who had a square face with blue and red boxes, though her nose was an off-center rectangle. She liked to arbitrarily place one thing next to another. Her husband felt she was a control freak, but kept quiet his entire life.
And this one – this one menstruated black and white. This was before color television and black and white was good enough. To call her unabashed was not an exaggeration. Her drippings at the center of town confused both Rorschach and the mayor. "Can you please stay in the barn when you do that?" the mayor asked. She said okay.
The last mother refused to rid of her son's peaches, pears, and placenta. The cleaning lady was less than enthralled and waited for each of them to die.
He says slow down and mouths words like mother and harder. He says sand is a form of torture for children. He claims he is a space invader but to my ears it sounds like I’m a masturbator. We make toe drawings to remember the carved turkey we will never eat.
*
He is bingo tough.
He is wanted by the law.
He is California.
He is the sexiest lizard I’ve seen in my whole life.
He is everything from Dizrythmia onwards.
He is brie.
He is hands down the star of her (or his) own debut.
He is licensed in North & South Carolina.
He is a Muppet.
He is Nordic sex.
He is standing in front of a small orchestra.
He is sketching in a special room with a big table and chairs.
He is certainly not Martina Navratilova.
*
I love wild boars and Bruce Springsteen. I love plausibility and deniability. I should be writing about Meta but I’m tired of death and destruction. I want to move to Sodom with Charo. I am desperate for space.
*
He says: I’m afraid of suspension bridges and needles too. I say fine. He says sorry. I fold his hands.
*
I’m tired of geese and the cherished treasures of the Holy See. I’m tired of elegant metaphors for snow, e.g. tiny geese fluttering in the wind. What’s the possibility of geese fluttering? Of snow in outer space? Of geese used as weapons of mass destruction? I’m tired of random fires and pebbles in my shoes. I’m not bulletproof and neither is he.
*
I won’t tell you how I feel except for this fact: kerosene.
*
Merlot wine reminds me the guy who served me liquor when I was seventeen, who is the same guy who dies at the end of this story, who is also like the cat who dies at the end of Cats, without my permission. It’s funny how the names of the dead go with them. What’s the sign for memory? I almost wrote sing for memory. Warblers love irony. I can't remember his fucking name.
*
Say something, he says. I say chicken.
IVAN THE TERRIBLE TELLS US HOW HE'S BEEN
Small. Smaller than the fanned leaves of the Gingko tree. Palm of the hand small. So small, you wouldn’t believe. Terrible. I mean, you could see me, if you tried—if you wanted to—but it’s not like I’m really there or anything.
The new library downtown was larger than the previous downtown library, filled with shelf after shelf, all unmarked. Even the sections were unmarked. The floors, too. The woman at the information desk told me that the city had cut the funding before the new library could pay to have anything marked. Politics, she told me. It is the duty of each administration to destroy the work of the previous administration. Bad timing, she said. Rotten conditions for a new library, I agreed. Not even the staff knew where most of the books were. There were entire floors out-of-order, with books on the first world war next to Plato’s Timaeus, next to a recording of sound effects used in the film Red Dawn, and the elevator hidden behind boxes of misplaced Newsweeks. I soon found myself lost in Contemporary Poetry, or what at any rate appeared to be Contemporary Poetry—it was impossible to know if, beside Eavan Boland, I might find The Faith of George W. Bush. It was easier to read right there than to try to check anything out. I wasn’t sure, after all, if I’d be able to find my way back to the circulation desk. In the back of one of Mary Ruefle’s books, the one with the poem about James Dean as a farmer, was a picture of a teenage girl, a digital photograph that someone had printed on low-quality paper, and then had traced, steady-handed, with a pencil, so that the effect was of a smoothing-out of whatever imperfections her face might once have had. I couldn’t not take the picture. It was as lost as I was. On the back, also in pencil, two names: X, love Y.
At that time everyone lived in a cave underground and the burrow I found to call home hosted so many fleshy languid wayfarers that every move and thought became erotic, even walking to the fridge, now nestled against a few boulders but otherwise the same cheap white affair it had always been in dens of that ilk. Don’t ask me how it worked or how anyone got oxygen because what did I care? Everyone was so sincere and sincere is sex, so no, no one minded living underground, in our burrow or anywhere else, since violence went away forever and life was a boudoir mall cave: rock, and open-faced people, and things people bought before the underground time. Walk out of the burrow through another rock burrow into another rock burrow and pass women in faded silk bathrobes still carrying designer handbags, men in slippers and suit jackets, children in lollipop-sized rubies and bug-eyed Chanel sunglasses. Everything functional and back to a new norm, just step over rubble now, no architecture, no wallpaper, no plants, no sunlight, everyone mellow, all around cave. A hippie living in my burrow left me a love note in a bag of chocolate-covered graham cookies, but I never have any privacy so I walked to the river running through the cave to read. The note was four pages long and full of sincerity, I was sure, and I couldn’t wait; it would totally turn me on. What do you think but when I got there and pulled the note from my pocket, strangers still slung their arms around me and tried to look over my shoulder, everyone sharing everything now, so I waded into the water but you wouldn’t believe the current and with the water rushing and masses of people bobbing along for the ride, urgency lost its hold and the next thing I knew I was at least twenty miles downstream in who knew what burrow. Talk about no maps. Everyone let those go awhile back. But I climbed out of the current and tucked myself in a corner to read the blue-ink handwriting, now smeared. Then I thought of when I met the hippie and returned his warm smile, and I felt something like light, but then I remembered once when he went to the shower and he took off his hat, how his hair underneath fell down to his butt, which meant he’d been growing it out since before the underground time. That was a turnoff, I had to admit, like his hair could get in the way, like I wouldn’t be able to feel his skin. I sat in the corner by the river while contented people rushed contentedly past on the current and I felt contentedness creeping in because the river was warm and fast and the freest of all the free underground, but I clutched the note and couldn’t let go. Still, I’d already forgotten about the cookies and soon I would forget about the note or it wouldn’t matter anymore and I knew, even as I unfolded the note, because it was impossible now not to fail, that the light was fading away but what I wanted was a reason to find a way back through the burrows to the hippie. What I wanted was desire.
When I walk down the street, when I abandon the relative comfort of my city apartment, when I step outside, not knowing where it is that I am going, and when I at last decide to head to the corner 7-Eleven, I see many others, and fiercely do I hate all those others whom I see. I turn away from their hopeful gazes, their kind and searching hellos. I refuse to return their curious greetings. Why should I greet them? Why should I offer them my hello? I do not know them, and do not think that they know me. They do not share my thoughts, my line of thinking. They occupy themselves with different thoughts than I do, feel different emotions. They do not see the world through my eyes, through what I know. Their teeth don’t ache the way that my teeth constantly ache. They do not know the weight, the discomfort of my belly on my belt, the pains in my fingers. They do not feel my fear due to lack of health insurance, or my annoyance at the presence of grease-stained dishes cluttering my sink. They do not know the sore spot on my thumb, or the tear in the seat of my favorite jeans, my addictions to nicotine and caffeine, my dearth of income. They do not suffer as I do each waking hour due to my sweaty crotch, and my sweaty ass. They don’t know the nervous tic that lives behind my left eye, departing it only to take up residency in my right; they don’t know my post-nasal drip, the tickle that haunts the back of my throat, my insomnia, my heartburn, my hair’s split ends, my generally damp and unpleasant odor. The smell of something secret and hidden. The taste like decay in the back of my throat, like rotting sausage, or day-old dog excrement, that flares up every five weeks, my allergic reaction to all brands of soy milk, and which can only be relieved by my abstaining for one week from drinking soy milk. They don’t know my desire to slip a sharpened pencil tip deep into my eyes, into both of my eyes, rooting around to evict their twitches. They don’t know my dumb want to step in front of a passing bus or subway train. They don’t suffer from my incessant need to yawn, the cramps in the sides and in the bottoms of my feet, in the soles of my feet, or the muscular stiffness in my pelvis that can’t be undone, that no stretch I attempt ever loosens. They don’t share in my lightheadedness, my dizziness brought on by not having eaten any breakfast, or not having eaten any lunch, or not having eaten any dinner, or between-meal snacks. They don’t know the freezing numbness in my hands and in my toes that comes after eating ice cream, or the giddiness that overtakes me at the thought of eating yet another pint of ice cream, of stepping outside and walking the seven blocks to the convenience store right now and purchasing yet another pint. They don’t know about my tendency to overfill the bathtub, to turn the water on and then turn to another task, forgetting to turn off the tap until water’s pooling in the hallway. They don’t know my lack of patience, my inability to wait for even three minutes, to allow the microwave to finish reheating my leftovers all the way through before I gobble them. They don’t see the grime that builds up underneath my thumbnails, infecting my hangnails, the spots that I’ve bitten down, lying in bed, unable to sleep, turned edgy by my anxiety and ennui. They do not know my restless leg disorder, my charley horses or my absentmindedness, my incessant feelings of inadequacy and shame, the fact that I can’t afford to take proper care of my cat, or to buy new shirts, or to keep a girlfriend. They do not know my constant guilt. They don’t know my confused thoughts, the mushy disarray of recognitions that I laughingly call my mind, my haphazard inventory of scattered recollections. And how could they know this? And how could they ever be made aware? They don’t know the corrections that I intend; they don’t share in my intent to improve my ways. They don’t share in my regrets, in my many excuses, in my fuzzed-out sense of sickening despair. They don’t hear my apologies, lame as they are, and muttered only to myself; they do not hear my “Oh my my’s,” my “please forgive me’s,” my “mea culpas.” My embarrassingly insincere and pathetically sorry sorries. I mutter them under my breath, to myself, alone, as I walk, as I trudge along the sidewalk, my head bowed, my mind clouded, my eyes turned resolutely elsewhere, my conclusion predetermined, predestined, incontestable. They do not hear me, and they do not see me, and they do not greet me, and they do not care. They do not know me.
During the fall of 1974, time seemed to move both faster and more
slowly than usual, with each event brightened and magnified like the leaves on the maple trees. I remember
it vividly, the particular tensions in the air, the way all of us faced the morning with heightened awareness, as if we were preparing ourselves for whatever the day might bring. The uneasiness in town was sharpened by events in the larger world — the resignation of the president, long lines at gas stations, the kidnapped heiress who still was missing though her captors had been killed or arrested, the busing crisis in Boston. Everyone seemed to be on edge, and at nine years of age I felt suddenly old, as if I knew that what I was then witnessing would propel me into an early adulthood.
everybody's girlfriend's sister's internet stalker's daughter
I lived my life backwards having died just after birth. For one such as me, who lived a lifetime in just days, there was no time to waste because there was no time left. This was not a Merlin life, moving ever younger with vision of what the future held, but a life so compressed, so dense, that time stopped, breath stop, and all of reality experienced and then collapsed into itself. The doctors couldn’t help because they ceased to be, the mother’s tears didn’t fall, there was nothing at all. It was so beautiful, so vast, so undifferentiated that nothing could describe it. Yet it did. Life moved without time or space, and created as that description. Breath moved. Time began. I am, yet I am not. I am, only as a description by the absolute beauty of nothing, the description by the undifferentiated everything.
Mine was a struggle not to transcend life, but to descend it, a journey not to enlightenment but to the darkest regions of embodiment, the ecstatic tortures of the flesh.

Don’t ever ask me to solve your problem. You complain about your partner, your job, your money, your wretched soul and its spiritual needs.
You block the ejaculate, separating it from life, wrapping it in rubber as a safeguard. Your life is dead, only energetic onanism remains.
Eros will revive you, chronic eros, it will give you your life back, but it will also cost you your life. Eros takes your hand, it doesn’t care if you want to let go.

I was talking to God the other night, when He told me something disturbing, and truthfully, somewhat baffling. Now, you probably doubt that I was talking to God, and likely think I was delusional, or talking to myself, and you might be right about that, but as I am trying to explain, in a way I don’t care what you believe, or what I believe for that matter. I only care what God believes, and that is what is so troubling. God told me he is an atheist, he doesn’t believe in himself, he doesn’t believe in belief, and he thinks that all the believing that people get into has caused nothing but problems.

Just hours before I had gotten God’s invitation by email, written so touchingly, so directly to the heart of the male psyche that it had seared itself in my memory with its redemptive promise. Titled, “Such a big size that she never felt before,” it went like this:
Dear Customer
Attention: new unequalled preparation will enlarge your phallus. It obtained popularity over the whole world and aided to many people-This is the MegaDik More than 80 000 men in the entire world have already been pleased by the quantity and efficacy of Mega Dik And this is a opportunity for you! Join to them.
I knew now that this, like all things in life, was a direct invitation from God, and a promise that faith upon Him and His works would lengthen my days and strengthen my seed, or something in that general direction.”
everything we do, we do in bursts--brief periods of intensive activity followed by long periods of nothingness. These bursts are so essential to human nature that trying to avoid them is not only foolish, but futile as well.
But can we engineer bursts? This is what I attempted to do recently with brsts.com--engaging others into a predictive burst. The premise of the experiment is simple. The whole book, "Bursts," is available on the site, just as it will appear in print. But each word is covered by a rectangle. Each user can 'adopt' a word, and at that moment all words adopted by others will become visible to her. So once 84,000 individuals have each adopted a word, roughly the number of words in the book, the whole book will become visible to the adopters. But any user can unlock the whole book within days by guessing a sufficient number of covered words, as each successful guess offers additional points that helps the user reveal further content.
Two weeks into the release Brsts.com, eleven users have collected enough points to unlock and read the whole book. Yet, to our surprise, no one bothered to do that. Instead, the players continued their guessing game. Some have amassed over five million points, sufficient to unlock and read the book fifty times over! The predictive game behind bursts became more addictive than reading.
Today we obsess over Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, hungrily devouring our friends' thoughts, ideas and images. Imagine a new generation of social networking sites that offer not our past, but peek into our future. Forget "What's on your mind?" and focus instead on events to come. If you find Twitter and Facebook absorbing, Bursts has a message for you: the possibility of predicting the future could be far more addictive.
The friction of my tongue slipping was damp. There was a beckoning noise behind the only door into the room. My wife sat in a swing that hung from two tight bolts in the ceiling, swinging her feet in motion, laughing. The noise was a small static like a radio, or television left on a dead channel. From the thinnest covering of my skin I read the directions of how to colour the walls with shapes and stones. Stacking the stones, encasing bones in walls. Applying the correct colours from my wife's hands, her jaw, her thinning muscles. Bugs carpeted the single flickering light on the ceiling, curling the silence between thinking a word and speaking it. We looked at the door we've never opened. When the stones were stacked, and the colours were correct she pushed my left hand through the spectrum of colours, and the standing stones. My fingers, palm, and wrist made it between the friction of the stones. I felt the stinging salt air filling the new cuts. I felt the sun's warmth. The static noise behind the door grew louder. My wife thrust my shoulder, and shoved my waist into the stone's cracks as water slithered under the door, and rose quickly. My blood tickled her toes, mixing with the colours running down the walls. You're almost there, she said. My bones cracked and crushed in the flux. Lastly she pulled my tongue from my mouth, she kept it balled in a fist. With all of my body reaching, reaching, reaching, becoming compressed in our creation. She swam to the ceiling of that room holding what was left of me as I was filtered through the wall. Under the water she breathed small fast breathes with wide eyes. My body, like pieces of ribbon, twisted in the new breeze; falling onto the piles of people resting on the beach. Bodies trenched in the infinite sand. My wife expanded, and flattened against the room's only light. The water shorted the static sound. She too filtered through the stones, falling over, and into the ocean followed by the colour, the bugs, and my tongue.
Children playing in the sand built castles, and buried mothers.
As a fragment I watched the colours spread until they diluted into the rest of the ocean's blue.
Scientists trying to explain the universe’s accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.
But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We’re inside a black hole that exists in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.
i am a bad parent. i abandoned it on an escalator. i fed it dishwasher tablets. i let it watch scarface. i raised it in california. maybe you would like to adopt it? it could make a decent and biodegradable doorstop. you could practice your dart throwing technique on it. you could regale it with stories of vietnam. you could send it on an aeroplane to russia when you are done.
I live in a secret room with mushrooms and bats, skeletons and roots, pitchers and pipes. When I fly I have no legs. I hold out apples for my guests. Every night I set out to study fear.

It wasn't until later that I met you in a class on Greek Mythology, and we drank the city into a sweet swirling puddle neighborhood by neighborhood, and you showed me how history is toppled together in a heap of velvet and cocktails, waltzed me into an oblivion of drunken ghosts. We Shanghaied each other from bars to corners to bars, and when you kissed me, at a bus stop haunted by garbage that flew around us like birds, it was poison and whiskey, a death that happened to someone else a long time before we were born.
I was tending the livestock when I stepped on something spongy in the low grass, a brownish blur that rose up, wrapping itself around my legs, and I went down struggling, tried to free first one leg, then the other. I made a desperate barking sound, moaned and cursed until her grip extended to include my torso and I felt like I did when I almost drowned once. But this was different—it was like wrestling a man, only stronger and more flexible. I could smell her old milk breath. She dragged me up a tree until I felt weightless and even closer to death (at 53 I've reached the average life expectancy for a male in my country). I wormed my mobile phone out of my pocket with a free arm, used speed dial and yelled some intelligible things into the handset, and though she had relaxed her hold (she was probably tired from the climb) my voice redoubled her efforts so I bit her, thinking "I will cause you pain" (not in those words) before I heard men shouting and could breathe again, but for how long?
Rather than a baseball or a wallet, a fist going through drywall; rather than a rolled-up tie or a bar of soap, or a ladybug, the eye of a black-eyed Susan; rather than a margarine container without its lid or a single serving of yogurt, or the unraveling of a jacket pocket; rather than the time it takes to get from London to Chicago, or the way age knots on fir trees or clumps in the sugar bowl; rather than these, he says, the size of an orange, as if he is any other farmer who can tell sweetness from the weight he holds in his hand.
The show, heavily inspired by and infused with the style of Japanese anime and manga, is a powerful and visceral hybrid of musical theater, opera, electronica, film score and Asian drumming.
NEWPORT, RI—Audience members at the Newport Rock Festival were “outraged” Monday when rock icon Bob Dylan followed up such classic hits as “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Maggie’s Farm” with an electronica set composed of atonal drones, hyperactive drumbeats, and the repeated mechanized lyric “Dance to the club life!” “We came here to see the authentic Dylan, the one with the Stratocaster guitar and signature wild blues-rock band behind him,” audience member Robert Hochschild said. “Then he walks out with these puffy headphones, some turntables, and a laptop? The guy’s a Judas.” When asked later about his musical transformation by reporters, Dylan said he had nothing to say about the beats he programs, he just programs them.
REQUIEM. Kathy Acker died on November 30, 1997. It's still hard for me to imagine her dead. She was the most alive person I have ever known. I was never able to keep up with her. She lived with an intensity that left her friends exhausted. She threw herself into everything she did, without reserve. Anything less would have been a betrayal of the real. Kathy's intelligence was wide-ranging and ferocious. It was matched by a deep thirst for experience, of all kinds. Whatever Kathy encountered, or was able to imagine, she insisted on exploring in her own flesh. This made her difficult to get along with, sometimes. She was never willing to compromise, or let go. She was obstinate, to the point of exasperation. No wonder our friendship was stormy, with frequent quarrels, and difficult reconciliations. But of course, I wouldn't have wished Kathy any other way. "Whenever I get something that I want," she wrote, "it isn't good enough. For to be female, to me, is to want everything." This is O. speaking, the heroine of Kathy's 1996 novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates. But it is also Kathy herself. Her novels were as much a part of her as her gorgeous tattoos. I love the sheer extravagance of Kathy's fiction. Pussy is a book bursting at the seams. It is full of poems and songs, dreams, jokes, stories within stories, porno sequences, myths and legends, political diatribes, translations from French and Latin, even drawings, diagrams, and maps. Most of all, Pussy pushes language to the breaking point. It is poised forever on the brink of orgasm, where words fail and all you can do is scream. What pulls the book together is its furious drive to imagine everything anew. "The world has to begin again," is its repeated cry. Kathy's writing was much like bodybuilding, something else she did with dedication and discipline. The bodybuilder must push her body to the limit, Kathy explained. For "muscles will grow only if they are... actually broken down." Language, too, must be broken down in order to be recreated. Writing can only cleave to the real by shattering it, and accepting the risk of being shattered in turn. Writing, no less than bodybuilding, "occurs in the face of the material, of the body's inexorable movement toward its final failure, toward death." Kathy worked out with words, just as she worked out with her muscles. It was her way of being true to the real. "What is, is," she once wrote. "No fantasy. Pain. Just the details... The only anguish comes from running away." The finest thing I can say about Kathy is that she never ran away. Not even from the cancer that finally killed her. She faced it head-on, with full awareness. She grew intimate with this alien life that had usurped her own. She tells the story in her essay "The Gift of Disease." To come to terms with her illness, she says, she "entered the school of the body." She learned to listen to her body's rhythms, its blockages and flows. Thanks to the "gift" of illness, she stepped into the unknown. Her disease allowed her to reinvent herself. It led her away from everything she knew. It gave her the courage "to walk away from conventional medicine... to walk away from normal society." In the course of this healing process, Kathy says, she conquered fear, and "felt only intellectual excitement and joy." Yet the fact remains that none of this made her well. The cancer stayed in her body, and she died. Part of me is angry with Kathy for letting this happen. I wish she had given conventional medicine more of a chance. Maybe it would have cured her; maybe not. We will never know. But I do not believe, as Kathy came to believe, that "all healing has to do with forgiveness." No, Kathy, I want to say, forgive all you want, but it will not make your tumor go away. You cannot heal yourself by will and faith alone. I should have said this to her, while she was still alive. But I never did. Now that it is too late, I can't forgive either her or myself. Yet I also know that Kathy couldn't have acted any differently. She approached death the same way she lived her life, the same way she wrote her novels. You can see this at the end of Pussy, King of the Pirates, when the pirate girls don't keep the treasure they have found. For if they become rich, instead of having nothing, "the reign of girl piracy will stop." Wanting everything means refusing to settle for less. It means being ready to throw it all away. If this is how you live, then what are illness and death? Disease, Kathy says, "is equivalent to life, for bodies are always changing, going through what we call disease... We say 'good' health and 'bad' health, but we're only making up what 'good' and 'bad' are."
DECOMPOSING. The image of a vagina fills the screen. Fingers caress and pry, pulling the labia apart. The lurid pink of the vulva stands out against the white of the fingers and thighs. Now a head enters the screen from above. Lips move down to the clitoris. It's a sequence from Peggy Ahwesh's 1994 short film, The Color of Love. This film has no plot to speak of, no real characters, no dialogue, and no metaphors. The only thing it has is bodies. Every image is literal. Every image is an image of sex. A man lies naked on a bed. Blood is smeared on his chest. Two women hover over him. They bathe their hands in the blood. They make desultory efforts to arouse him. They graze his flaccid penis with a knife. They make out with each other, straddled over his inert form. They kiss, in close-up. I don't know who these people are, or why they're doing what they're doing. The images are flat and inexpressive. They show me everything, but tell me nothing. They don't get me hot. They don't involve me in the least. The sex is perfunctory. It's performed without conviction. I can't imagine anyone being aroused by it. These images aren't interesting in themselves. They are cliches. We've seen them too many times. What's fascinating about them is only this: how fragile and delicate they are. It would be so easy to disfigure or erase them. Indeed, this is happening, even as I watch. Blotches of purple, red, and blue race randomly across the screen. They pulse and throb, changing at every moment. Now they spread out in moldy stains. Now they congeal into granules. Now they stretch into long gashes. Now they break into filaments, forming an intricate web. These abstract patterns take over the film. They tear it out of any context. They become the main focus of attention. The sexual performances are only secondary. The body of the film eclipses the bodies of the actors. It's as if the celluloid itself were writhing in an erotic frenzy. And in a sense, it actually is. The Color of Love is made from found footage. Its source is an anonymous Super-8 porno movie. Ahwesh found it in the garbage. The print must have been deteriorating for years. Chemical decomposition did its work. It ate into every frame, creating the blotches we see now. Ahwesh reprocessed this cinematic debris. She didn't try to restore the original footage. Rather, she carefully gathered the traces of its decay. Sometimes we think that art makes things eternal. Film is supposed to preserve appearances. The actress grows old and dies, we like to say, but in the movies her youth endures forever. Ahwesh shows us otherwise. Film stock, no less than flesh, is mortal. Images are weak and vulnerable, just like bodies. The decomposition never ends. Everything changes and decays. You couldn't stop the process if you tried. Better to affirm it, as Ahwesh does. The Color of Love anticipates its own demise. Its mood is elegiac, before the fact. It seems to be saying: "I am mortal. These splotches all over me are signs of age. I am going to die. Sooner or later, I will perish. So much of me is gone already." Few images are left untouched. Even the ones that remain intact are not quite right. Somehow they don't seem real any more. It's as if they had been placed in ironic "quotation marks." They are imitations of porn, not images from life. The whole film seems to unfold at second hand. A melancholy tango plays on the soundtrack. It reminds me of the music for silent films. It's in a minor key. It's alternately fast and slow. The fast sections are filled with frantic motion. The slow ones are mournfully reflective. At either speed, the music seems distant and detached. It is reserved and formal, even at its most frenetic. And it is reticent, even in its sadness. This tango is the faded echo that pleasure leaves behind. It evokes, not sex itself, but the nostalgia for sex. The Color of Love does not take place in a living present. Watching it, I do not think: "this is happening now." Rather, I think: "this has happened already." Nothing is more fleeting than an orgasm, after all. It's over, almost before it has begun. It happens in the barest sliver of an instant, like the time between one frame of film and the next. But it is surrounded by stretches of empty time, in which nothing happens. A time of infinite longing lies before it. And a time of slow forgetting extends after. The Color of Love is all about these abysses of obliterated time. In its ruined frames, sex and death meet face to face. The encounter is as tender as it is painful. A whole world of desire is created and destroyed. In less than ten minutes, it's all over.
ABDUCTED. The stories are everywhere: in books and films, on talk shows, on the World Wide Web. Dr. John E. Mack of Harvard estimates that as many as several million Americans may have been abducted by aliens in UFOs." His 1994 book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens presents representative case histories. Budd Hopkins gives a more detailed report of one case in his 1987 book Intruders, later a TV miniseries. And Whitley Strieber provides a gripping first-person account of being abducted in his 1987 book Communion, later turned into a film. All the stories are quite similar. The aliens are gray, hairless, about four feet tall, with leathery skin and vaguely humanoid features. Their eyes are deep, black, and unblinking, and have hypnotic power. If you look directly into them, your will crumbles and you are paralyzed. The encounters usually take place at night. The victims are mostly white Middle Americans. They are snatched from their beds or their cars, and taken aboard a UFO. They are stretched out on a sort of operating table. First, the aliens take tissue samples. They impress strange marks on the skin, like stigmata. They insert small implants into the abductee's body. They stick long needles through the eyes, nose, or ears, and on into the brain. Then they bring out the notorious anal probe. Many witnesses have described this device. It's a thick metal rod, about fourteen inches long. At one end, there is a tiny sphere like a ball bearing. The sphere is surrounded by little prongs that enclose it as in a wire cage, or open outward to let it roam freely. When Strieber was penetrated by this tool, he says, "it seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own... I had the impression that I was being raped... I have never felt so tiny, so helpless." No part of the body is safe from these intrusions. But all in all, the aliens are less interested in our anuses and brains than in our genitalia. They attach suction devices to men's penises, milking them for sperm. They implant embryos in women's wombs, only to extract them again a few months later. The little alien fetuses are then placed in transparent tanks. One abductee saw rows of these tanks stacked up against the wall, like a display of Barbie dolls in a toy store window. Perhaps the aliens are trying to breed a hybrid species, mixing their genes with ours. Or maybe they can't even reproduce on their own, but need help from our bodies and DNA. We service them as bees do flowers. In any case, the aliens seem clinically detached during these procedures. Sex is evidently not joyous or fulfilling for them. "They don't know what a porn movie is," one victim remarks. "[They don't] understand the concept of voyeurism or anything like that." Their interest in us is not prurient, nor do they bear us malice. It's just that they don't realize how much it all hurts. As Hopkins puts it, "they simply appear unable for the most part to understand us, our feelings, our terror, our love for one another." They fail to grasp even the simplest things about us, like how we dress or how we do our hair. Human emotions are "like candy" or "like a drug" to them, one abductee explains, a dangerous luxury in which they dare not indulge. No wonder our close encounters end in mutual misunderstanding. Maybe their hybrid breeding project is an effort to close the gap. If so, it is an endeavor gone sadly awry. They re-abduct women whose wombs they have previously 'borrowed.' The surrogate mother is brought to meet her putative offspring. The aliens seem to expect some grand scene of reconciliation. But it's hard for us to regard these young with ordinary human affection. They do not seem like anything of ours. They are silent, frail, and disturbingly listless. They show no signs of love, nor even of recognition. They require a colder, more rarefied atmosphere than we can provide. No, these odd children do not join the human to the alien. Rather, they are living reminders of how vast a distance remains. They embody, not our hopes and dreams, but something we cannot even imagine. If they are a part of us, it's the part that we have lost and will never find again. The yearning we feel towards them is like an ache in a phantom limb. What does it mean to be intimate, against your will, with a stranger? Once you have been abducted, you are stranded between two worlds. You've been exiled from the one, without finding refuge in the other.

TORNADO. "Life is beautiful. Really it is. Full of beauty and illusions. Life is great. Without it, you'd be dead." These words are spoken in voiceover, so tonelessly that they almost pass us by. On screen, we see a collage of heavy metal videos and grainy Super-8 footage of pissed-off teenage boys. It's a sequence from Harmony Korine's 1997 film Gummo. The speaker is Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), a scrawny fourteen-year-old with an unearthly look. His hair is short, wavy, and tousled. His face is narrow and egg-shaped. His expression is blank, yet intense at the same time. He never cracks a smile. He's too old to be cute, but still too boyish to exude an air of menace. He is so self-contained, and so impassive, that he might as well have come from another planet. Solomon spends most of the film tooling around on his bike with his pal Tummler (Nick Sutton). They hunt for stray cats, which they sell to the local butcher. They drink milkshakes. They sniff glue. They have sex with the sweet, mentally retarded town prostitute. They break into a house, and turn off an old lady's respirator, so that she can finally die in peace. And sometimes they just stretch out for a while in the sun, and Tummler tells Solomon about his cross-dressing older brother. The film doesn't have a conventional plot line. It's more a series of slice-of-life vignettes. Some characters show up again and again, like Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell). He wanders all over town, wearing only shoes, shorts, and a set of pink rabbit ears. He never speaks. We see him pissing and spitting from a freeway overpass, skateboarding down the street, playing the accordion in a toilet stall, and frolicking in a pool during a rainstorm. Other characters appear in only a scene or two. There's the girl who has just had a mastectomy. She's afraid that boys will never find her attractive again. There's the albino woman who boogies to music from her car radio, as she speaks directly to the camera. She tells us about her pale skin and her deformed feet, and what music she likes, and what she is looking for in a man. Korine himself appears in one scene as a desperately drunk gay teen. He comes on to a midget, who gently turns him down. Most of the film's characters are underage. Most of them are white; a few are black. The one thing they have in common is that they are all powerless and poor. They have all been excluded from the official, Hollywood version of America. Gummo was the fifth Marx Brother, the one who never appeared on screen. True to its name, Korine's Gummo shows us lives and events that we don't usually get to see in the movies. It gives voice to the voiceless. The film is set in Xenia, Ohio. Some years ago, this town was ravaged by a tornado. People and animals were killed. Houses were destroyed. The town never recovered from the damage. Today, it is a place without prospects or hope. Yet the tornado seems almost magical in retrospect. Gummo begins and ends with jerky video footage of the storm. We see strange visions. The twister looms on the horizon like a living thing. A dog is impaled on a rooftop TV antenna. "I saw a girl fly through the sky," Solomon remembers, "and I looked up her skirt." Korine's camera, just like the tornado, shows us the world from a new angle. Gummo is filled with terror, disgust, and grotesquerie. But these are all transmuted into wonder. The beauty is in the details. I love the scene where Solomon takes a bath. He sits in the tub. His hair is soapy with shampoo. Before him is a tray on which his mom has served him dinner. He drinks a glass of milk, and eats spaghetti and meatballs. As he opens a candy bar, he fumbles and drops it into the filthy bath water. But he fishes it out again, and bites into it without a thought. Now his mouth is smeared with tomato sauce and chocolate. Nothing really happens in this scene. But isn't that precisely the point? Korine is not interested in drama. His movie gives us access, rather, to different states of being. He seduces us into a sweet complicity with the people we see on the screen. He places them before us, free of condescension or judgment. Such intimacy is a matter of keeping exactly the right distance. If we came any closer to these people, we would suffocate from their contact. If we moved any further away, we would lose touch with them entirely. But just at the point where we are, we can see the beauty of their lives. For all that it might seem crass or sensationalistic, Gummo is a film of enormous tenderness.
GLIMMER. The first thing I remember is the lighting. An exquisite radiance suffuses nearly every frame of Guy Maddin's 1997 film Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. The film takes place in a land where the sun never sets. Each scene is backlit in gold, silver, or pink. The diffuse light streams horizontally through the forest, along the shore, and over the ostrich farm. It makes the most common objects glow with an unearthly sheen. It burnishes the actresses' pale skin and pastel costumes. Such a light is not found in nature. It is something extra, something we add to what we see. It glimmers only in our nostalgia and yearning, or in the artifice of a movie studio. Maddin creates an unreal world of wistful dreams and tacky glamour. He brings us back to a past that never was. He crafts his films to look like old-time movies. With its exaggerated colors, static camera, and mannered acting, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs seems like some sort of archaic experiment in color cinematography. It doesn't resemble any actual films from the twenties or thirties. But you can't help feeling it should have come from that era. The movie has a built-in sense of obsolescence. It is stilted and airless, like a kitschy souvenir preserved under glass. Its action unfolds in the past tense, rather than the present. Its images come to us like half-forgotten dreams. As Peter (actor uncredited) and Zephyr (Alice Krige) make love, the tide rises, and waves wash over their bed. Later, their passion spent, and the tide gone out again, Peter picks up a lobster from among the sheets, and tosses it back into the water. The absurdity of the image is matched only by the insouciance with which the film offers it to us. For this incongruous lobster is not a symbol. It is not a visitor from the depths of the unconscious. It is just there, a gratuitous gift of the sea. The film is full of such grotesque and useless artifacts. The sinister mesmerist Doctor Solti (R. H. Thomson) has a whole collection of them. And then there is the great statue of Venus. The Goddess of Love torments every character in the film. She allures them all with her flawless beauty, but she never grants any of their prayers. Her only response is to topple down upon them. The statue mangles the Doctor's leg, making him a cripple, before the film begins. It falls again, crushing Zephyr to death, at the climax. Each character struggles with the dead weight of the past, which is also the fatality of his or her desire. Despite its delicate beauty, the light of the midnight sun is cruel and implacable. It uncovers all secrets. It forbids repose. It tracks the characters relentlessly, leaving them no place to hide. These people all seem lost in an insomniac stupor. Sometimes they wander aimlessly through the woods. Other times, they hold a single posture, as if frozen. They gesture emphatically, to no avail. They break down in paroxysms of futile passion. They don't engage in conversation, so much as they declaim vehement speeches to one another. Maddin postdubbed the dialogue, and had all the actors speak in different accents, in order to get this sense of disconnection. Everyone in the film is driven mad by unrequited love. Peter spurns Zephyr, because he has fallen for the mysterious Juliana (Pascale Bussieres). But Juliana is entranced by the Doctor's hypnotic spell. If she flirts with Peter, it is only the better to reject him. The Doctor, meanwhile, toys sadistically with the affections of Peter's gawky sister Amelia (Shelly Duvall). And Amelia, in turn, suffers the ambiguous advances of her handyman, the aged eunuch Cain Ball (Frank Gorshin). Twilight of the Ice Nymphs dramatizes these hopeless infatuations in a series of ludicrous tableaux vivants. The film lurches from one lurid, embarrassing incident to the next. Each scene entombs yet another blasted emotion. All the while, overwrought romantic music plays on the soundtrack. Eventually, Amelia loses her mind, and murders Cain Ball. Juliana and the Doctor drive Peter to the utmost depths of despair and humiliation. When Peter cannot stand it any longer, he cries out to his only remaining friends, the trees in the forest. He begs the trees to crash down and obliterate them all. It's a wonderful melodramatic moment, full of rhetorical sound and fury. If I must perish, then let the whole world perish along with me. For an instant, the wind rages, as if responding to this plea. But in the end, of course, nothing happens. The world remains unmoved by Peter's ridiculous gesture. For why should things be tailored to the measure of his desperation and longing? Frustration is as fleeting, and disappointing, as desire. Even Peter's overwhelming sense of desolation succumbs to disillusionment. Each event in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is shadowed by the ghost of all the things that did not happen. That's why the film does not take place in the fullness of a living present. Things are always in process of fading away, and saying their farewells. As Juliana recites to Peter on three separate occasions: "This might have been the day we first knew we loved each other, and my kissing you now would not have meant goodbye."
BLOOD."In bed under Caddie touching me, our lips parted, spitting blood. I began happening out of nowhere. This was the beginning of bleeding. Straight into Caddie. You will not die from bleeding. I am not among the dead. My sister's breath strange and unsettling. You will bleed into life, not into death. Caddie exhausting her body into me. And between my thighs I felt the making of language." This is Doug Rice, in his 1996 novel Blood of Mugwump. The book might be called a romance about three generations of transsexual vampires. But that makes it seem more linear than it actually is. Nothing in this novel is quite solid. Everything oozes and runs, in a viscous flow. The book is filled with mud, blood, and saliva. These are dense, gooey substances, thicker than water. They congeal, time and again, into flesh and into language. But they never maintain any one shape for very long. They are always bleeding into new configurations. The novel is a flux of words, meeting a flux of bodies. Rice's gorgeous prose stutters and sings by turns. Words cascade in syncopated rhythms. Pronouns shift in gender, person, and number. Sentences break into fragments. Phrases proliferate in kaleidoscopic patterns. Echoes of other texts (by Faulkner, Joyce, Eliot, and Burroughs) resound from page to page. Utterances arise deep in the body: in the throat, the belly, the cunt. Language is intensely carnal. This gets in the way of meaning. As Doug says of Caddie, "she had always had trouble with sentences, running sense over the tops of things... Scattering frozen syllables, lost, on the floor, words were arrested, made to suffer on her tongue." The word becomes flesh, and suffers a kind of Passion. Cosmic confusion ensues. There's no way to distinguish between the genders. Men have cunts, and women have cocks. Bodies are as unstable as words. You can't even tell where one ends and the other begins. Doug and Caddie twist in an eternal dance. She is his sister. But she is also his father. Or else she is his drag persona. Or else he is hers. She is so close, as to suffocate him with her presence. Yet she always manages to evade his touch and his glance. No wonder Doug has no sense of himself. Caddie fucks him senseless. She turns him into a woman, and back into a man. There is no end to these transformations. The novel is full of tales of gender confusion. Doug as a child is seduced by the older girl next door. Doug as an adult is arrested for dressing as a woman. Poppy Torgov, Doug's grandfather, appears as a bearded lady at the County Fair. Grandma Mugwump, Doug's grandmother, is born male. She becomes a woman by devouring female flesh. She recalls when Poppy Torgov told her "how I could become a woman again and my cock getting hard just thinking about it." These delirious stories never add up to a plot that you can follow. The book is like a labyrinth with no exits. Time flows backward. Events precede their causes. Caddie talks and talks, "breeding her own ancestors out of the river stories" that she tells. The past is not recovered by this method. Rather, even the present moment turns into a story. It becomes distant and unreal, already drowned in the past. It seems to Doug "as if the past had taken Caddie over the edge into some sort of abyss." But Grandma Mugwump is that abyss, in person. Her monstrous figure is the focus of every story. She spends the entire novel lying sick in bed, endlessly speaking, endlessly dying. Doug and Caddie explore her reeking flesh. They crawl in "the craters on her belly." They unravel the dizzying folds of her cunt. They watch her eyes glow in the dark while she sleeps. They lose themselves in the vast recesses of her bed, and need help to find their way out again. Through all this, Doug learns what it means to be a girl. A cunt is barely visible from the outside. But it contains volumes, and it can swallow up the world. "What do you see?" is the urgent question that Caddie keeps asking Doug. "Tell me what you see." All he can answer at first is: "nothing there." For you can't just look at a cunt. You have to touch it and feel it. You have to discover it in your own body. The pain of bleeding finally teaches Doug that yes, something is there. It's all a matter, Caddie explains to him, of "the control of blood." Menstruation is the origin of language. Words and blood alike gush from between the thighs. And that is why Doug "will bleed into life, not into death." He's bound to this flesh, whether he likes it or not.
MASK. I can't forget the image of the burning face. It's from Alfred Chester's 1967 novel The Exquisite Corpse: "The mask came off with a long loud ripping sound, and underneath it: the raw, red, boiled, baked, twisted flesh. Tommy roared wordlessly at Ismael, and thrust the mask on his face. The smoke began to rise at once, and Ismael screamed. Tommy saw billows of smoke rising from Ismael's head. Ismael was still sitting at the wheel, his head wrapped in flames." Tommy and Ismael were lovers. Tommy was rich and white. Ismael was poor, with "cafe-au-lait" skin. Tommy was afraid that Ismael just liked him for his money and looks. Ismael was offended that Tommy didn't trust him. So they broke up. Now, Tommy is poor and homeless. He wears a mask, for his face is hideously deformed. But he tears it off, in a fit of rage and desperation. He forces it upon Ismael, as the proof of his desire. Who could refuse so urgent a demand? No wonder Ismael burns. By the end of the book, he is "even uglier than Tommy." His face looks like "a huge toasted marshmallow." Ismael and Tommy have plumbed the depths of abjection. Now they can finally love each other again. The Exquisite Corpse is full of such transformations. Men turn into women. Jews become Catholics. New Yorkers suddenly find themselves in the jungle. White people are drawn to those of darker hue. Each character in the novel burns with extravagant desires. And each wears some sort of mask. John Anthony, the drag queen, makes masks obsessively. The walls of his room are covered with them. Whenever he goes out, he chooses a mask to fit his mood. "Who can I be tonight?," he asks himself. "Who will I be tonight?" The novel as a whole asks much the same question. It adds and subtracts characters almost at will. One mask leads to another, and then another. Casual phrases take on lives of their own. "Poor baby," sighs John Anthony in drag, looking at himself in the mirror. "Poor poor baby." Before you know it, the book has a new character, Baby Poorpoor. Baby goes his own way, independent of John Anthony. A few chapters later, Baby spins off yet another character, James Madison. James is the love slave of a man he knows only as John Doe. At John's command, James plays a series of female roles. First he is Joan of Arc, then Mary Queen of Scots. The book goes off on one ridiculous tangent after another. The characters keep appearing and disappearing. James Madison even kills himself at one point. But he shows up again a few pages later, as if nothing had happened. The world of The Exquisite Corpse is deliriously fluid. No identity is stable. No event is final. Everything is transfigured by desire. James Madison becomes a woman because John Doe wants him to. No matter that his anatomy is wrong. To show that he is having his period, he just shoves a few Tampax up his ass. James has never been happier than he is now. A kept woman locked up in an apartment, he is free of the burden of being himself. He is content to lie on a cot all day, dressed in a bra and panties, eating chocolates. His only problem is that his degradation never goes far enough. His desire for John Doe is never satisfied. John teases him, for instance, by never letting him see or touch his cock. This is as exciting as it is frustrating. But the tension pushes James beyond all bounds. Finally he escapes from the apartment, and tracks down John Doe in the outside world. For doing this, his happiness is ruined. John Doe is deeply closeted. He lives in the suburbs with his wife and kids. To preserve his situation in the world, he dumps James once and for all. The last time we see James Madison, he is lost in the jungle. As he impales himself on a pine branch, he hears a strange music, "orchestrated with his screams." The world is filled with the music of his love, just as it is filled with "the sweet glorious smell of life bursting and rotting." At the far end of humiliation, James Madison discovers a new beauty. "Why didn't I think of dancing instead?," he asks himself. Most of the characters in the novel come to such a point. In order to stay true to their desires, they must give up everything they have. They must stop being white, male, and rich. They must cross lines of race, gender, and class. They must lose themselves, like criminals or saints. The Exquisite Corpse is filled with pain and erotic frustration. But it is also airy and insouciant, like a fairy tale. It's all a matter of how you wear your mask. In the first chapter, John Anthony is perturbed by the "stranger's face" he sees in the mirror. "Why?," he cries to his reflection. "Why must I suffer your destiny?" In the last chapter, however, Ismael rejoices in the same fate. "They think it's me," he laughs and laughs, when strangers stare at his burnt-out face. For he knows that he has slipped away, beyond identification.
Later she'll remember she forgot to pick the tiger lilies from the marsh where they'd swatted August mosquitoes--positioned in love. His grave wasn't going anywhere. This holds her through another anniversary and the growing that follows. Soon the tigers lick gravel. Yesterday, a farmer's dog sneezed against the strength of their pestles. Up, up orange into gray green lands.
You were out of oatmeal so eating donuts. Plain glazed the least ostentatious of the bunch brought along with the rest in a greasy paper box by our boss. There were Germans watching you work. She is waiting and remembering: burying rabbits in the backyard that were dead to begin with and she is thinking: people eat rabbits but people will not eat these rabbits. She had never seen maggots like that before. You will never see maggots like this. She dug the holes shallow but large enough for the bodies, holes all in a row as if she were planting a small crop of the type of thing you'd have to chase rabbits away from. The bodies are sliced cleanly pelt falls from muscle. You were then in the hangar yelling, Power On!, training the currents, and eating the donuts--let's doughnut--with the Germans and sweating the sugar you swear you can feel it the granules in your arm sweat and though she doesn't believe you at first after you arrive to the porch and you're in the bed she will taste it on your skin.
We figure the leaves will find a way back into the house, where they take more than their share of furniture. The smell of ruin and the lack of rain outside has not permeated the house yet. That must be what draws them to us, draws them indoors where we multiply when faced by extinction.
We figure the leaves will not do enough damage. They have the tiniest of hands that cringe at the touch of dust. Even when provoked, they remain harmless. Not once have they interrupted us in our sleep. It's like, we are writing about life here and we are drawing out of an upturned hat the names of our enemies; we do not have to care if the leaves exist or not. There is more to this room, this house than the door that will not open to conceal the dying things inside.
Autumn, and they grit their teeth. Summer, and they explode in color. Winter, and we let them tiptoe their way into death.
We figure the leaves will leave us alone.
We figure the house will have enough walls to keep them out.
I am a fifty foot and two inch panda monster. It’s time for my sacrifice. If it’s not there, then it’s time to rampage through the village. I live out in the woods, a deep ancient forest, trees older than me. I can hear them talk to each other. They bore the hell out of me. I pound my way through the path, here before me. Where did I come from? Just fucked-up nature. I had a mother. So I must have had a father, but he was never around and never mentioned by my mother. She died, and I haven’t seen another giant panda monster since. But there have to be. Surely I’m not the last.
The town is a sweet little fishing village. I have a circuit between ten or so villages. I hope they don’t know about each other. Would they be jealous? Band against me? I come here for my virgin every month or so.
Virgins just taste better.
As I get closer, I walk heavy, really stomping the ground, give them a little scare, a show for their money. The trees shake, like an unholy wind. Drums from the village start up. It’s a nice beat. I do a dance step before I clear the ridge and come into view. Have to put on my monster face. The screaming starts low, but as I get closer it drowns out the drums. They have my sacrifice tied between the poles.
It’s lonely being a big monster. I’ve met smaller monsters, and they seem to travel in packs, keeping each other company. I met these two werewolves one time, and they were a real cute couple. I ate them. They gave me a terrible hairball.
When we big monsters get together, we usually get in a fight. I don’t know why that is. This one time a giant porcupine turned the corner of a mountain, and I was just sitting—I sit a lot—picking my teeth with a tree. So this porcupine takes one look and turns his back to me. I think to myself, just keep walking, you, I don’t want to have to get up. But then he shoots off a shitload of quills. I was picking those out of my fur for days. Which is nothing compared to that damn scorpion.
“Whales don’t like the same things people do, Dale,” said somebody. “Whales may not like anything at all.”
Mutiny is the last I remember. being pitched over. only to awaken here. drowning in an Aeron chair. typing my own ransom memo for the corporate pirates who pay me in somnambulistic days. unsure how I was fished out and tanked. I fill an ironic window on the 22nd floor. the Fisher Building scrapes dun sky above Detroit ghettos. peregrine falcons give shape to gnarled winds. snatch pigeons from the currents. only to set gutted featherbones within reach. upon my sill. meanwhile, I eat years. dolphins and humpback whales dive over and again down the blue mural decay of the Broderick building beyond. eventually someone calls a meeting. in it I ask who drifted my life away on hot sirens rising from the steaming streets. this is what no one wants to talk about. of course. our talk is deliverables. project status. the milky muse of my brain sours. pours over mouthfuls of suspect words. synergy. milestone. benchmark. bleeding edge. the omnipotent R.O.I. a burning furrow worms my gut. afraid of the sleep threatening to dream me fathoms deeper. I sip my nth cup of black. mull the word talk until the sound turns crow: talk. tawk. cawk. caw. swim back to my desk against dead seas. stalled by the very air I’ve forgotten how to need. this is what’s left. facing the life I’ve wrought. a comfortable near-miss namesake chair. a window on the 22nd floor. a hole in space just beyond the sill’s rail leaking the dregs of a wine god’s song. painted, peeling dolphins wondering if I will leap. or pick over these remnants. a pigeon carcass. the falcon found unworthy.
You see him at the 7-11. You see him at the bus stop, trying to look at you without being seen himself. Who is he? He is a person. In this debut novel, a person walks around Chicago contemplating the possibility of starving to death on purpose. He borrows his roommate's car to drive around and then nap in. He goes out to look for a job but just talks to bums and imagines forming friendships with people on billboards. Who is the person? The person is you. The person is me. The person is sitting in his room shooting an empty pellet gun at his face, feeling the slow exhaustion of a Co2 cartridge against his frowning face. The person sits in a bathtub reading his roommate's yearbook. He considers the possibility of creating a piece of paper that is a contract mandating worldwide friendship. He buys food at Jimbo's and calls Jimbo after eating it, just to talk to someone. In every one of us, there is a person. In every one of us there is a person willing to spend ten dollars on a hundred page book, then review it on amazon. This October, a person says, "I am a person." This October, you will meet a person. This October, you will spill beer on this book while telling someone else about how it's "ok, but sometimes too much." You will see persons everywhere, and you will invent new and splendid ways of not getting along. You will read this book and remember why you mainly read books that have sex in them. You will become...a person.
I arrive below the 38th parallel. Everyone and every place I know are below the waist of a nation. Before I arrive, empire arrived, that is to say empire is great. I follow its geography. From a distance the waist below looks like any other small rural village of winding alleys and traditional tile-roofed houses surrounded by rice paddies, vegetable fields, and mountains. It reminded me of home, that is to say this is my home.
Close up: clubs, restaurants, souvenir and clothing stores with signs in English, that is to say English has arrived before me and was here even before I had left. PAPA SAN, LOVE SHOP, POP’S, COLDEN TAILOR, PAWN. I followed the signs and they led to one of the gates to Camp Stanley, a heliport, that is to say language is not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience. A woman in her seventies lived next to LOVE SHOP. She was taking an afternoon nap. She has never left below the waist and eventually came to be regarded as a great patriot by her government, that is to say she followed the signs and suffered from lice infestation during the war and passed the lice on to GIs.

My message to you:
You are gone. Please come. I have your comb. I know homesickness. It unfolds like Mother’s umbrella. I dress your paper dolls, the penciled closet. I pace the bridge, your hair pin in my hair. The river is muddy. I unfold arms and take off my shoes I am none. Please come. I have your comb. Be low. Be no. Say no to dinner and fog.
Your message to me:
Forgetting is lovely and Father’s well is bottomless. Freud says: the way in which national tradition and the individual’s childhood memories are formed might turn out to be entirely analogous. Indeed, a higher authority can shift the aim of the resistance to memory. Madness may be a form of resistance. Forgetting is lovely and Father’s well is bottomless. In order to remember an incident painful to national feeling, a lower psychic agency must resist the higher authority. However, it is against the Law. Tea and false memories. Which is lovelier? Colony or neocolony? The shift in aim is minor. Forget something then remember something else. The loveliest of all is the unconscious—it is lively. In defense of nation’s paramnesia, tea must be served at all times. Migration, my nation! The family in the distance must be oceans apart. Closeness may lead to nationalism. Follow orderly obsessions. Wash and clean when in doubt. Scrub the edges of your memory. Childhood loneliness can shift its aim. Nation’s loneliness is false category. Be fraud. Be Law.

Twin twin twin zone. Cameraman, run to my twin twin zone. A girl’s exile excels beyond excess. Essence excels exile. Something happens to the wanted girl. Nothing happens to the unwanted girl. The morning news is exciting. Excessive exile exceeds analysis. Psychosis my psychosis. Psychosis her psychosis. Pill her and pill her and file her and exile her and pill her and pill her till axis and boxes and sexes.
She puts on her robe, wishing, perhaps, that someone would look at her, that someone in the courtyard, in the living room, some nameless phantom were waiting for her, someone to whom she could abandon herself, some beast, some animal, some sex fiend, for whom she could throw herself away, for whom she could recklessly damn herself to pleasure and hell.

It was, he knew, certain, that had he not known, in any way, all the people he had known, but had, instead, known as many wholly different people, his life, such as it was, would have been the same in its vast panoply of error and carelessness. He had indeed blundered through his life, as he would have blundered through any life given him. Had he been born anywhere at all—he knows this—he’d still be standing at a dark window, alone, wondering who, through the years, precisely he was.
Watching porn’s usually like watching a melancholy documentary to me, a documentary about sex as a failed utopia or something, I don’t know.
The main scene should be full of ornaments and crime. The words attributed to the characters do not necessarily have to be spoken; they can be acted out, or played on an archaic tape-player.
The second stage is an abandoned factory in downtown South Bend, IN, where during the entire performance my daughter Sinead dances while changing in and out of various costumes: the Hare Mask, the Cartoon Face, the Red Robe of History, the Reversible Body. She is only once actually seen by the audience, on a video screen streaming live from her dance. Mostly she is hidden because she represents that which is hidden.
The third stage is a mall, where the Natives stand still, watching, interviewing and photographing the Customers. Sometimes I feel a certain tenderness towards the Natives. Other times I want to stab them in their plug-ugly faces.
I’m trying out this apathy and rebelling against love.
I am only just giving in to my sentiments.
sometimes I pretend I am crazier than I really am.
my biggest fear is being normal.
I am greedy I am impatient I am mistaken I make mistakes I look into shadows and see nothing just symbols of restlessness I do not relent I am not free I imagine being taken for a moon ride by moonlight marked by the night the black from the black canvas from that place that I can not go I have been touched by the night turning its back on me only after the day told me I had too much pride because I mix love and pity and anger and lust and restlessness into the oceans as my heart pounds with the tide and a broken pot shows my reflection, cracked from the morning sun.
after undergoing unbelievable hardships to come all the way to where in the distance they have seen clear blue water, the hungry ghost arrives to find that the water has been filled with pus, blood, hair, garbage. there is nothing there to drink. some pretas find food and try to swallow it fast only finding that the food they eat bursts into flames as they swallow it.
Lyle was always telling patients about his extracurricular activities; he considered himself something of a Renaissance man: one week reading Proust in the original French; the next week opining on the teachings of Gandhi, and Gandhi’s correspondence with Tolstoy. He made copies of the letters, and brought them for the patients to read. She remembers a time when he brought copies of The Magic Mountain to pass among the patients on the ward. It was questionable therapeutically, but most patients didn’t read it anyway. She always did, though. Les said this intellectual kinship with Lyle was part of the reason she'd never let herself be critical of Lyle, or the place itself.
“Seven days left!” Paul wrote on March 1 in the diary he’d kept in a notebook since his first day in Santa Fe. “This is my last week . . . I’ll try and write in you every day.” And then he’d gotten the flu. Two weeks out, he still can’t get past the feel of the dry Farmington air on his skin. It’s like being touched. (Paul doesn’t like being touched.) The cool wind makes him dizzy. It’s like being touched by a beneficent presence, or maybe by God.
Passing the high school is the worst part of the walk. In the morning: kids everywhere. In fact he feels pretty exposed the whole hour it takes him to walk to Casa Bonita: a slow-moving target. With his thick wire-rimmed glasses and dozens of half-thought ideas bouncing around in his head, Paul feels like an alien freak dragging himself through a nuclear desert after the world has been bombed. People are watching him from their cars! Not even 40, his hairline’s receding but he’s got a thick pelt of Arabic hair on his back, he looks like a satyr. His small feet are bunioned like goat-hooves, and the scar!
Since no one in Farmington walks, there are no sidewalks. Twice every day he has to trot by the side of the road like a dog while oilrig guys drive past him like kings in their Yukons, Dodge Rams and 150’s . . . nice shiny aluminum toolboxes padlocked and bolted town to their truck-beds. The jeans Paul is wearing are not even a brand. He wonders if people can tell that all the clothes on his back are state-issued?
1.When I was small the Ark of the Covenant loved to crouch beneath my bed. To make its sacred presence known it went ahem ahem amen. It sent up holy coughs in the direction of my pillow. I knew the Ark by its ahem; I would’ve known that face-melter anywhere. I tried to say my prayers over the coughs but my prayers were no match, especially when the coughing gasped into words and the words were about being lonely. I tried to tell the Ark of the Covenant that all people are lonely in their own ways, especially when they’re not real people, but real objects like you and me. The Ark of the Covenant liked the sound of you and me. You and me, it coughed, you and me. Beneath the mattress there occurred the veil-lift, the spark, the capture. It coughed that it just wanted me to take a look at it, but I wouldn’t. It coughed, hey, just for a second, hey please, just for a minute or a second. Just so I know I’m still here, ahem and cough and amen.
2. When I was less small there was a whistling hunchback at our place of worship. Later, he’d go to prison for his monsterisms against girl children. The monsterisms occurred behind the drapes during whistle lessons. The whistle lessons had been trilling along for years, ever since his whistle solo at the holiday show. The solo showed just how high, just how low, he could go. After the show, parents praised his talent and let him give their girls whistle lessons because his price was fair and because their girls weren’t trying to learn enough and because—in secret—they were afraid that if they weren’t sweet to the afflicted that God would make them hunchbacks too. And no one was interested in shuffling eyes-down to the earth in a lumpen manner, not in our town’s earth at least, because who wants to look at the two snakes fighting in the grass like that?
A lack of animals has stalled the progress of our zoo! Elephants, though large, are by themselves inadequate to constitute it with similitude. The people will not come for peanuts and pachyderm alone! The Engineer insists he can fabricate a facsimile of any animal, bird, or fish we wish. (He has a box of schematic diagrams, as well as dance steps by Astaire on paper patterns with which he hopes to acquire savoir-faire.) “There must be space inside, however, for a mechanism that can be wound up by a key.” He rejects transistors as inelegant. “But the elephants are real!” shouts the Zoologist. “Our menagerie must not be marred by incongruity!” The General is impressed by his intransigence and avers, “Too many have forsaken principles in favor of a life of artifice and sloth.” We forgive the General his remark because of the absinthe he is drinking, a habit acquired in a youth misspent on the Continent with poets, rogues, and others living by their wits. The Taxidermist volunteers to stuff the elephants with mattresses. He has already done much in the case of swans with feather-dusters that is admirable. “There will be no offal to pick up,” he says, “once they’re dead.” (As if dung were our only concern!) “What is wanted is monkeys!” rasps the Zoologist brandishing Introduction to the Primates by Daris Swindler as if it were a club. We scold him for his savagery as we swivel on our barstools to listen to his discourse: “The shaggy red orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus of Sumatra, will give the most delight. Orangutans are arboreal—according to Swindler, who has been among them. So we will have reason to look up once more, now that the sky is no longer with us.” “But there are no trees!” grumbles the Prime Minister, who used to punt on a river underneath them when the world was everywhere in leaf and rivers rich with fish. The orchestra wakes long enough to play Brahms’ lullaby, which affects us like a soporific, i.e., we fall—each and every one—to sleep, including the Funambulist, who balances on her wire by an instinct stronger than unconsciousness. While we doze, a troop of shaggy red orangutans materializes from thin air, or so it seems; and with them is no other than Daris Swindler arrived from Borneo and the Wild Men there. He wears a watch-cap and bell-bottomed sailor’s pants because he was one (a sailor, not a pair of pants!) before the study of man’s interaction with the simian absorbed him. The Cigarette Girl minces forward with a lacquered tray of smokes. Everything moves so slowly while we are mired in this dream! Daris takes a Camel and dilates on a favorite theme: the venery of Homo sylvestris—orangutan, which word is Malay for forest man. “According to seventeenth-century Dutch physician and anatomist Nicholaas Tulp, orangs are as amorous as the Satyrs of the ancient world.” So says Daris, quoting the original. Our dreaming selves are polyglot! The General is delighted. “But what,” the P.M. asks, “will become of our zoological specimens when we wake and, furthermore, whose dream this time has enthralled us? The answer involves a pin jabbed into the limbs of the musicians one by one until—having reached the Bassoonist—we swim up into consciousness with an appetite for sardine sandwiches. Who can fathom the devious paths of desire? “Look!” the General shouts. “Swindler and his evolutionary gang are gone! Here’s a cone of ash that fell from his Camel, and here and here and here is dung!” We retire to the Metaphysicians’ Room to debate the (in-)substantiality of figures in a dream (including orangutans)—what weight, if any, they may have; what life for them when they return to where we found them while we slept.
The grade I got from a niece of the current
Regime. My sunburned
Nipple, also a variety of Japanese shrubbery.
Did you know the bus is free. Untitled skirts for
Fall. Why didn’t you say something.
I didn’t want to say anything. Underwater plants wave from
The underwater mirror of the spring. I don’t cede
My right to poignancy and have been assured
You did so only recently. Birds ask
And answer fire where here
Here here.
I was sitting at my kitchen table, the daily newspaper open to the sports, a half-finished sestina (and thank God for that! Otherwise I might have been blinded by “the cat-smooth curvature of her spine,” which was likely to be the third line of the fourth stanza) lying near my Bic. And then, from out of nowhere but the whereness of my table and my weary brain, the thing shot all over with a hissing and a sharp report, as the old adventure novels used to put it. There were colors, some, at least, in consort with the words in the poem (blue, despair). I ducked as “the brokenness of the book’s spine” flew like a shuriken over my head; I threw myself to the left as “yielding spine” and “mere cohorts of love” and “green” went whistling by. Terror? Not quite. There was some fascination in the mix of my emotions. Some admiration for the self-determinacy of the thing, this exploding sestina, apparently impatient with my lackadaisicalness. But who wouldn’t be?!
And now that the memory of my experience and your close call is clearer, I can say with some confidence that you were wearing your white woolen Irish sweater. Now I distinctly remember how difficult it was to extricate Jezebel from the stitching. You even made some ironic comment about your real-life Jezebel and her clinging ways.
What has become apparent is that the stuffedness of this verse form can be dangerous, even incendiary—too many repeated words at the end of lines, then all six of the key words jammed so closely in the final tercet. It’s almost foolhardy! But we’ve always known that writing a poem takes bravery if not recklessness. Perhaps we—you and I—can attempt a new form, in this day and age when the world (or at least a group of a half dozen respected arbiters) cries out for a new form to rejuvenate and reelectrify. We’ll let our sestinas explode, then gather whatever survives, us included, and link the fragments in a meaningful way. Even looking over the verbal wreckage on my kitchen table, I spotted some possibilities:
the cat-smooth cohorts
yielding to the brokenness of love,
our spines green, like cohorts
of –ing,
always –ing.
See what I mean? Oh, the places it could take us! And then, if we have the courage and the flak jackets, perhaps we could take a closer look at another dangerous form that simmers with tightly packed repetitions, yes, the villanelle.
Instructions:
1. Use only a wine-dark spool—extra large.
2. Place the tip of the thread between your lips and suck. (This will alleviate problems in step 3, but will also wet your courage for what is to come.)
3. When threading the eye, close your own. (Not as accurate, but essential.)
4. Pierce the eardrum quickly.
5. Push the needle through the cochlea and down the auditory nerve. (It’s best if this is done in one action.)
We suggest taking a five-minute break, as it gets tricky from here on in. Before continuing, we have a few pointers for you:
6. Remember to think three moves ahead.
7. Remember to not think at all.
8. Let a single thought guide your thread (Though none know what that thought may be).
It is important to remember that from this point on all is conjecture as few have made it through, and those who have will not speak of it. Still, rumors persist of vast asphalt deserts littered with the bones of those who tried and failed. Others whisper of corridors made from towering briars with thorns so sharp one prick brings immediate death. Still others hint of a thick fog that suffocates travelers before they’ve taken their seventh step. Given these considerations, we have come up with a plan that has at least a modicum of success.
9. Move clockwise toward the west.
10. Make a beeline east.
11. Follow the moon until you reach the marble steps.
12. Aim for a central shrine of singular enormity.
13. Don’t stop until you reach the meadows of flame.
We are fairly certain that it is crucial at this point to create moments of stillness within the storm. Many travelers have lost their way simply because they panicked. Therefore, it may be important to:
14. Listen for the whitewashed tomb.
15. Watch for the whispered obscenities of children.
One last word of advice: The demon who possesses us lies in wait. Expect him at the center, or at the outer edge, or the exit. If you meet him—and you most certainly will—keep in mind that his job is to keep you in this little prison. He will say anything to get you to take a wrong turn, do anything to make you second-guess which path to take. He might even appear in disguise and trick you into handing over the thread. But then again, you know all this. You’ve attempted this journey before and most likely will again. You may even write these instructions one day. Perhaps you already did.
My tongue’s clapper honeypots shed sticky bodies on the sidewalk an eel pie inside the mute dwarf her gladiolas followed me I prayed to Tip eventually revealed to be a girl begged the Little Sisters of the Poor for one blasted bite she looked too much like the king crying in her nightie froze my garbage in bundles so the not so kindly neighbors could have their way bought this hat in Portugal no Germany I was German then no Hungarian now I am a Japanese soldier terrible things happened to my children America TAKE NOTE I am hungry and won’t stop one night I went on drinking far too long and alone a war held me hat and boots AIM! STRIKE! I practiced on the furious girls the gold girls wrapped their wings in electrical tape you with your eye switchers we’ll feed the next patient wild garlic paste and lily of the valley pirate radio waves Henry Henry-Hank-O-Hank I lived in Beijing Montana with Robert Pershing Wadlow Illinois’s TALLEST MAN he died of a blister furious furious girls then I drowned in a movie where they said made up things or static storms tonight I laid low under fifteen blankets war horses running past on fire I was a whore in Topeka a prostitute with lemony ripe hips and them hearts unpracticed swimmers red hands gold not warmed in the crook of my arm I think of them like whiskered rawfish horses in mud horses on fire I was a priest a detour in France my face blown clean off in a public kitchen those horses! flames jerked across their bodies let’s talk about my huge hoary lump don’t can’t can’t thicket tree swung up hard it was my hole IDEA gold and frothy air I had to skim the cream a hungry flicker with a sweet tooth under the poison what about Penrod he was a badger in the marram grass revealed to be most dangerous after I loved him when we crossed the river naked

The orchard now full of them girls crying a red darkness I tried ice cream and rubber stoppers but they stayed dreadful quiet when I helped them ignite chicken eyes lit up fruit in all directions fully de-thinged and brown-hearted there was life in Violet lifting buckets of pears over a wall a stutter of music I made when I spoke farted burped rubbed whose room is this how do I look some lippy kid to smack my face or dredge my stick mocked in terrified pursuit a second language child dive in thrash GOD sees everything blast bung hole when the mast leans down for seeds in your pocket broken matches she was not welcome mocked my overcoat bulging pockets territorial cow dipped into my soup the gypsy’s din and crash gave herself to death like that clucking the hole time I leaned out the window all my whiskers between a wedding like a jerked-out baby I and her it was a hot time lickable polished shoes a white sheet tied tight in the heartland seeds and beans Hettie's pitted face called for tumor called for kelp land-locked as she were in me I danced a long time before I remembered the sweets and their secret brother

a concentration camp for dollies that opened closed their fists corn trembled skinny legs while herself slippered applauded by princes hung sheets to dry their urine smell carried on aching legs yellow hair little socks those girls were not soldiers under my thumb my stained thick THUMB I told them time and agin hush now you be hush or there will be no more horse or ice cream I disliked children my entire life and now they crawled over me like barnacles I knew the sea in Mongolia slapped with sticks raised in the river gave me Shaman powers it was my heartland power over horses and noises of all kinds I made a GREAT SACRIFICE a perverse gift of wooden boxes paint boxes milk boxes the ribbon from a coat submission of the flesh God’s breath enraptured through my hair and I breathed it into them my own my gold creations fair girls pink ears the flowblow of their lungs HUSH NOW I’VE HAD ENOUGH I strode on my rush horse strode and never looked back I was not a general my eyes too bad for seeing battle I was there to witness to pluck children like almonds put them in my box no myth no muse milk-swarmed insects in the wounds like a FATHER so many so many so many nights when breath pinched my throat I picked at the seams of my coat pulled my whiskers to the side tried to talk not bash my head into the wall in case the whole shithouse blew up in flames
Before I’m able to voice any objection she takes hold of my right hand and places it at the lowering of her costume, asking me to hold it. I hold it. First as an objective data; a canal that connects the superficial to the cervix of the deep uterus. Nonetheless, being a vagina rarely compatible with scientific objectivity, I start to participate in her motion, from inside. As I move hands, a hint of roasted Mayan scarlet peppers discharges information from skin, enabling me to identify direction, locate obstacles and simultaneously adjust to both. The background level of illumination changes drastically. Effectively blind, I feel no definite boundary between atmosphere and outer space. To reset sensitivity, I push hands as far as they can possibly go. Prehensile thumb is freed for walking requirements. An increase in blood flow reddens her skin. What usually remains hidden is now visible. Her clitoris, for no particular evolutionary function, erect. Accessing anterior wall I touch the behind of her pubic bone, palpating in clockwise fashion. Left hand draws around nerve endings bordering anus. As she continues to lengthen in response to pressure, I catch sight of Chloe, transferring all her vulgarity to a large group of young animals. The bulls differ from the oxen and the geldings from the stallions. She’s the only sexed mammal. Not fully formed she seizes the first ten, speaking seven hundred mutually incomprehensible languages that resemble prostitution. Expressing an urge for natural variation, I face her. Her vagina is not affected. There seems to be a delay between giving and receiving.

A first year anniversary calls for paper in civilized circles. This past Friday, citizens received a threatening paragraph, small and concise. A day later there were roadblocks. This is all just a result of the times, a failure of fundamentalism, a misunderstanding of history. Who else will create a generation that will contribute to our winning? Will the young people crowd around the leaders and flirt openly with the news? Tens of thousands of letters flood the buildings, all anonymous. They begin to decide to go out, it was a small situation in the world that attracted images. One life is a symbol of the ten around it. In recent weeks the fear spread from the bottom to the top. In rain a mask covers the face. The rain right here is a calm mask with anger underneath. Your location, right here, will be transmitted in about a year. A year later, you’ll receive an anonymous text message asking you to reconsider. Will you? The map folds slowly into light paper lining, brows come out over the eyes and sweep up the details.
I walked to the top of the stairs, stopped in front of the locked door,
knocked and listened for your footsteps. You knocked back. I could
hear your voice, kind of, thought you said, “Help.” I ran down stairs to
find hammer to break door down, find you. When I came back, I got
lost. The stairs were all messed up. The door which was there was
thirty feet up in the air, in a tree. You kept knocking, though. I looked
at the sky, saw bits of my pom pom, I think. I started to believe
strange things. Started to believe that maybe my pom pom took you
away. I played with a loose thread on my skirt, the one you liked. I am
afraid of what might happen if I keep trying to stand on Marsha’s
shoulders.
everyone i know beats up their lover and their lover beats them up
and the cops come and the cops go and sometimes someone passes a night in holding
i saw a shade pass across his face when he said he loved me
and he would not tell me what that shade was
i’m just a lover officer
but they never came though later they would come for him and i looked at my computer
and the internet was so depressing
then you wrote me a message like
call me sometime
and i think i chatted like how about right now
and you were like
yeah
do it
call me right now
We have arrived at a place based on the idea that the past never existed. We set out intentions for public imagination, educational software, rumpus rooms, etc. Haywood makes dinner on an indoor grill. A bee flies up and down outside the window, bumping the glass, hovering above plates on the patio. Fruit is rotting on the trees, and the bee lives on after the death of the fruit. He is rejuvenated by past forms in my yard. He’s a good sport. Just then a shy bird lands in the branches. I’m so near the bird we’re practically neighbors! All of a sudden there’s another bird, a black one, and then two red ones, and then another that is both red and black. The two red birds face the black one and I watch as they roll and wrestle among the leaves. Then a fallen petal signals some sort of retreat. The red birds spring past me and out of the yard entirely. It was the only battle I’ve ever witnessed. That night Haywood seems to move toward a derisive nickname. He’s perfectly right to do so. In the morning heat I look like pudding, or I sound like a mosquito squeaking under a mattress, or I fuck like a secretary with her hands full of paper. But I have sudden ideas like a fox, so many ideas, scenes, sudden beauty. So I sit on a cushion and write a letter to the seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painters grouping them according to taxonomic phenomena: animals (pheasant, gorse, dogs, cow, stag) and plants (melon, sweet cherries, leeks, gourds, pumpkin, blue grapes, lettuce, brambles, berries). The table has all its own categories: stale crusts of bread, wine stains, orange peels, stacks of plates, crumpled pink paper napkins, strawberry stems, dirty flatware, cat hairs, walnut shells. I answer the phone twenty-seven times. “Who’s there?” I say, but no one answers. It’s like a sick and moody privacy, so I wear ruffles and read alone in the afternoon, fully absorbed by dangerous propaganda and fits of laughter. I flip through magazines that advise about weight-loss, fashion, sexual dramatization, what is “hip” and what is “square.” Unhappy people are analyzed with the latest vogues in impersonality. I eat a banana on my side by a tree. I smack my lips and shout at people who ride by in cars. This is incredibly exciting for me. Among certain groups of women, shouting at strangers has become a way to contrast oneself with particular social pressures. Lisle and I used to drive up and down Main Street on weekend nights in a kind of parade of increasing and decreasing speed, contraception, and overall total movement. Haywood, at that age, drove a motorcycle and played two outdoor sports. Today he is unlikely to participate in such customs. So I send him to the store to shop for milk, flour, and eggs. These are my own ideas about modern cake decorating: after baking cool thoroughly, remove with caution; use the proper icing; the rose is the loveliest flower made with the tube. At different parties I see cakes that look like Barbie, or grand pianos, or golf courses, or Holiday Inns, or silver bells, or bowling alleys, or carousels, or hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds, or guitars, or Bibles, or flags, or flowers, or duck hunters, or French poodles, or holiday baby booties, or hands in prayer, or horseshoes, or girl scouts, or clown heads, or patriotic fish, or racecars, or woven baskets, or country scenes, or psychedelic dancers, or the moon. There are different cakes for different occasions, some involving children, or sleeping children, or monster trucks, or battles for statehood. Meanwhile, there’s a spatial plunge behind the dark oaks on the edge of town. The mayor wants to shut it down or build a fence around it. “It’s like a dead word,” he tells us. It’s rumored all over town he cries in his sleep: “Wasted space!” Preparations are made. Grim men gather at City Hall. This is only the first meeting. After a few days they manage to successfully redecorate the interior of the city offices. These are events of large civic significance and depend upon progress and reasons. That’s the exciting thing. The whole town is interchangeable. Everyone listens to the same song at the same time, so we dance together under the stars (gold flecks in the ceiling). In bed that night I imagine a complex floral design with thin patches and some complete holes. I crank my arm faster and faster without brakes. Haywood says, “You are the victim of some mechanical metaphors.” He has many possibilities available to him, things to talk through, and reasons to be suspicious.
I don’t know who my friends are. Are there friends? Or only rooms? They have books with names who can befriend you. Only the ones in books or who write them are my true friends and comrades.
Chuckawalla was a kind of pretty, way out there near Arizona. Shitload of palms, rowed, though, showing some planning, which he did once appreciate. Though EP’s forgotten mo’sly bout the hate of the heat. How the hair on his arms recoiled, and his back shuddered from the chill of the sun. Processed into Pelican Bay about ten shades darker than his jacket photo, baked near-black just by being. All of them were. Go into the visiting room, some body’s mewing about how all women’re white by fair comparison, all them wives, rides, -litas and mamacitas, even the mom what wears the red and black like Xmas sweaters, even in June, cold in her mind like he was from the sun, she kept saying how could you do this to me son, son’s undone, shaking his shaggy knucklehead, I don’t know, ma, I don’t know, he stands to reason, EP figured he was some sort of special needs, but come to find (trustee ships it) that Shaggy’s busted his nut on a score of old ladies, one of them took the licking but didn’t keep on ticking, shit like that, EP thought, dropped too perfect, no art to it whatsoever. Barren summer. Round about then, warden decides to trim to two plug-ins per customer, fellas got to decide between see-through TV and clear radio and transparent CD, or maybe a personal fan, he could play the guitar, classical, or the harmonica, blue, or a combination of the two, turning himself into something else, but at temperatures over one hundred degrees, it’s the freeze that comes first, you choose to see or not to see, dreamboy, and such fell choices up the ante, boredom-wise, substantially, cuz without substantiation, there’s no reason to go on as before. Besides, since they ditched that free book program (he’d gotten through two Laughing Policemans, few vols of Gibbon and Golding’s trans by then, T&C, no shit), few itchy Aryan Bros decided to give clapper what process was due, cld have been stopped, most can, but that’s not entertainment. They blanketed the sob, beat him, and set him afire, sort of a giddyup to his hereafter, skin bubbles before it gets goopy, some patches go black or white, chill-bitten, goosepimpled like it was freezing felt instead of pure heat, the smell sweet, not cafeteria unlike. That’s good, cafeteria unlike. EP missed the red & black Xmas sweater though, she always said hello, and left a shoebox of oatmeal cookies with butterscotch chips at the end of each visit. He’d picked a fan and a coffeepot.
His snitch kept closer watch after that, playing fitful sentry, startling at silence, shaking at shadows. He made sure not to be in the chow line at the same time, or in the same part of that scrub they called the yard, still, it was too easy, his cellie was The Parrot, for his habit of squawking what was said and sitting on other men’s fingers. The Parrot said the snitch was scared, scared he said, and the deal’s dealt then, over & done, that’s a bargain bitter made, scared means the fight’s between your ears & bell’s done rung, you’ve bared throat & split belly in the cranium, your thoughts’re running salted & clear as fear itself, and the sour part of tomorrow coats your thin frightened tongue, for fear, as any dude with a cleft bum can testify, mean’s day’s pinched by the perineum, buddy boy, cuz soon as you think you got something to lose, you do. Like a baby eating chocolate, it’s the taking away that’s the treat of it.
Oatmeal cookies with butterscotch chips are better than good. Once they had potato chip cookies which come dusted with confectioner’s sugar and crunch like crazy. Once there were hermit bars with plumped raisins and a whisper of mace, then marshmallow clouds, melaninized with cheap cocoa powder. Ten days after EP saw his snitch, someone’s old lady brought macadamia nut brittle and ribbon candy, red & green, piped in white, like a grandma would keep on a glass Santa tray for the holidays, flanked with a bright peppermint pig and cracked buttons of Pfeffernüsse. Sweet tongue-tipped patience, drizzling caramel shelled onan, right on right on.
EP bided his time. That was a line from something, though what came too loose to catch. He found a book with a Bic inside, what book, do you remember, not God’s, or any other thin conforming copy, but a water-logged work what changed everything. He lost that pen, copped another, then retrieved the first from the seam siding his mattress and used the small heating coil on the coffeepot to slowly soften the plastic. Super-slow, stopping whenever there was an aroma of something more than apprehension, he was the model of patience, sipping seconds like a hot Swiss Miss, draining hours of their grotesque design, playing divinity, claving days from days into drunken infinity. As the clear plastic starts to curve, remove it from the heat and press it against your thumbnail quick, quickly, not on the floor or wall or the shining silver side of your toilet bowl, hanging legless from the wall, nowhere to leave a mark or smear or the scent of burning. That’s not flesh. Sure it hurts, but better now than later. And if you fuck up and there comes that sour smell, by all means, melt yourself a little bit, that’s copacetic, that passes as payback, one thing no one shits about and everyone wants, freedom, that is, to burn, like in that other Eden, to drown, in a pool of septic eyesell, to stagger, like our Savior, through the walk of the innocent, or at least the not proven to be. And you burn and bide and burn and bide a few hundred times, that’s small exaggeration, man, and not by sensation, for the hot ache in your thumbs turns constant, and like any constancy, becomes your beloved companion. Proof of transcripted peace.
I resurfaced in the Technicolor musical, cast in a chorus of Navy nurses, prairie pioneers, Yiddish village folk. But the New Wave auteurs spliced me out of the picture. I was the missing shot in Godard’s jump cut, the cardboard telescope tube that guided Jean Seberg’s gaze to the enclosure of Belmondo’s rogue smile.
The blur of trees as the boy runs through the woods at the end of Truffaut’s 400 Blows. The blur itself.



At twenty-two you fall asleep in the bathtub, half-clothed and bloody. The thin green cotton of your t-shirt sticks to your ribs and billows at your stomach; the fabric collects filthy water and balloons. Your skin peels and flaps at the slits in your arms and thighs. Water seeps in and blood leaks out; the cold, white porcelain stains red. You are not dying. You are trading fluids, transfusing. When you wake up the water is cold and half-drained, your wounds puffed and gaping, your shirt heavy and soaked. You get out of the tub and remove it. You try to tape the cuts.
The night we first attempted sex she had diarrhea several times before taking off her clothes. Nervous anticipation, she explained, only slightly mortified. She wanted it to go well. Soon she started crying, out of pain from her ravaged asshole. Mercy, mercy. I was being polite. The snot came down again. Laughing overhard at her lunacy, she pissed on herself, then, during our fucking, which I commenced in an attempt to distract her, ejaculated all over her bed.
She was so embarrassed by all of the liquids her body was expectorating, she started crying again, then laughing, and the cycle began anew.
It was like this for two months.
Twice during that time, she menstruated.
Artaud’s screaming body is the original, or maybe the original appropriated, or maybe the original applied, body without organs, screaming with suffering and the desire to end its suffering, though suffering is necessary for its survival.
The weeping body is similar, but not the same.
The weeping body is not important. What we have here is an erupting body. This girl had orifices that erupted as if on a lunar schedule. That is, when the moon was out, she erupted. Waxing and waning, no difference. Just eruption, and eruption, and eruption. Of the effects of cyclical time, she was exemplary.
Was the girl a trap? Would I fatally drown in her fluids? Is there a drowning that is not fatal? Why did she expel fluids whenever I was around?
These are questions I’ll never find answers for.
If I had answers, I would not be telling this story like a story, like this. Instead I’d develop a thesis.
Thesis: There is only me, the girl, and the girl’s erupting body.
Though I liked her violently, was fully and wholly in love, I didn’t know what to do with her, or with her body.
Though I also like violence, it was not a part of our relationship. The girl had a history of sexual abuse, which for her nipped sadomasochism in the bud, and for me softened my performed aggression into something gentle and weirdly maternal. I would say paternal but that would give you a different idea, even though paternal and maternal could mean the same thing.
In other words, the girl could not be contained, though I did my best to contain her. This is not the moral of the story, because the story is without moral. I started going to fetish parties and cheating on her.
Of course, I lived in a big city. If I hadn’t, I might have relieved my impulses in other, less accepted ways, like performing minor acts of violence upon strangers. Like stomping on your feet when I move to get off the train, like intentionally burning you with a cigarette. Like skipping, giddy, away.
The girl needed to be safe. I don’t know how she lived her life from day to day when she was not with me, because she never felt safe alone, or in the streets which wanted to fuck her, and did.
It’s like that guy who had the enormous mutated colon, which contained thirty buckets of shit when he died, from a brain aneurysm. How did he live? But he did.
The girl I was violently in love with erupted all day, every day, and yet was highly functioning. She left home three times a day. She was on a tightly controlled schedule.
As much as I loved the girl and appreciated her extreme differences from others in the world, which made it feel like we were unique and beautiful soldiers whose passion for one another was more intense and worthwhile than any other passion in the history of the world or universe, I could not explore my violent streak with a girl whose body constantly hurt. How could I explore it? Her eruptions were accusations of my selfishness. I never touched her like that, violently, I mean; and yet I always felt I had. I always felt guilty, as if the waves of fluid that erupted from her, that suffered her body, were my fault.
There is always blame in a world based on law.
The expectorating girl tried once to enter into violence with me. She told me she hadn't been entirely straightforward, that she had had a boyfriend all this time, then wrapped my fists in duct tape and told me to punch her in the face.
Role reversal. I started to cry.
I was to leave for Germany in a few days. We decided to break it off.
An inversion of nudity. The cloying pelt and underneath the body pubescent. Emanating, it reflected your love. Then later, I shed hairs and absorbed it.
Not a going into primordial but a return. Like the river followed through canyon, cresting and climbing, dismantling the way by which we come and engendering it.
I’m not saying we’re animals.
I’m saying, the strangeness of phenomena calibrated by the desire to invent a new experience.
I sent a message to the blank face of the universe. It rose on the back of gaseous matter. It was something about survival, but I do not remember what.
My body was a different shape then, including the desire part, which was scabrous, wet, and infected.
Newer than the collusion of the past and the present, newer than disjunction as an ethics of boredom or acedia. An injunction to listen and receive it.
Three years ago, I detached from the stricken tenderness of all things. So I am no longer concerned with invention and transcendence so much as with possibility and pragmatics.
But that is not entirely true: first a lake wasn’t there and then it was. I was anxious because I wanted to admire it in the manner of grinding into it.
The urgency of happiness was a real dictum, a sense of variousness and sublimity.
I maneuvered into the quick by first feeling tender toward corners and then toward parameters. I did not know what belonged where and so misplaced it.
In fact, everything started to disassemble itself, tiny holes developed in leaves.
Debris and the familiarity of my garbage—I recognized and didn’t what I vomited—seeds so small my fingers hurt to touch them.
Everything began to disassemble itself. No it wasn’t fall. It was apprehension of the body. My tawny kneeling knees burned at their edges.
Everything started to disassemble itself, so I cased my body in caul. Mercurially, the fragmented world gathered into papule, and I asked:
but isn’t everything we love a sticky wound? and: is eating natural?
No eating is natural, the pets said. No manner of eating is natural.
So, I drank various milks. I craved something outside my body, which was flesh—scintillate, carnivorous habits. (I simply have no taste for you.)
I craved yellow, red, and fat. I savored sounds in trees. Fell asleep to anticipated rhythm.
My hunger often exhausted what remained. Paragraphs of sleep ran contrary to staccato movement.
I tried to teach myself discomfort or muted chewing.
I thought calamity of evening. I thought poison. I thought lead and mulberry.
Three years ago, I wanted calm detachment and then I wanted more.
An artist butchered your face. Genius.
The curators mounted it in a massive gold baroque frame.
Hung it on a white wall in the new corridor of the south wing.
You.
Five feet wide and me, small as my own freckles,
staring up at the huge canvas.
Your crater eyes dance in a way they never did down here on the ground.
I bet you just love your new immortality.
I must admit, I yelped.
Startling, those jutting cheekbones.
The yellowed skin blended with sweet peach,
then dragged down with what must have been rakes.
Blond eyelashes hacked away, even a bleaching
for your nicotine teeth. Impressive, Ma.
So monstrous. Alone on that forty foot wall.
You’re so permanent
like that.
The other day I had to deliver 154 kilograms of letters. The weather was perfect, not too wet for the letters. I already had lost 4 kilograms of my body mass just by walking mail. But all I could think of was that I had to deliver mail in the house of the red dogs. I paced the neighborhood in my red outfit … My heart was beating like crazy when I finally arrived at the house. I didn’t want to be rude but now my eye was scanning the mail. It wasn’t a closed envelope, but a postcard. On the front a tacky picture of a windmill. I suddenly wanted to read it real bad. I turned it around with trembling fingers. The dogs smelled my fear and they almost fractured the window of anger.

Dear friend,
I want you to know that all the letters you ever wrote to me are destroyed right after the crime. There is nothing left, not even the word “fuck.” I want you to feel secure. I also want you to know that the dogs have nothing to do with you. They are just some characters in a story and they will vanish in the end.
Your friend,
The dying mailman.

I really wanted to deliver the postcard but I couldn’t do it. I froze on the path of the front garden. I stood there, my eyes motionless at the text of the postcard. Was God playing a crying joke on me? Then I gazed at the window. Silence was penetrating my heart. I kept my breath. I was looking for the giants but they seemed to have disappeared. The house was empty, hushed and serene. I heard rain dripping. I licked the wet stones of the boulevard and I remembered the smell of rain in Amsterdam when I was a kid. Have I ever been a kid? I guess my parents were still alive then.
IT HAD STARTED WITH A SORE THROAT. Nattie was really sick and Nadine had the discomfort of forgetting whether the hierophant had bathed the antibiotics in invisible water or artificial light. She knew the cold had gotten progressively worse. The pounding headache and the talking mosaic told her so — that her scratchy throat would project a diffuse song beneath the elements, as snow going down in the season of fire. After the first treatment, she remembered when the exact moment, despite its dailiness, was scented in fire.
In the abandoned clinic, doctors were consuming green beans, chicken nuggets, and Hashish Pudding for dessert. Across the raised glass counter, fragments of dioramas suddenly lined up in unison, swelling the sphinx-like eddies of Night. From the thresholds of the hospital — The Passage was beginning to remember the season of nothing, the tales from before her fiery pain was writ with nothing more than long oaks and the oils of thought.
There, the ship sweats in the rain while time divides its name in half…
Now we go toward The Moth.
Above the glass cedars, The Moth was seen as a shining wax sail enfolding in flames. The red winds were beginning to cough the iron ornaments of morning.
And the moon did not appear that night to scatter these sick heads from our bodies.
I want to make work in which conventional hierarchies of value--the concrete over the imaginary, fact over fiction, efficiency over pleasure--are dismantled, their parts rearranged to form objects through which desire, pathos, and obsession are encouraged, and the translation of event into imagination is made physical: form follows fetish.
So this songbird comes flying over to me and sits on my shoulder and is chewing on some stick or fuzz or wrapper or whatever and says, “Whatcha doin’?” like the knife is invisible or something.
So I say, “What do you think I’m doing, bird?”
And the songbird says, “What for?”
And I’m pulling the knife and making a turn and pulling it and making a turn and pulling and making a turn until I can lift a flap of skin. I didn’t cut all the way down, there’s still a real thin layer separating me outside from me inside. I can see the veins and blood pulsating like a stop motion traffic camera. It’s blue and green, not at all familial.
I tell songbird, “I wanna see my great grandma” and I take the knife and turn the tip to my arm and push in.
Songbird says, “Whatcha doin’?” like my blood is invisible or something.
When it sputters out my skin it’s red, but not in the way I expected. Not like fire engine red. Not like the movies. It is different. It is dark.
“There she is,” I say to songbird and I point to the ground where the blood has made a stain the outline of land under water.
“Whatcha doin’?” songbird says, like this whole mess is invisible. Like he can’t see me raising my arm to my mouth to taste and can’t see the look on my face, the sour and wrong feel of my own blood on my own tongue.
“Why is that?” I ask songbird. “My own me tastes like poison.”
“In the movies,” says songbird, “they make blood out of corn syrup and
flour. And it tastes like candy.”
“Whatcha doin’?” says songbird when I take the knife in my other hand, like the splitting skin is invisible or something.
“You know, songbird,” I say “This would all make more sense if you were blind and really had to ask, rather than just being the nag that you are.”
I would prefer it if this songbird were a fruit bat, blinded by the sun and forced to ask my activities because of the sound I’m making. Something like if I were holding an orange in my hand and squeezing it to make it break and squish apart.
“Whatcha doin’?” says fruit bat.
“I’m making something sweet,” I say. I fill the orange with corn syrup and flour and red food dye. I stitch up the rind to make skin. Fruit bat pulls fur from his stomach and we glue it to the orange and I draw a face with eyelashes and lips.
“Look at what I’ve made!” I say, knowing that fruit bat can’t see shit. I like the way this orange is still mostly broken, the way her skin pushes out and opens in between the stitches. I like knowing that all I need to do is squeeze my hand and she’ll break apart and I’ll be able to look at the stain on the ground and say, “I made that.”
“We made that together,” says fruit bat, wanting some of the credit.
“No,” I say. “This is mine and mine alone.”
“That’s not how it works,” says fruit bat.
“Sure it is,” I say. “This is my story.”
Whereas the boy’s father was mostly an untouchable ghost, the boy’s mother was a solid presence, even when several rooms or hundreds of miles away. Her implied corporeality often took the form of the nasally sound of her voice or the persistent shape of her, a short, squat fiftysomething Italian-American woman whose regal essence, there in her thrusting chin and tidy outfits, neutralized her frumpy countenance. She also had a florid smell about her, along with stubby hands thickened and coarsened by decades of doing laundry and cooking meals and handling whatever else occasions a mother of four in a cold, old city every day. Though the boy could not discern her exact words, he felt his skin pierced by the rising and falling cadence of her rote courtesies mixed with firmness, and his bones rattled to the rhythms of her footsteps, paced and growing louder by the second. He stilled and prayed to be passed over.
The bland shadows thrown by her relaxed march through the living room, from the kitchen and to the hallway that led to the carpeted foot of the attic stairs, crossed the usual witnesses to the family’s daily affairs: the white statuette of an embracing Romeo and Juliet, a souvenir from a trip Nonna had taken to the Old Country, the artwork’s base of opulent Renaissance clothing a flume of tumbling creases and folds dusted in soft brown paint which arrested the casual observer’s eye, which was a good thing, because the tragic hero’s head had been removed –– accidentally, unceremoniously –– by the boy and his two, older brothers in a fit of roughhousing one summer afternoon; and the framed family snapshots, all of the children and some cousins; and the fuscous sofa and loveseat, their arms matted from years of use and, at some edges, frayed, and the chocolate leather recliner, a former star now way past its prime though struggling valiantly and pitifully to retain its old sense of dignity –– a few of the rounded gold tacks that once trimmed its legs in orderly rows were missing; and the beautiful faces of the celebrities and models on the covers of the ladies’ magazines and department-store catalogs, crowding the chipped coffee table and the chipped end tables, each facial expression a wanton plea to be consumed; and the plastic cherubs, with their curlicue’d tresses and their tiny, fat digits and limbs suspended in the service of translucent glass bulbs and teardrop beads and plastic ivy, all of them cheap details on cheap, gaudy lamps and wall fixtures; and some of the boy’s colorful drawings of Biblical passages, including his mother’s favorite, a gently clunky but impassioned and colorful reckoning of the scene at the Garden of Gethsemane; …
… the domestic effects, all of them, were normally merely visual background noise and nothing more, but now, she noticed, they did not dutifully, humbly regard her passing in hushed indifference but seemed to revolt, rumbling in protest to every footfall, every bang produced by fuzzy slippers beneath doughy feet as tired and worn as her mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s, and the rest of the world’s mothers’, which slowed her and triggered a start of clarity, so needlessly intense was her blind execution of righteousness, as charged as if she were tramping off to confront the damned at the gates.
She never truly understood the difference between her childhood and her children’s, though she was aware that the number and gravity of outside influences on children, especially American children, outstripped what her generation had known. “Do unto others,” she felt, was steel-clad and impervious to manipulation: The Crusaders were as evil as the Nazis were as evil as the executioners on Death Row. Father O. and the rest of Immaculate Conception might have argued otherwise but only, she believed, because they were, virtually, backsliders. They may not have been at one time. Sister A. spoke candidly about the rigors of the order and how she had witnessed several strong believers, whom a layperson may have deemed saintly, rationalizing minuscule, natural wavering as an excuse to return to the secular world. But Father O. was interested only in purveying a broad message, one with no intellectual subtleties or complexities to confuse the kids and with clearly defined moral boundaries, and he also was concerned with keeping the church coffers firmly in the black. The Mac, as Immaculate Conception was nicknamed, held a bazaar in the church parking lot for two weeks every summer, and along with about a dozen games of chance, the event also included two craps tables, an over-under wheel, and, in the cafeteria, about two dozen black-jack tables. Evidently, the boy’s mother thought, the message of Luke 19:45-48, in which Jesus set his wrath upon the money-changers, did not apply to the parish to which her family had belonged seemingly forever and to which she had belonged for more than 25 years, dating back to her first Holy Communion, and in whose classrooms 25 years ago the intellectual subtleties and complexities of the dynamic Catholic faith were parsed and permanently illuminated. Why were her children’s generation treated like adults in almost every other facet of life but faith? Their world was almost wholly foreign to her, except for the regular occasions when her sons strut onto their grass or artificial turf stages and, to rapid applause, ran, tossed, and tackled better than everyone else, broadcasting in the loud, brutal, and, to her, nonsensical language of sport that primal quality of which she was infinitely fond: excellence, a higher state of being erected upon the universal notions of talent, patience, duty, perseverance, and practice. But after games, when the boys appeared to her in their silly street clothes, speaking in their silly catch-phrases through the base, noisy holes in their pockmarked faces, and rubbing their sore, muscular but hairless, and fictile limbs, and bore no resemblance to the majestic, uniformed giants on the field, she was returned to confusion, unsure what to say or think or how to feel. Each son had been the ringleader of a troupe of thieves bound in speed, dazzle, and legerdemain, and, their weekly performances transacted, dispensed to anonymity by the mark’s haplessness, a haplessness not entirely without its charms, though. Its intoxicating residues carried the boy’s mother down from bleachers suspended high in the air by rigid algorithms of angled steel braces –– the ground below patrolled by stoic security guards and empty, swirling soda cups, bags of chips, and paper plates, and visible as distant, exotic terrain through the splines behind spectators’ knees –– and propelled her gaily through the chattering, shuffling exodus and to the makeshift waiting area outside the locker rooms, where she and other players’ parents and friends waited excitedly, no matter the game’s outcome, for their children, her memory tipsy on visions of her sons’ swiftly navigating shockingly animated matrices of large, angry bodies and emerging into open space unscathed. Her confusion returned upon the opening of the doors and sight of her boys, especially the youngest, who in the wintry months was rarely separated from a certain denim jacket, its lapels covered in miniature pins, each circle, none any bigger than a quarter, ablaze with the text logo of one of his favorite rock bands. Rush? UFO? Iron Maiden?! Who are these characters? she wondered. She could not have imagined, as a child or even an adolescent, confronting a phrase such as “Judas Priest” without being shocked by fear, and a kind of shame, into convalescing for a few weeks afterward. The boy, her son, not only waived his right to be offended but endorsed the offending words. He brandished them on his favorite garment. He decorated his room with them. He went out of his way to understand them.
The boy’s was the inexorable culmination of three previous, more and more bewildering childhoods, as if L.’s, V.’s, and A.’s had conspired to birth it. By the time the other children had grown, somewhat imperceptibly, into almost-adults, with career ambitions and material desires and grossly uninformed but readily flung opinions, the magnitude of the boy’s present and onrushing future had begun to press heavily down upon her. Relegated to compendiums of yellowed snapshots were simpler displeasures, of L.’s irascibility that led invariably to chipped teeth, missed curfews, and missing cookies, and the uncontrollable, seemingly unprovoked tantrums that contradicted V.’s meek temperament and calm resolve, and A.’s fists, dreaded by his peers and plainly motivated by his potentially demoralizing lisp. The other kids had a warmth, a closeness about them. But the boy emitted a coldness, though his expressions of warmth were manifold and unique. None of the other kids worked with their father, putting up drywall or making wine. None of the other kids even considered for a second, as far as she knew, making their own money –– the boy had a paper route. None of the other kids drew pictures for her. None of the others pestered her for stories about her vacationing with friends in New York City and about visiting Birdland and The Village Vanguard and about her seeing shows by Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and Stan Getz, and about hanging out with the Freshmen and the Four Lads when they came to town to do a show. Maybe, she thought, just maybe her distance from her youngest was her fault, the consequence of fatigue or forgetfulness or both.
Other than some of its furnishings –– furniture and carpeting, knickknacks and wallpapering, and the people –– the house had not changed for as long as the boy’s mother could remember. There were a few years right after L. and V. were born when the boy’s family lived in a quaint house in a poor industrial suburb by his father’s parents and extended family. But for most of her life, the boy’s mother was here, treading the same worn linoleum floor panels whose uniform and intricately floral patterns of gold and white conveyed the color of urine unless you were crawling across them and cared to notice, flipping the same worn light switches to the same worn light fixtures, climbing the same worn, clumsy, dog-legged, green wooden stairs out back to reach the same worn second-floor entrance, whose stingy, green porch –– its footprint about the size of a compact car –– sloped viciously, trying its damnedest to spill its occupants over the same worn green railing there and onto the narrow yard’s same worn red-brick latticework below, where weeds sprouted up in clumps in the same old places, by the mouth of the gutter, by the wooden fence between the Brackens on the south side and the chain-link fence between the Savinis on the east, and at the lip of the dark, grimy cubby hole that formed naturally beneath the back stairs’ raised elbow, where a spade, a snow shovel, a pick, and some gardening tools were kept, out in the open and without fear of theft, even though one of the implements, especially Daddy’s handheld spade, was precious, specifically for being the conduit between the boy and the delectable peppers grown by his father, there in the brick yard’s makeshift garden, really just about five wheelbarrows’ worth of topsoil lovingly compacted, cordoned off by bricks upended and jabbed into the ground, and backed by a red-brick wall attached to a huge garage next door and that stretched as long as the entire western run of the yard, from back gate to front, and as high as the second-floor porch, whose view opened up to the flat, empty, tarred roof of the garage, home to a bottled-water company, and the roofs and porches of the shitty houses and apartments nearby, stuffed with groaning, tired, bitching bodies and seemingly perpetually rimmed with dusk and stilled, with the measured stream of cars crossing beneath the street-light at the intersection of Taylor and Liberty all day every day perpetually swallowed by muggy gray shadow, and even the people shuffling in and out of Mellon Bank, Pizza Italia, and the Plaza Theater, and Bloomfield Drug and St. Joe’s, or simply loitering, arrested light and motion like piles of dry shit, all within feet of the tall house near the corner with the white aluminum siding and faded green awnings beneath which the boy’s mother and her siblings jovially watched rain and snow fall or played jacks or collected the mail, only several feet from the potentially fatal traffic and almost always beneath stony adults, who watched over the asphalt where the children chased one another and laughed and squealed, recklessly and naturally, as if they, the soft-bellied and -limbed noisemakers, were already intimate with the noxious weights of their futures, when the world would be greased by the blood of their suffocating commitments and loyalties signed by hands in an attitude of waving in –– for good –– authority and shooing out everything else; jovially watching rain or snow fall or playing jacks or collecting the mail but only to return inside to the same worn floors, the same worn white appliances, the same worn porcelain commodes, the same worn white sinks, and the same worn bathtubs, as part of the same worn life that never ended.
The boy’s life accommodated a similar though heedlessly vernal awareness, kilned by pure facts. That there were houses nicer than his family’s was a fact –– some of them were even on Taylor. That time would not be time were it not a thing fit to be wasted or exploited was a fact. That he wrestled with geometry and video games was a fact. That having a mini-bike would be awesome was a fact. That superheroes existed was a fact. That goodness sometimes went un-rewarded was a fact. That there was no one as exceptional as he was a fact. That the world was cruel despite goodness was a fact. The house’s essence as his family’s house, known and unremarkable, seemed to him as often comforting as constricting: a cramped basement caked with grime that stained his eyes and redolent in grease, two floors of full living quarters, and an attic whose three inhabitants slept, woke, dressed, undressed, dusted, and swept, and jammed to music on the stereo, and dreamed, leafed through comic books and professional wrestling magazines, and read joke books aloud to one another, and painted and sketched fantastical creatures and panoramic, otherworldly mises en scene on paper, and played board games and card games, and whose lone inhabitant on one particular August day strapped on a backpack filled with priceless stolen comic books, stepped out of the window and onto the glistening, black shingled roof, and, to a soundtrack of shuffles, scrapings, and pinchings, shimmied down the concrete gutter encasement –– his fingers and forearms and his knees and feet crackling electrically, his breathing fitful and sharp –– landed on Taylor Street, and flew away.
Opened like the funnies
a picture stuffed
into another picture’s frame
the sky becomes gray
no candles lit
this reality will not suffice
if it isn’t cosmic it isn’t anything
it’s raining and I’m going out
maybe Joe Brainard will show up
maybe a diamond will fall
all the things he talked about
still make the poem a surprise
I once asked to marry the moon
believe a mind could
take hold of the sea
Katie died surfing
I too know the sorrow of wanting love
refuse to tame my vulgar emotions
and I’d like to go home
the long way if I remember
Unlike before we start not in the middle of a decision, not in the middle of the egg, but in a house that someone has built. Unlike before where we were swordless, where we were a child, we have knives, a shield, a weapon to dash out in front of our body like a jabbing tongue, a retracting thorn. We are older now, we are told, we have been tested, we have burned through trees, we have separated rock from rock, evaporated water with a song—here, a pond with no heart—we can only play one song—we can play that song again if we are allowed.
The beauty is that we have lost everything except our sword, except our shield, and there is nothing to remember or to be remembered. We know that it is us only because we are told that it is us; we looked so different then; we can see every stride we make with our legs; we can see our knees bend. Before, we were seen through the eyes of a god, a raven, something we have killed with our sword, turned away with our shield. We used to take the jewels left behind by our enemies and turn them into things that we can hold: a candle, a bottle. Here, now, there is nothing to buy and nothing to take from our slices but experience and the knowledge that we can walk through a place where you once were, but are no longer.
We do not know any of this yet. We will touch shadows and be thrown into worlds where we must duck under the emergence of fire from stomachs of creatures that we will always be unfamiliar with. We will take lifts and we will be seen. We will turn into fairies for just a few rotations of wings before we fall back towards the grey brick. We will die and we will see a photograph of ourselves multiplied. We will die and someone will lose themselves in the lights. We will die and someone will forget a name they have said before. We will die and someone will put form over function, over meaning, and we will say the word “door” over and over again until it looks strange; we will doubt the letters and how it feels in our mouths; that nothing can be that round, that the door that disappears with a key was never there—that someone came in the middle of the night and replaced it with something similar while we weren’t looking, while we were sleeping. We do not know any of this yet because you are sleeping. We begin when you were sleeping. We begin when you were sleeping and I am sorry. We begin because the end has lost its meaning. We begin because we are meant to believe that after all that transpired between us disappeared at some point; that a birthday passed, you ate dinner with mothers I will never know, that you are wearing a shirt that I have never seen and now you are sleeping. There are stairs to where you are sleeping and I cannot jump up them without jumping through you while you are sleeping. The key to the door is in your mouth but you are sleeping. I will see the fires that surround your bed, my bed where I have placed you while I sleep like a gentleman in a chair close by. I will see the fires that surround my bed, one at your feet which are bare, one at your hair which has not moved since August. I will see the fires elsewhere and they will cause me to leap back like a wasp and my body will turn invisible, invincible, and I can run through things that harm me, things that harm you like invisible plans made to cause you to fall asleep elsewhere, all places, but not here. These fires are for decoration; they cannot harm you while you are sleeping.
You do not know this yet, but I will wake up and think you are dead. I will wake up and you will be dead and you will not wake up. I will wake up and I will be dead and you will not wake up. I will be dead and you will wake up and you will get a drink of water and look in the mirror and I will be dead. I will be dead and you will wake up and you will kiss me on the forehead and I will kiss you on the forehead and I will be asleep. I will be dead and you will walk through a door and then another door and you will leave and I will be dead and you will play a song like a boat on an ocean, like a night moth, like a sad bird and I will reflect in the keys like a Spanish melody, like a shadow that I have been carrying that spills out from my stomach when the lights go out and the courage is lost. I will kneel in the corner and stab at the air until my shadow walks into me—jumps with knife pointed downwards to the earth, and you will be asleep. I will sleep on the floor on my side like a wound, like the taste of grapes.
No one would have disputed it was a terrible thing. It was a terrible thing. A thing that had happened, that frequently happened to very many people they had individually known and some whom they had known together. Everyone had a story about it. Their voices were hushed. It was not in dispute. There was nothing to dispute. Everyone had something to say.
The same day it happened, they began to update each other. “She’s resting comfortably,” one of them said to the other. Some of them would not comment. “I heard she took some soup,” some of them said to others of them who, leaving the tight group and traveling across the building, went on to say it to yet others who nodded, tight lipped. Someone had seen an omen. On their drive in to work, someone had seen three crows by the side of the road. Another one had had an uneasy feeling for weeks. Mr. Haslip had nothing to say about any of it, but he was a confirmed bachelor. Mr. Haslip had round eyes, hard as cherries. Many of the women walked around all day touching each other. One would touch another on the small of the back. One would touch another on the hip. The light was very strange. They agreed.
The eye is first drawn to that illusion of movement in the right foreground: a checkered taxicab with its rear curb-side door hanging open and a young Sid Vicious entering or exiting the cab, his motion-blurred face visible over the flat plane of the cab’s roof, and the cab, too, ghostly, slightly blurred as though moving off, up Twenty-third Street, away from the Hudson. Only three-quarters of Sid’s face are visible because of the angle at which Sid’s body is twisted at the moment of the exposure; one immediately assumes that Sid’s face follows his body in turning toward the camera or back down into the cab but it is, of course, equally possible that Sid is instead turning away from the cab to look up at the building in the background, the Hotel Chelsea.
A package tied with twine is thrown off the bridge. A leather satchel full of letters is flung into the river. Shirts, sweaters, hats, gloves are tossed off in fits of joy and fall to the river to be taken away by the current. A handful of paper is sent flying from the bridge walkway. A gold band is taken off and given up to the water below. A woman at night screams down to the water. A man at dawn screams down to the water. The ironwork is formidable in its construction, a barrier of crossbeams. But the river is there below, and voices barely audible, call out.
; it was virtual, the killing; it was conference call, the killing; it was party line, a party; it was everyone talking at once; it was everyone talking and me in charge; it was nearing morning, almost light; it was the doctor begging me, come on already; it was the doctor begging me, do it already; it was me saying, you do it already; it was my brother laughing into his phone; it was my mother sighing into hers; it was my mother saying, this isn’t funny; it was my mother saying, you kids are monsters; it was my mother saying, I’m hanging up; it was the voice she used when we were kids; we hated that voice when we were kids; my father hated that crazy voice; he called her crazy with that voice; he called her crazy, that way she got; it was his fault she was crazy; it was his fault everything went the way it did; it was his fault everything in the world: like planes falling from the sky, like suns exploding into dust, like the whole world how it was; but it was too easy to blame the father; I was done with blaming the father; I would take the blame from this point on; I would take the blame for the world how it was; the world was in a state of collapse; the world was collapsing in my hands; the world was my mother and the voice we hated as kids; it was my brother saying to my mother, take a fucking pill; it was my mother laughing too hard now; it was my brother laughing again; it was funny because we were on the phone; it was funny because we were in different rooms on different streets in different states; it was funny because it wasn’t funny; it was funny because it was nothing even close to funny; but it was totally ours; it was no one else’s but stupid ours: like words you made up as kids, like things you watched through a keyhole as kids; it was my tv on when it shouldn’t have been; it was my brother saying, turn down the fucking tv; it was me saying, no fucking way; it was my brother saying, this is serious shit; it was me thinking you don’t know serious shit; it was rain for the tenth day in a row; it was twelve spiders in twelve corners in three rooms in the house; it was a different time zone where I was; it was a different altogether time; it was the doctor saying, I need you to focus; it was never just, I need you; it was never just, let’s have a good time; it was the doctor saying, I need you to pull the plug; it was never that; it was softer than that; it was more like, I need you to do the right thing; it was more like, your father would want it this way; it was me not knowing what he would want; it was no one knowing what anyone else would ever want: even if he said it to your face, even if he wrote it down, even if he carved it into a tree, into the sidewalk, into the softest part of your arm; it was the doctor saying, this isn’t funny; it was the doctor saying, this isn’t life; it was the doctor saying, trust me; it was hard to trust a person I couldn’t see; it was hard to trust a person I could; it was like watching though a keyhole as a kid; it was long ago that one day; it was no big deal that one day; it was no big deal looking in at him; it was no big deal walking in on them; my father screamed; the lady screamed; my mother was out of town; I called her; she came back to town; she kicked him out; the end; it was not the thing that did me in; it was the conference call that did me in; it was the conference call why I had issues; and here I was on a date in a bar; here I was on a date with a guy and I told him there was no way; here I was in a lovely skirt, my knees exposed, his hand about to touch my knee, and I told him no fucking way; now was always no fucking way; now was always no fucking; now was the luxury of years passed; now was the luxury of the bartender’s serious face; now was his serious eyes as he described this wine or that; and it was me drinking way too much; it was the date saying, I think you’ve got issues; it was me saying, I think everyone’s got issues; it was the date saying, I think you know what I mean; it was me saying, bartender; it was the date saying, what’s your deal; it was me saying, there’s no deal; it was no big deal my deal; it was too easy to blame the father; it was too easy to blame a father dying on a terrible narrow bed I never saw; it was stupid to blame a terrible plug I never saw; it was unclear if the plug was a literal plug or not; it was possibly a switch one flipped; it was possibly a metaphor; it was easier to say a plug; it was something I never saw, the plug; it was virtual, the plug; and it was virtual, the terrible narrow bed; and it was virtual, the father; and it was crazy how he got that way; it was crazy that way he got; it was clichéd that way he got; it was too many drinks; it was too many pills; it was rock star how he was; it was hotel room how it was; it was calling me in the night; it was singing stupid songs to my machine; it was, wake up little, etc.; it was, wake up little, etc.; it was never funny; and then he got sick; and then he got sicker, and then, and then; it was never once funny; it was never me laughing; it was me looking for the bartender; it was another round; it was another round; it was me feeling slightly better; it was a shame of course, ever feeling better; it was the worst shame ever, killing one’s father; it was the worst shame ever, really killing him really; it was the worst shame ever the virtual way I did; it was me lying on my bed; it was me and the phone pressed to my ear; it was me watching some actor on tv; it was some familiar face that shouldn’t have been familiar; it was my brother and mother in my ear; it was all the voices I didn’t want in my ear; it was all the voices telling me to do the right thing; it was all the voices somehow knowing the right thing, and I didn’t even know the exact time; because there was no such thing as exact time; because it was one time where I was, one time where they were, one time where he was; it was me saying, wait a second; it was me saying, just wait a fucking second; it was me saying, just shut up a fucking second; it was wrong to say this to my family; it was only an actor on tv; it was only the actor saying something funny; it was only the actor saying a really funny joke; it was me needing a really funny joke right then; it was a shame to need a joke right then; it was me waiting, everyone yelling; it was me about to laugh my ass off; it was my mother complaining weeks later; it was my mother complaining, you shouldn’t have called me; it was my mother complaining, you put me in a hard place; it was my mother complaining, he was a monster; it was me thinking who put who in a hard place; it was me saying, who put who; it was me saying, you had me; it was me saying, you put me in the worst hard place: the oldest kid, the only girl; I said, who put who; she said, who put whom; I said, exactly; my father put me in a hard place; my father put my mother in a hard place; my father put the lady in a hard place; my eye was pressed to a hard place; my father put the lady in front of him; he stuck her there in front of him; she was younger than my mother; it was a hard place to be; it was probably love; it was probably total love; it was her laugh that waked me; it was her stupid laugh; and there was no keyhole; it was only a metaphor, I think; it was only me opening the door, I think; it was only me screaming, I think now, something awful; it was my father screaming something too; and it was me screaming something else; and it was shameful the lady screaming something too; it was shameful how trashy just screaming like that; it was shameful being a lady like that; it was my brother hiding in his room; it was my mother out of town; it was my mother still able to dream something lovely; it was my mother about to dream something lovely; it was me running out to the lawn; it was me standing under some dumb moon not knowing what next: like maybe I could run away, like maybe if I were a guy, like maybe I was not that girl, like maybe if I were I wouldn’t care; but I went back inside; and it was not the beginning of the end; it was the beginning of something else; her purse was on the hallway floor; and it was my floor, that hallway floor; meaning it was my purse on the hallway floor; meaning it was my stuff in that purse: meaning her comb, meaning her ten dollars, meaning her ID; it was the beginning of the beginning; I deserved something that night too; and her picture looked nothing like me; and her name was impossible to pronounce; and I memorized the spelling of her name; and I memorized her address; and I figured out her sign; and I styled my hair to look like hers; and I made a face that looked like hers; and the ID worked for many years; meaning I was a piece of trash for many years; I was a piece of trash walking into bars; it was me before I had issues; it was me before no fucking way; it was me before no fucking; it was me before, I’m too fucked up; it was the date giving that look dates gave; it was me thinking try killing yours, motherfucker; it was me saying, drink your drink, motherfucker; it was just shut up shut up shut up; it was a shame to make a virtual decision; it was a shame pulling a virtual plug; it was a shame my ear pressed to a hard place; it was only voices in my ear; it was only some actor on tv; it was half my brain waiting for the punch line; it was half my brain pulling a plug from a wall; it was pulling the plug in my brain like a pro; it was swinging the cord like a lasso; it was me like a cowgirl, swinging the cord around my head; it was the date saying, you’ve got issues; it was the date saying, serious ones; it wasn’t always like this though; it was a good time with that ID; I was a good time with that ID; I met guys and it was a good time back then; it was the ID always getting me in; it was the ID always getting me what I wanted; but there was a night a bouncer said, ID; I looked around like no big deal; there was a guy in the bar; there was a guy in the bar I wanted; the bouncer looked at my ID; he said, what’s your name; he said, where do you live; he said, what’s your sign; I was ready for this; I was well rehearsed; I said, Virgo; he said, no way; he said, you’re a Capricorn; he said, and a liar; it was true; I was a Capricorn; I was also a liar; the whole point of the story is something else; the whole point is I wasn’t always this pent up; the whole point is I wasn’t always; I said, you caught me; the bouncer said, get out of here; he said, liar; he said, get; but I wanted to go into the bar; I said, come on; I touched his leg; I said, I’m a Capricorn; I said, you guessed it; I could not hide what I was; I said, I’ll buy you a drink; he shifted; his leg was too warm; another bouncer walked up; then there were too many men in the picture; then there were too many men I needed to please; there were often too many men; some nights I just wanted to kiss the softest part of my arm; some nights I just wanted to think of some guy I thought I loved; some nights I waked, my mouth still pressed to my arm; some nights I could stay there and fall back into dreams; some nights, though, the phone rang through the night; some nights were songs on my machine; some nights were rain on my machine; some nights were dead air on my machine; some nights I should have said, no and no and no; some nights I should have fallen back into my arm; I was in love with myself some nights; but there were often too many men in the picture; there were often too many men I needed to please; and there was no way to shut it off; there was the date wanting something I didn’t want; there was my father singing, wake up wake up; there was the doctor saying, do it already; there was my brother saying, do it already; there was a plane past the window; there was sun past the window; and there was me saying, mother, to nothing there; there was me saying, mother, but she had hung up; because nothing was left but, shut it off; because nothing was left but, do it already; then it was a hum from some machine gone dead; then everything went dead; all the voices in my ear went dead; then the plane; then the sun; then light; then air; then the punch line to the actor’s joke; then another joke; then another joke;
It was a terrible Saturday, the kind of Saturday you have after a Friday night spent explaining to your third wife why you had a hooker in your house and how the condom wrapper she spotted under the couch was not, after all, necessary. I promised said wife I would get some help. To mark my sincerity, I suggested we all go to a bookstore—wife, son, me. I’d start there. This earned her gruff consent.
I considered changing everything about the way I read, but my remorse ran deeper. I considered changing everything about the way I lived, loved, breathed, and ate as well. I was in that not-smoking-not-drinking-resume-going-to-Mass place, maybe learn-a-foreign-language-and-spend-a-decade-reading-Dickens place. I would live forever in family. I was in the poorhouse of want and shame, which dogs often call home. It’s where I belonged.
I became the screaming trees,
I imagined in raining down.
This fire and waxing moon
my magic and of screams.
We is my defensive wound
and my mantra is wax.
moon, and in the regeneration of it.
We denied the of this salivation.
The world was once pure: animals tilted their perfectly formed heads to listen to the workings of the great clock, the sky-blue waters churning over the sunlit rocks. All was well. Then a twig snapped. Something was coming. It was I. I was traveling in my characteristic way: lumbering, unstoppable, crashing through the fragile woods.
We had been on patrol all summer without encountering any sign of the enemy, much less the Enemy himself, and I had come almost to enjoy our missions along the Upper Ridge, from which we had command of the entire countryside, the broad black harbor fading into open sea at one end and contracting into the fat vein of the city port at the other. We marched in silence. I wandered among my own thoughts. I was thinking about the gloomy lane of old poplars that lead to my grandfather’s house, the rusted iron pots that hung ominously from the ceiling—my senses took note of the contrasting lightness of our combat-issue tin cups, the clatter of them bouncing on our packs as we trudged along the ridge without stealth (another memory rescued by association!). If Ben has a son of his own one day, I’ll take my turn at playing the wild-haired old man living in a shack outside the city, obsessing over the Enemy, hoarding food against the Enemy, sorting bullet casings in the pitch black of cabin night, waiting for the Enemy to come at last, just as my own grandfather did.
The river slogged far below us and out toward sea. To think that I had spent most of my life in the city gazing across the water to this very spot, contemplating the silhouettes of these major and then-distant trees: the tall pine shadows planted in ruthless lines long ago by the settlers—those mysterious beloveds, those incomparable villains. Who were they, who were they?
I enter the field I always wanted to enter the field, this
morning I wanted to do it. I did. If now and always you are
tracking the entry in why don’t you just go in? Can you
make it? Do you need to use lowercase letters? Is there a
ball of wax in there? How do you know what you want to
do you hold out hope for the field do you come back to it
day after day you only need to get going to get in there it
will then take care of itself or you might simply talk about
how it feels to be a man at all as opposed to a woman. Do
you have any idea how it feels then memories begin
coming in and then you see what happens the memory
now ah well there it is the memory now it might do some
good. That’s an idea in the field what would actually do
some good, if it happened, not the idea that no matter who
it is we’re all figuring things out and no matter who it is
each time any sort of arousal happens it’s always
different, sex is always different, they need a thousand
words for it, they do, can you manage it again or mustn’t it
be something entirely different now, I think it must, like
writing every day.
I don’t do anything the same every day unless it’s deny
physical exertion in a certain way though certainly the
muscles in my hands would never say that. Now the
thought turns ever so slightly I have a fork in the road I
don’t know what to do I think about staying with the daily
idea I think about “the bullshit” I think about going on
with the idea of the field I know I can’t be this conscious
does it feel any more immediate or do I want a new topic
is now the time
that the field begins to surface that the place where
anything said is said and it goes on for many years until
I’m someone completely different having written day after
day and pushed and pushed until there’s the field again,
looking over me, it was so useful.
I love time, how it’s simply not there, I love cute humor, I
love abstraction, I love interiority which might be
masking laziness or just lack. My friend my friend I think I
knew what to do back then, such a time far back then,
even then I was doing something to everyone that both
engraved us all in us all but even now is nothing so much
terribly but spew against the void. There I think a period
makes sense there it does thanks it’s sitting rather
perfectly or who am I fooling I’ve forgotten it, imaginary
thing it was before I made it appear.
I imagine if I keep going like this there will be some
substance showing up, and that will be my field, like it or
not, not many people there I think but that’s a sure bet
that it’s good that it’s going to be a way to critique the
state of affairs, I want to be very careful with what I’m
calling things, they need to make sense, this is an
important world we have on our hands. I might fade from
it, that could be what boredom is. Or perhaps it’s the
reverse of what the thinness is
the exactitude, yes what it means to move your gaze
toward, without saying a single thing. Each day a little
more turbulent. Each day a little more in my possession. I
want to go back to philosophy even now since I have this
pocket of everyday American life and you can see it’s like
it is and you can see if you’re saying so much.
I gave, I gave over, I get up and run. The greetings come
over the internet and than break up and explode like or
explode and break up like things might have always been
trying to. I am starting from the assumption that I will not
be thinking but that I have been trying to think. There are
interventions small but pronounced. Think so. Think so
too?

The sun is going to slice your goddamn face open. It's going to split it right down the middle. You are sick. This is a sick morning for you. The window is there, naked, the curtain ripped down and thrown in the corner. You did that last night. The curtain reminded you of the last dress she wore, walking away with you pleading one step behind her shadow on the sidewalk. Now there's nothing to keep you hidden from the coming daylight. You now have a new set of hours to contend with, even if you stare right at the sky-blaze and remain motionless in bed. Pretend, then. Keep your eyes open through the pain and imagine it was a bomb, imagine a mushroom cloud in the distance. Imagine her shadow burned forever on the sidewalk, her ashes just out of reach.
Love no longer has the satisfaction of
emptying—but is a cold fire circulating.
Steve thought: A given alligator is a billion billion years old. Time has distilled within it the rudiments of every death. Steve thought: When you left me you didn’t know I could hunt. Steve thought: You believed I had no teeth but I have many teeth. Steve thought: While I slept you emptied my life into strange animals. I know because my food is gone and starving cats yowl from my stoop. I sense traces of your fingertips on their black lips. Steve thought: You thought you could starve me into working. You thought you could make me move into a shopping mall or marry you inside a grocery store. Steve thought: You always said you looked prettiest under florescent lights. Pale and humming and lit from the inside. Steve thought: You said we should create animals together. You said ‘what is my belly for but growing new animals?’ Steve thought: You were always constructing shelves and beds. You were always painting rooms. You invented names. Steve thought: A given alligator is a billion billion years old. Steve thought: I see its yellow eyes instead of your eyes in the grocery store parking lot. I see its billion year old face instead of your face. Steve thought: You overestimated my need for new animals. We have many living creatures at our finger tips. Much ancient life darts through a wilderness. Steve thought: You talked about building a house from shopping malls and grocery stores. You needed bricks and wires and florescent lights to shelter the animals growing inside. I heard them mewing and squeaking through your membrane. Steve thought: An alligator must murder the membrane it is born into. Steve thought: I am not building your house. I am building a house of humid meat. Steve thought: I am building a house that devours a rotten kill. A house of claws and armored hide and milk teeth. Steve thought: I gathered materials from American sewers and Roman aqueducts with bolt guns and wire nets. I fastened tails and legs and skulls with rope and barbed wire. Steve thought: I built a house of humidity. I built a house older than your oldest countries.
Before the girl existed there was only dirt. It was black and peaty, caking the wooden spokes of wagons that rolled through the streets. It was the kind of dirt you would kick across a path or brush from your shoulder after scraping against a wet autumn branch. It was lifeless dirt, soulless clumps of pointless filth.
When she was conceived she was nothing but matter. She was proliferating carbon, growing and spreading like turbid floodwater. Upon birth she had dried into clay, compacted and shaped into the form of a child. Scooped from the earth and given structure, then fired in a womb to make this structure stick. When she was born she was mud, but she was mud that felt: seeing, hearing, hurting.
The girl made of mud acquired a reputation in the town. Her skin was not lush and pink; her hair neither soft nor fragrant. Her friends' mothers hurriedly rushed to wipe down chairs upon which she had sat. The girl gazed at her drab skin and tatter-leaf hair in silence, the perfect silver of the mirror's surface an insult. She developed into a ball of frost-covered pain, loam alienated from a winter landscape. Carved from the earth and surrounded by sky, she was agoraphobic mud, yearning for the steady warmth of the burial ground. Her body was an archeological dig, suffused with relics of her anxiety. Terror curled up the lifeless root of her spine and coiled around the flint of her bones. Icy panic trickled from the base of a cold, stone skull and overflowed sackcloth lungs.
She was taken to a laboratory for testing, to determine how lifeless mud could suffer so. For years they worked, scraping away gritty samples of her for analysis. Eventually they concluded it was a mystery, and invented grand concepts to capture this miraculous fact – that dead dirt, taken from the earth, could feel. They called this sensitivity an "emergent phenomenon – a high-level functional property of soil." Her ears were deaf to this dry science. Instead she prayed for the feelings to fade. She yearned to be regular mud again, qualia-free, seeping into the earth from which she was formed.
When she died they made her into a roadblock, a trundling slab of wood in which she was entombed. They hoisted her onto a wagon which paraded, with mock reverence, through the town. She inconvenienced many people that day – people who were late to work, who missed appointments, who idled, frustrated, behind the long chain of traffic that followed her coffin. Her burial was a unification of inanimate mud. Clay became formless, crumbling and dull – the feelings fading, the panic dispersed. She dissolved into the fields and lanes of her country like spilt oil. She was a girl made of mud, made mud once more, and her disintegrating pores wept consoling sediment as she went back.
Forgiveness is unfair. White-sugared bulb
in cold storage, tap root, adipose
memory, book. My lord
is a shepherd of crooks and want.
Increased drone activity will not
find anything I want to know.
I want to know.
He painted me, and his eyes fell clouded. The ocher burden on the left, tuft of its tail crushed against the gilt frame, was a blemish to threaten me. Nobody reads the dew before the lion’s claws, the letters that bleed across the sand. Translate the darkness that makes ribs hard and hungry: prophets that promise There’s no boy in the beast, no prince in the whispering furnace.
Escape is seeing the light pour down the mouth of the well. Escape is seeing the inside of the beast. He painted me—a bundle of rags held up by yellow—but my body is wrapped in string and dropped into the darkest pit. I read his drippings flung down and holy; they read my bones spit out as history. A curl made black and heavy, I nest in him and learn how the riddle ends. What comes from his mouth is feathers and fluff.
What comes from his mouth is not a clue. My script has run out. Wet and dripping, living marks fall dead on the sand, silent and indecipherable as the roar of the beast. He painted me out of mystery, gave me a dais of light, but he forgot that my body is shaken and torn. What comes from his mouth is new and wet and formed, all my pieces made up again. I wait for his drippings to come down holy, repeat the riddle. Wait for light to pour from his mouth.
I am aroused by the hum of the modem.
My heart is a word processor. My heart
is a bloody fingertip, is a keystroke, a private
Facebook message saying There are days
when I’m aroused with being aroused.
There are days when we should only
be naked. Today it is March & snowing
in Independence. You have come down
with exhaustion. I hold your hair with
my teeth.
My computer eats your floppy disk lips.
My God is your God & he’s fucking
mean, man.
I want to bleach your ribcage.
I want to swallow the Kansas River.
The oxen are tired. They demand
rest, reasons for futility, someone
to clean their horns.
My wagon is a carcass of remorse.
I ford the river alone.
Divine Destination
The Gothic Tudor-style mansion is tucked away on six acres that enclose a greenhouse, game house, guesthouse, zoo, tennis courts, and swimming pool. The flamingos, peacocks, African cranes, macaws, monkeys, rabbits, llamas and dogs milling blissfully about add a rainbow hue to the otherwise green-dominant color scheme. There are many intimate paths that wind their way around this enchanting Eden, with many nooks for hidden rendezvous. The wide lawns are spacious enough for vast tents under which to host parties such as a Midsummer’s Nights Dream lingerie gala. There are several sloping hills, idyllic for topless slip n’ sliding in the summer or sledding over a gleaming expanse of imported snow in the winter. A marble panel is visible just inside the video monitored main gate, presenting a depiction of Aurora, Roman goddess of the sunrise, guiding a group of young Eves into the southern Californian dawn.

Stone Sanctuary
The estate profits from a waterfall, streams, koi pond, and in-ground pool, all organically linked. There is a rock grotto and a tiered flagstone patio with a bar and a bathhouse made of natural stone. Modeled on prehistoric caves in France, the grotto’s glass ceiling is implanted with panels of prehistoric objects and insects rapt in amber. At the bottom of the pool are many bobby pins and shards of broken glass. In the various pool nets are condoms as well as a tangled balls of hair in stages of blond. The bathhouse contains a shower that resembles a cave, ideal for a post-dip cleanse, or a native photo shoot. The sponges in the shower were once natural, living creatures.
“Whistle While You Work” opens inside a filthy cottage overrun with wildlife. Snow White presses a pointer finger to her blood red lips and chants:
Now you wash the dishes
You tidy up the room
You clean the fireplace
And I’ll use the broom
The animals look around, wide eyed and confused. The sink and kitchen table stacked with precariously balanced dishes, clothes strewn across the living room floor, cobwebs, thick patina of dust—the Seven Dwarfs are real slobs. Three blue birds chirp a militaristic call to attention, then Snow White begins to sing, “Whistle while you work . . .” and the animals get busy, cleaning in a frenzy. Snow White has cast a spell on them. Even though Disney has given some of the animals opposable thumbs (a chipmunk winds a ball of spider-web string, raccoons scrub clothes) they prefer to use their mouths and asses. A deer licks dinner plates, and a squirrel dries them with its whirling tail. Snow White corrects, with a high pitched, “Oh! No no no no! Put them in the tub.” Stunned, the animals obey. The deer fills the tub by undulating its ass on the pump handle. Squirrels hula their fluffy rumps with zeal, like nothing could be more pleasurable than dusting. A deer and bunny attend to a chair whose backrest is a carving of a rough-hewn humanoid face, hole in the middle for the face’s open mouth. The bunny perches on the seat, facing the hole; the deer stands behind the chair, presses its ass to the back, and brushes the top with its tail. The bunny peeks through the hole, right into the deer’s asshole, then the deer pokes its tail though the hole with a very intense look on its face, in a gesture that simultaneously suggests fucking and fellatio. The bunny sits upright and excitedly wiggles its own pom-pommed derriere. Outside at the pond, a chipmunk scrubs a shirt on a turtle’s ribbed tummy. The turtle sits on the bank of the pond, partially submerged. The shirt extends into the water, between the turtle’s legs. As the chipmunk rubs the cloth up and down, the turtle throws its head back, clenches its eyes, gapes open its mouth, and rhythmically moves its bottoms legs up and down—a pose of such jouissance it suggests the chipmunk is jerking him off with the shirt. When the chipmunk tries to leave, the lascivious turtle latches onto the chipmunk’s tail with its massive jaw and snaps the chipmunk inside its shell. Both animals’ heads poke up from the turtle’s shell, they look at one another with a startle that quickly melts into dreamy bedroom eyes. “Whistle while you work” means make the most of your drudgery, and the animals have obeyed big time, reinventing domestic labor as bacchanal. Snow White emits high-pitched operatic hums and sighs, but she never whistles. Whistling, the great unutterable, comes from elsewhere, this condensed libidinal energy from which Snow White draws her power. She lackadaisically swishes her witch’s broom and sings, “whistle . . . whistle,” and transfixed animals writhe and scour.
STUFFED ANIMAL
The original “stuffed animal” referred to an animal post taxidermy, killed, skinned, stuffed with cotton and rags and sewn back up in a wooden frame, a phantasm with a pair of glass eyes. Sometimes a taxidermied animal is set in a fictional habitat that, were it to come back to life, it would not recognize as its own. (Like deaths in amusement parks, this occurs more often than you might think.) The educational diorama then blurs into curiosity cabinet. The animals become, in death, misrepresentations of themselves. “Let’s put the dead thing in context,” someone suggests. But what is context for the dead thing?

REPET
If your pet has passed on to the “Rainbow Bridge,” one company suggests, you may want to consider freeze-drying its inanimate body, to keep it near you in effigy. Or, for $150,000 you can now have your pet cloned. For those who are not comfortable with the impermanence of forms, this is a step up from taxidermy. Does one still grieve the original pet? Or, in the age of biomechanical reproduction and infinitely reproducible sameness, is the original pet to be viewed merely as a prototype, and do we instead grieve the obsolescence of our future commodities? What is the difference between nature and commodity when it comes to love and pleasure? What is the difference between impermanence and obsolescence?

WIND EYES
The word “window” refers to openings, prior to the invention of glass, which allowed a building to breathe. They were called wind eyes. Have you ever looked through a grimy glass wind eye so opaque it barely filtered the light? And did you perchance think you saw, as into a dirty television, action figures? Perhaps they wore fatigues. Within moments you thought you heard them running through the building, their shouts of war echoing in the halls. Or (more fortunately) perhaps you thought you could make out shapes resembling animals, leaves, baby faces, carnivals, nebulae, salutary geometries, embrous filigree bonbons, or stencil birdlike intimations? As with auguries derived from cracks in mud paths, tea leaves, and the firmament, ambiguous surfaces resemble the mind that is looking (as Kurt Schwitters says of collages and their makers).

FIRST PERSON
First-person narration is an armature of subjectivity that unifies all the variegated elements of story. Through that singular voice—an artifice, to be sure—is transmitted the vapor of reality. Similarly, the installation artist mobilizes a first-person point of view to unify the variegated elements of installation. We might view its organizational patterns as continuous with the artist’s subjectivity, the more or less masked, more or less reflexive ur-context. We are made aware that we are contacting the worker via the work. When the artist wields subjectivity as his or her subject, in order to reflect upon another scene of (more or less masked, more or less reflexive) subjectivity (for example, science) and to argue for a reckoning with the ramifications of that subjectivity (the scientist’s) with respect to the subject, then the “first-person” function itself is richly emptied out; it becomes a rhetorical figure.

TEMPORALITY
As we enter the contested site of superimposition (overlapping the ethical subject of installation with the instrumental object of laboratory), we see planes of continuity (temporal, associative, ideological, disciplinary) where they were not obvious; ruptures and power where they were concealed; the undoing of archaic racionations, and even auras (of the polis? the earth? our condition?). The objects before us have become metonyms for whatever has forced them into social consciousness in a new guise: if flag for nation and crown for king, then polar bear for climate change and T-shirt for sweatshop. And thus may semantic figures, in their immanent recognizability, show (by comparison) the staggered relays, botched negotiations, and time lags—the slow stitch, the shadow fight—between perfect insight and broken infrastructure.

PREPOSITION
Suppose identity is prepositional: You live outside/inside of a prison; outside/inside of a national border; outside/inside of a battlefield; outside/inside of educational, health-care, or economic systems; under/over the table; beyond/within reach of help. Recall Julia Kristeva’s articulation of the crucial role of abjection: Whoever is not abject is negatively defined by whoever is. When am I me only because I am not you? Self is an unstable infrastructure and a mutable currency. Syntax describes cultural values. Syntax is a social arrangement.
There’s a famous line from the movie The Wild Ones. Marlon Brando, playing the part of a motorcycle rebel, has rolled into town, and when a townsperson asks him, “What are you protesting against,” he says, “Wha’d ya got?” Although Brando was almost 30 when he made the movie, he represented a form of adolescent rebellion, against powerlessness, and against an adult world that constantly reminded him he wasn’t old enough or good enough. A child protests by saying no to authority because saying no is the only choice it has, and, like Marlon Brando, that’s what I was doing, standing in a shower stall with Alan.
Argento Magenta The Painter pulled out his tongue and slapped it against the side of his house. He smacked it until his taste buds fell to the ground, making these clink-clink-clink sounds. Argento Magenta The Painter swept up the taste buds and went inside his house, where he put them in a glass jar filled with distilled water. He filled up a second jar with hydrogen peroxide and put his tongue in it. He let his tongue sit in the jar for 14 days, and for those 14 days, he didn't speak or eat. On the last day, the artist took out his tongue from the jar and dried it with a washcloth before scrubbing it with a steel wool pad. He took out his tubes of acrylic paint--blues, yellows, oranges, greens, reds, blacks, grays, whites, and dabbed his tongue with each color, turning it into a palette. Argento Magenta The Painter fixed his canvas tightly to a 10-by-10 wooden frame. He painted. He stroked his tongue with his paint brush and worked on his canvas.
On the day of the showing, Argento Magenta The Painter didn't attend his own opening at the gallery. He sat in the living room looking at the jar full of his taste buds. At the gallery, the crowd hovered around his piece--their eyes and mouths were large and round and motionless. They weren't blinking. There wasn’t any talking until everyone nodded their heads in unison, and then the murmuring began, and the talking grew louder. In his living room, Argento Magenta The Painter saw his jar full of taste buds emitting colors; first the water was blue, then it was green, and then it turned to yellow, then it was black, orange, gray, white, and then all of the colors came about and swirled around each other. Argento Magenta The Painter smacked his lips together. He poured a glass of Crianza; he tucked a napkin into the collar of his shirt, and he sat there looking at the jar of colors with a knife and fork in hand. At the gallery, there was clapping and praising, and then the crowd left. Looking at the jar of his taste buds, Argento Magenta saw nothing. The colors absorbed the water and it all evaporated. Argento Magenta The Painter wiped his mouth. He put his fork and knife into the sink. He threw away the jar full of taste buds. He washed his tongue and put it back into the jar of hydrogen peroxide. He kept it there for four days before putting it back into his mouth.
It was a little while before I was able to start hanging out with you again. But when we did things were fine. I would go to your coffee shop and you would give me free coffee and, if it was near closing, free pastries, which you'd bag up for me to take home. Every now and then I would catch you looking at me and we would smile at each other and then look away. It was nice to see you again and to hang out some. Of course it reminded me of when we used to date. And of course we kept certain topics out of conversation. Sometimes I looked into your eyes longer than I probably should I have.
One night after work you asked if I wanted to hang out, get a drink or ride bikes or something. Sure, I said. After you got done closing, we rode out toward where I lived, slowly and in silence. Near my apartment we stopped into a dive bar and ordered drinks. We got $3 PBR’s and found a dimlit booth in the back. The drinks helped us feel less weird. There was an appealing red tint to your face and I indulged in thinking about how it looked similar (and also a little different) than from when I had first met you. You looked better now, more assured, untouchable.
[specimen]
The termed used to be “white trash.” Now it’s “undyed recyclables.” “Like flies around a dead deer’s asshole,” was judged to be a bit too colorful a way of expressing our interest. Hume disproved the actuality of cause and effect relationships, so there’s no real way of knowing how this stain got on my shirt. Technically, most things moving through the air are UFOs. She was voted most likely to end up as a Bellmer doll. Cotton candy, my foot: I know fiberglass when I taste it.

[specimen]
As the guard made yet another three-point shot, the announcer shouted, “He’s unconscious!” I lie down to relax before going to bed; two hours later, I wake up, then can’t go back to sleep. Charles Bukowski has published more books since he’s been dead than most writers get out while they’re alive.
[specimen]
Using technology far beyond human comprehension, the aliens traveled eighty gazillion miles and then didn’t see me standing behind a bush. She said she missed her prime because she sneezed right then. The instructions were to imitate human beings in action, which made us wonder what we were. The dog posed with its tongue stuck out like Einstein. All afternoon free, and I didn’t make it to the post office; when I took a nap, though, my body moved through space at eighteen miles per second.
[specimen]
A lot of rocks and a steep slope, but bouncing always looks festive. You can be illiterate and still get a paper cut. Fortunately, the aliens communicated mainly by guffaws. Stop yelling at me--I didn’t lower the blinds all crooked; it was the spider on acid. He said he was firing himself inside.
Horoscope
You might want to approach a situation differently. Not everything needs to go your way right now. Let someone else choose. Why not jump on the occasion and pretend you are an easy-going Taurus or some other sign? Know when to back off and do something very differently. Defer, and you’ll come up with answers. Defer to others more often. Others clearly want to and will dominate, no matter what goes on. Tomorrow night: as if you have a choice, let someone else dominate.
Sex and death, beauty and brutality, organs and Joy Division: welcome to the strange and compelling world of Perfume Genius.
Rip off the wings of dragonflies
Rip off the wings of dragonflies, take their “spines,” their central lengths and a bit of paste, affix them down noses, between the eyes, one per customer. A dream.
The most important thing
The most important thing, about this pen, is to maintain inkflow: (the idea that) the ink must flow and continue flowing, at all times.
A Certain Angle
Remember, he said, when loaning it to me, this pen won’t write unless held at a certain angle.
It is said of the Emperor Fu Kang
“It is said of the Emperor Fu Kang: that He, with eyes unflinching, and a hand at peace, would have His enemies, and He had many, executed by decapitation. Further, that He would have their heads scooped out, embalmed then impregnated with magnet: the cavity that held the brain would be filled with iron, mined in the furthest West. During His ample leisure He enjoyed tossing these magnetized heads at a metallic surface. Actually in later years, with His son gaining influence, His Empire modernizing and so falling to ruin, this metal surface was often the door to an enormous refrigerator, then the largest to be found in the universe (opening it required two teams of oxen and an equator of rope). Inside this fridge the Emperor kept his foodstuffs, luxuriously imported at our expense, at a temperature most appropriate.”

Not before falling asleep, not during sleep, and not with children in the room. Do not use in the case of pre-existing conditions. Not if you are prone to skipping breakfast, have ever eaten breakfast in a moving car, or are likely to engage in forward motion, such as skipping, while ingesting comestible items. Avoid quantities of water. Not for use at sea (See Warnings). Should not be used concomitantly with lip balm. Not for the faint of heart, nor for any chronic treatment, and in a case where chronic condition exists, not a dependable preventative of calamitous episodes. Not to be taken with grains of salt, lying down, etc. Should not be regarded as a reliable forecaster of remittance nor be used in any circumstance for which relief is required before, say, operating a communication device or walking a canine companion. Not to be administered to canine companions. But you, you have no alternative.
"Airplanes have sliced open its blue skin," someone yells. "Bandage it in clouds before it dies!"
"The air has breathed poison and is hemorrhaging," someone warns. "Styptic pencil rockets are our only hope."
"The sky's a woman," someone snaps. "Shut your eyes. Give her some privacy."
"God has a nosebleed," someone believes. "If He lies down and puts His head back, He'll be fine."
"Not one God—gods!" someone proclaims. "They've sacrificed a constellation. Bigger gods are angry. There'll be hell to pay."
Rivers flow red as open veins to viscous seas. The moon, a glowing cherry coughdrop, soars. The temperature dives.
Lacy, geometric scabs drift down.
Being a volcano, Mom is invigorated by danger. Dad is a chain smoker specializing in Solo Yachting. All over the place they leave pictures of boats with big rosy breasts, and books about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
The girls are afraid of friction, and roller-skate everywhere they go. Dinner is hard on Celeste, all those nasty little green things she can't keep down. Whenever Mom gets up for more Molotov, Alice gobbles the rejects on Celeste's plate. Celeste in turn keeps quiet about Alice's shoplifting problem. One day Mom heaves up Lily; soon Lily will go back in. She likes to load up on aspirins before school. Although her tongue is turning black, she sings in her sleep. She trembles all the time.
One night, Dad takes the girls to the top of a tall building. They look down into it and see frothing sulfur. As they descend the steps, behind them the building has begun spewing lava. Dad is nonchalant as three girls jockey for his two hands, saying "OUP-la" as they all hop down, one step at a time, their roller-skates clattering, flames and ash hurtling into the lacy clouds above.
Your jackrabbits are right with the world, but only half so. Your hills are full of big cats. Pooled seeds germinate here from the heat of wildfire. Imagine that, a seed who only wants to live if danger licks her spine. Doesn't matter what they call your chaparral—fynbos, matoral, mallee—or along what country's cliffs you reside in your long-baked dish of skin: cool ocean currents are your breath, mild winters your bedside. You are a rarity, a Mediteranea, three percent of earth's area. Survival is a fist down a mountain-lion's throat. Luck, as far as I can see, draws lines in the summer dust. On this side, my jugular. On the other, an erasure in the space where I once was, where you are continuous. This is the exact spot in which scientists find vacancy, a hawk too rare for form. You are drought, deciduous shrub-land. Your name could mean two legs or a bevy of wings.
There are clouds, or no clouds, or bright clouds, or sometimes clouds, yellow and pink underbelly clouds. These were things that happened outside—the old cow getting dry, so dry. We dreamt that the line on the horizon would open like an earthquake or like the palms of some god or other. It's blue there, way over there, a silver blue; I think they call it midnight. But when you get there, it will only be like this, like these mountains, like these trees, the same earth brown, the same moss green slickening everything. Oh, lonely chickens, count your chickens; that very mean man said that one day, you would be compared to her. Sometimes, we don't know what to make a nest out of; sometimes, we take what we can hold. It's lovely there, over there, way over there; I think they call it love or something or other. But one day, the sky will open up; and one day, someone else's cow will come a-munching on your land, on your grazing grass, on your carefully planted rows of buckwheat and corn. When the belly is slit, when the belly is slit, you'll see: the sow would have given birth; she would have given birth to pigs three.
One hour later, gravity forsakes me.
You were refusing the earththe sweet maternal clay
the moist phosphorescent cavethe dark, hidden burrow
you rejectedthe ancient atavistic thirstto descend
slip back into fetus uterus pointback
into water fire metals.
Torn from the shellplunging nakedinto spaceinto the void
into the unbreathable ethersearing the nostrils the flesh
so as to evaporateto break freeto contain through
frantic dilationlike a rare gasits hard absolute,
rock-hard and inexpugnable.
Like an archaic urnfloating at randomweightlessly
scattering its extinguished ashesamong identical urns
floatingamong other cosmic dreamscasting in their wake
swarms of chaotic imagesupon the stellar dust
so as no longer to have anywhere to fall toto dwell into return from
but to disappearthrough fissionthrough vaporization
a space voyageamong comets and nebulae
among big-bangsand solar spectrayou sought
a masculine grave
in dyingso as never to die.
A mirror is only a moment in time and sees nothing. A mirror is as blind as is a word tortured by fascists.

I have seen girls disappear inside mirrors but have never recognized myself. I have known girls who have fallen down rabbit holes and girls who have been awakened by leaves falling on them. I was an infant at the time of these dreams. Speechless. My mother abandoned me. Not everything was a metaphor. Not every body has been claimed by a pronoun. Grammar always fails desire. The parish priest told my mother that I suffered from an unbearable knowledge of being exactly where I was supposed to be.

Writing desire is not desire. And this pipe, that pipe, is not, was not, a pipe. Beginning with beginning. Gaby said, "You are a girl in this." We were crossing the Middle Fork of the American River. Her body set free by the river pebbles. I had never seen a woman so free. The salt of her flesh on my lips. I desire to you. Gifting our bodies each to each. What was to have remained invisible spoke together. Two lips seeking words. Rubbing words. Hand to mouth. Born this woman I was.

Writing does not make truth appear.

"It's because you are remembering it all wrong. It's because memory blocks the flesh from coming into being." Gaby reached her hand across the years that separated us. "You don't need words."

I imagined that I saw the words, the ones that came before, imagined I saw sentences without pronouns. To live there. The words I needed had nearly disappeared into the river. The river changes words into time and marks rocks with the slow movement of the current. There I am a girl in the river unseen but for Gaby. We climb over rocks. The white water pulls our bodies away from the static gaze of language where I/You are merely the other of the same. Still, the words I need have abandoned me, fled high into the foothills.

Rivers never flood. They simply remember their way home. They are pulled toward home and flow over their banks. We should celebrate such desire, such longing.

In the first person, I have always been at a loss for words. The first person returns me to amnesia. In the third person, I have forgotten enough of the present not to fear remembering. The following was in the third person. What came in the time before is forever in the third person. What comes later was in the third person. What is present is in this third person without losing sight of this I that utters.

Pronouns can only understand false borders, biological blunders. Pronouns should be more tentative. Whole lives are lost in the ruptures a pronoun invokes. Fuck God. Fuck biology. Fuck Freud. Clothes confuse pronouns. Sex destroys pronouns. My body, this body beneath these clothes is a schizophrenic hurricane that frightens pronouns. Once while sitting out back among the rock croppings in Cool, California, looking down on the Lotus Valley Gaby said, "Your body is an ecstatic delusion disappearing near reflections."

I almost forgot.
But my body refused.

In the end a boy, this boy, I can only be a girl if there is no desire to be seen. A disappearance into becoming present. Language falls away as the body enters.
Here’s your book back, world. Good story.
I underlined a few things. Sorry.
"There was a two-headed bird who lived in a tree near the river. He had two necks, two heads, but just one stomach. One day the bird was wandering near the river and one head saw a beautiful golden fruit, which appeared so delicious at the first sight. He started eating the fruit with great pleasure and said it was the most delicious fruit he had ever eaten. Hearing this, the other head said, Please let me also taste this wonderful fruit you are praising so much. The first head replied, You know that we only have one stomach, so whichever of us eats, the fruit will go to the same stomach. I'm the one who found it. So I deserve the right to eat it.
"The other head became silent and disappointed after listening to such an answer. This kind of selfishness on the part of the first head bothered him very much. The next day, the second head found a tree bearing poisonous fruits. He took the poisonous fruit and told the first head, You deceitful fellow. I will eat this poisonous fruit and avenge the insult you have done to me.
"The first head yelled, Please, please, do not eat this poisonous fruit! If you eat it, both of us will die, because we have only one stomach to digest it! The other head replied, Shut up! As I have found this fruit, I have every right to eat it. The first head started weeping, but the other head didn't bother and ate the poisonous fruit. In the consequence of this action, the two-headed bird died and fell out of the tree."
I watched the whole thing through a pinhole in your pocket, and still went blind.

Next time I’ll try to recognize that tiny moment right before turning back.
Dear Death,
I’ve read your letter. Thank you for taking time to write us humans.
Given what’s going on in the world, the timing is perfect. Although, given the history of our civilization, the timing has always been perfect.
I confess to some annoyance at the angry, albeit eloquent, tone of your jeremiad. In addressing all of humanity, you begin: “You can’t imagine the ironies I find in your hatred of me—your hatred of me as the ‘enemy of life’ (which may be the only idea you have ever united around). Am I the enemy of life? No. I am passive. You are the enemy of life!” By the end of your missive, however, you succeed not only at explaining why you are so upset at being blamed for our misfortunes, but also your polarized view of humanity, having observed us (and evolved along with us) for millennia. You cram a lot of research into your letter—from biblical scholarship to contemporary military doctrine to war psychology. At places, your conclusions could be deemed reductive or preachy, were the text not written by the ultimate authority: you, Death. You employ your strong, often witty soapbox voice to punch right at the moral nerve endings, especially in questions such as, “By what maniacal reckoning must more and ever more youths die so none will have ‘died in vain’?” or: “Wouldn’t it be more sane to realistically address the vulnerability you share on this earth than to devise more ways to kill and maim each other?”
Not only are you an ardent pacifist, but also a keen psychologist and philosopher. I was especially fascinated by your take on humans’ compulsion to concoct versions of afterlife and hell; your scathing critique of answers to the questions inspired by this imagined Hell; and your offering of alternative answers were we to agree with you that Hell is a place on Earth, varied and ever evolving, created by no monster, god, Grim Reaper or Angel of Death, but by us, humans. Such a concept of Hell didn’t take me by surprise. But your meditation on the growing militarism, our inherent vulnerability and mortality was enlightening and sobering. You didn’t let anyone off the hook: not the complacent, not even the conscientious.
Your hope for us lies, somewhat Freudishly, in childhood. You imply that everything will work itself out if we love and hold our babies. Simplistic or insightful? Regardless, I won’t be dying of excitement.
Sincerely,
Kseniya Melnik
P.S. I really enjoyed the illustrations that accompany your letter.
I hope you didn’t make the artist sell his soul to the Devil. I kid, I kid.
"Come here," she said. "We have light in our lungs. We speak into each other's cheeks. Would you like to buy a puppy?"
"You're the only one who understands how much it hurts," I said and hit her.
How Does the Gentleman Eat?
The gentleman eats with seething glances at his companions. The gentleman should set a fire in the loins of all those sharing his table. When he asks for the salt, the question should contain fetid and unruly undertones. His fingertips should brush against your hand. His touch should burn.
Several Gentlemen
encounter a body lying dead and naked in the road, torn as if by animals.
Several Other Gentlemen
thread wires between the bones to pull them back together.
The Gentleman's Teeth
rise like the tombs of ancient gods. They drive themselves with a fury through his gums. They are cracked and discolored. They are uninterested in innocence, moral foundations, cognitism, non-cognitism, utility, or the Principia Mathematica. They can be seen in the dark mouth of the forest, striking against each other, producing sparks.
A Fracture
due to a disease process rather than an injury.
Parts of the Gentleman That Remain Hidden from View:
Feet.
The Gentleman's Tie
can be tied in a variety of fashions, the Windsor, the Half-Windsor, the Quartered Windsor, the Victoria, the Edward, the Eunuch, the Nicky, the Dirty, the One-Eye, the Gaping Maw, the Horror, the Four-in-Hand, the Very Small Knot. Clip-ons are acceptable as well, provided that the gentleman carries with him, at all times, a note explaining the necessity of a clip-on. Example: In these modern days, to lose time is to lose heart. The century is barreling towards its dark end. I only carry a mirror so that I can see my breath fogging its surface.
He saw that he would become me in a sudden moment of realization. He was lying in bed, contemplating dreams, and he recalled this dream:
I am with my closest friends at a beautiful country inn. It is too remote for anyone else to find. My friends and I are outside the inn, naked, on blankets in the grass, looking at how beautiful the world is. I start touching my girlfriend. The world and sexual expression have a heightened reality. My girlfriend touches me between the anus and balls.
George was touched there in that spot in several dreams. In waking-life he had been doing self-examinations there, seeing how the little ridge was like a scar. It was where his flesh had sealed shut when he was in utero. In other people the sealed-shut place was a vagina.
The girlfriend who touches George in the dream is me. I was a frequent character in George's dreams. He never imagined that I could be anything more than a symbol of his receptivity and balance - as women tend to be in men's dreams.
You prepare for a great battle, you train your boys for decades, you hone their gifts. You save them up, you do not reveal their gifts to the world. In your underground mansion, a railroad baron’s vast red sandstone heap you’ve inverted ands buried at great expense – absolutely secrecy raising the price tag by two orders of magnitude (and the citizens of St. Paul never once took note, check the Pioneer Press, check the Dispatch, 1921, 1922, a mansion turned upside down, buried and sodded over for a public park, no mention of that) – in these headquarters, these dormitories and training grounds, on those ceilings retiled as floor, you nurture your boys, hold them to one side, amid roof beams sprouting pommel horses and parallel bars you suit them up, mentally, physically, for the war that’s coming. The breath and scent of exhausted sleeping boys eight or ten or twelve years old. The sweat. How it assumes presence throughout those long nights without electricity. In the Institute’s repumped air, over and above the oil soap and the heady rot of Flemish tapestries, a cleanish fug that cleaves to the subterranean blackness, more and more it insists, to very point of declaring itself as substance, never quite in time: because now it’s dawn. And the incandescent bulbs on their timers tick once and domino down the hallways, and bells clatter off-key, and in white socks and pajama bottoms boys stumble from door after door to the washrooms throughout every wing and level, blinking and shuffling through hot angled beams of natural light that cut from the dilating apertures of the mirror chimney network and strike random slipping ovals of yellow or brown or white skin – and sometimes, when the sun flares off the speck in a boy’s pupil, he sneezes. Then the day of fire, and you are undone. You thought you had prepared for all contingencies, but this was not one you’d prepared for.
And you are utterly undone.
And your boys are slaughtered.
And none of their gifts means a fucking thing.
You did not study your history – or you did, but not at the broadest level, it had not occurred to you that all your work, all those lives you’d trained so well and yes had loved so well, that they could all be snuffed out before the battle was even joined.
I am asking you to try to understand, Beezer.
Beezer, I love you so much, but I am writing to tell you: I cannot live any longer.
This is the first person who got hungry,
this, what’s left of them, full of vinegar, ideas for
new jackets, the eye carried in a grass pouch, the
body being flicked, bitten, choked, burned, torn, hung
from a hook, like this.
This, the first word, first utter, dearest chamber,
this growth I cut from my heart, emptiness come back
because it keeps coming back, the fact I keep it,
paint it canary, tag it with a transmitter.
This is a raven that scuttles across the street, this,
the to scuttle, the great mimic, the powerpole, its
perch, the kitelike swooping among the frost, spiked
grass.
This, a wheelbarrow I first had sex in, that I had my
first sex in, this, its pool of water, pull of water,
where I bathed, drowned almost.
This is me at 7yearsold: living in the Great Dismal
Swamp, riding my Green Machine, the coolest bigwheel,
& watching the best afterschool cartoon, “Attack Force 5,”
& trying to escape this stutter I had,
this sensation of being a spore trying to fall to earth.
No thing is nothing as nothing is never itself. For always and still, the is wavers backwards and forwards as the is not of what is, which is itself an is not on the inside of some other thing else.
Yesterday, as I sliced the thumbs from my hands, I said to the stumps that a new circumference awaited them, a sort of titanium zeppelin of the most impossible dreams they could never imagine, given, of course, they were stumps.
Within this inconceivable fantasy of the stumps, there drifted in sacs not only the lighter than air flotilla of hydrogen gas, awaiting the spark, but, in glowing cells cocooned in the airship’s cavernous centre, the isotopic ratios of the xenon that is imagination itself, ringed round, serenely, by the intestines of cows.
The thumbs, obviously, were not nearly enough. The toes and metatarsus were forced to go too. I was at war, you see, with each of my extremities, all the ends and reaches of me. My body was an attrition between the ulterior and the in. There was no exterior empty enough not to contain a VIP section, revolving like a restaurant on the tip of a tower within it. And every instant I went on living was an elimination of the inevitable. I was a plateau at odds with the plains.
One of the paradoxes of my pruning was that the fingers of my right hand – the hand I happen to use – would have to be the last thing to go, if I wished to see the task through with lethal success. To become an amputee, I knew, would only aggravate the condition. And yet the fingers themselves were the hub of the problem – these deft manipulators of items and everything, from wiping my ass to signing my signature, yet also the dropper of plates and slapper of faces, a klutz collective of the soul.
To think that I needed them yet! - to cut away lips and nose, nipples and dick (for I am a man), to scrounge out the anus and to scissor the eyelids, to razor the chin and the ears, to barber the tongue. These little piggies were the first to go to market; they were the invisible hand, the providential forces; and they stood like tiny, bloody totems, bringing home the bacon til the end.
By this juncture, as you may gather, I was in terrible pain. My mouth geysered with blood, which welled from the root of my tongue, and which I spat up in screams around me. I did not try to carry out this deconstruction with stoicism or gravity – to die, as they say, ‘with dignity’. It would be a slap in the face of the process, I believe, to pretend to stomach it. Rather, one must slowly remove oneself from the picture in the most painted possible way.
Then, when at last all that was left were the four standing digits of my red right hand, my Archimedean claw, I climbed into the bathtub and hulked the palm of my fingerless left around the handle of a cleaver, taping it shut. I next positioned my remaining flanges on the tub’s chipped rim, aligned the shaking blade, levered it up and took a deep breath. Then let my cutting edge drop. The blade slammed down unevenly along the ridge of my knuckles, shattering bone, mulching marrow, launching my digits like tiny toy NASA rockets thrown up into the air, their sputtering red stream running out of fuel in mid-flight, tumbling them down to watery graves, in the already bloody, human-sized basin below. After that, I slumped back against the enamel and huffed out a shriek. I had never experienced an agony that could compare to anything like it. The only ethics ever are rouge.
My work thus complete, I settled. I looked up at the ceiling as best I could through the red curtain drawn down by the removal of my eyelids. I could feel myself ebbing away into the liquid around me, becoming a situation, an environment, a time and a place. I had learnt at a young age to think of suffering as a kind of exquisite refinement of the educational faculty, though now I couldn’t think much at all. Had I been able to reflect, I may have weighed the merits of the hydrogen theory against the incendiary paint theory in deciding what set off the immolation of the Hindenburg. Or perhaps I would have recalled that xenon was first discovered as the left-over dregs of an experimental evaporation of the elements of liquid air, by scientists that hadn’t been looking for it.
But I was too dispersed by now to do much else but convulse. I drifted away in the tub of my refusing. I looked deep into my mind and saw nothing repairing.
You get as far as the third plane but you go no farther.
You come as far as you come.