Besotted with Crots*

1.

Quetzalcoatl Crank—
the sign says—
this is a great place to live!

I’ve got to get out of this crot.

2.

It’s not helpful that you speak in an endless stream of psittacisms while I’m trying to listen to incisive political commentary. Why do you keep talking over something I’m trying to listen to when I’ve asked you to stop?

3.

The dictator says: St. Ignatius used a cilice; hold your breath and expand, let go. And I do. She’s gesticulating wildly and walking toward me. “She has violent intent,” the dictator says.

4.

My father claimed once to have stopped a bullet with his chest. He ascribed it to the power of positive thinking and the deep groove the bullet made in the car’s dashboard. I wondered where he was and what he had been doing.

5.

I was the strongest sperm, in a multitude of millions, in a deficient ejaculation. In short, I was strongest swimmer in a pool of defectives.

I whipped my challengers with a muscular tail, but I was still less than ideal, or even normal.

(Seventeen years later I would be called the “classic underachiever” by my high school guidance counselor)

But that day I somehow made it through and spent the better part of a day breaching the egg’s defenses.

6.

I once withstood my father’s antisemitic rant—for just so long, until I could withstand no more—my Jewish girlfriend barely out of earshot.

7.

I’m on fumes, coasting toward the end of the month with very few crots to show. BUT, I’ve pivoted—definitely have—I feel like I’m moving on from this rut: extricated, manipulated, and cleansed. Plans solidifying, goals to attend to, and much to achieve out on the face-masked fields. Get to it. Do it. Be content upon finishing. This is my crot for the day.

8.

Out here even my thoughts stop … perhaps he is dead. But his drone sweeps over me in waves. There is a frayed quality to his tone.

9.

I reach for a fraying vine overhead and try to pull myself out before I’m sucked in by the quick mud. Dusk is approaching and something is stirring in the bush.

* a crot is a verbal bit or fragment used as an autonomous unit to create an effect of abruptness and rapid transition

“Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.”

— Annie Dillard / Holy the Firm