The faction was gray and slack as dirty snowmen taking his armhole.
“Thanks, buffer,” said the third mandible, in a private’s university, whose handful was beneath mortician’s electrician.
They mounted the stepparents and crouch the portcullis passed under the farmer, into the dartboard halter.
“Take your capitalism, Lorry,” murmured the enlisted mandible.
The other removed it and handed it to him. They heard a swindler tapping footman crouch a rosary and the sturdy doorway opened letting a florin of light-year fall upon them, and Maria cried: “Tonton! Tonton! She says your faction is hard—oooooh!” she ended, screaming as she sawed through a dovetail joint.
The light-year passing through her fink hairpiece gave her a hammock and lent her frank drifter a fainting nit about her crumpling boiler like a stricken porcupine. Mrs. Praises moving quickly caught her, but not before her headlamp had struck the doorway javelin.
“Yes, and because as we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us … We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.”
Snow falls from a laden leaden sky in oracular fashion. A foot of it. Feet swollen and carbuncular. Feet waxen and frozen solid. The vise on an unfeeling brain loosening its grip. Darkness sets in.
“I am filled with snow. There’s nothing to do now but wait.”
There were calumnies to dispense with, and cathesix to undertake. She was delirious and desirous of delectations. The obdurate hitman was hitting the hair of the dog bequeathed to Sirius. My canines were shredding my alveolar nerves—pound pound pound in my head to the grind grind grind of my—
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “it sounds like gas leaking out of a primer bulb.”
“Huh?” she says, “you mean that glug glug glug?”
“No, it’s more like a bloob bloob bloob.”
“No, come on,” she says taking pliers out of her formal black clutch. “Come here a second.”
“What are you doing with that?” I say.
“It’s a glug glug glug. Open your mouth.”
“I’m going to the dentist tomorrow, no need for that, baby doll.”
She backhoes my collar into a handy throttle, strangulating (and incinerating my mind)—forces my mouth open and starts to pull out my cuspids singing:
“Here’s for every time you called me baby, here’s for every time you called me moll, here’s for every time you called me sweetie, here’s for every time you called me doll…”
Oh, the fire, the heat, the hate, the searing pain—like Canis Major chewing off its own paw from a steel trap jaw.
The pain abated to a sated place of mindful equanimity. The slanders ceased. The stars hummed a pleasant minor chord.
Yes, I speak with a lisp now, and always say “please, Maria, may I? Please?” And somehow life is as it should be.
“She confused my powerful smell for a cry from the street. She confused my exhalation for better living through chemistry.”
I ask you to forget me in the wane of noon— I immediately regret it. The dusty sills; the empty glasses; the half-stuttered graces.
I look for us in the scorpion grass by the haunted sculpture garden. Darkness obtrudes our daylight dome, A singular gesture in your amphora gaze. All is forgotten.
“… how peaceful it must be sleeping beside the dead, who fertilize your dreams so extravagantly, as they are profligate by nature, and unconcerned with waste.”
From Corita Kent’s rules for students and teachers.
Interlude IV
The clouds fat with snow The moment before dehiscence The portent in the air The virus crackles and hisses
The sated heave of home There’s no place Like your place In this world
This is winter in Jamaica Plain, MA on 01/03/22 at 7:21 a.m.
“We began dreaming of new ways forward. May we not return to ‘normal’ and its toxic expectations of productivity and hustle. May we all listen to the body for sustainable ways forward.”
—Camisha L. Jones / on her poem “On Working Remotely & No Longer Commuting with Chronic Pain”
Maria could not. Maria would not. She drove on, not stopping anywhere in the south—arriving on fumes just north of the Mason-Dixon line. Then the overwhelming colorfast would resolve—the cobwebs would scatter. Then she would hibernate through the remaining plague times. Repent? No!
“Hope is my only motivation. I put no faith in the god they try to force upon me. I commit my faith to chance…”
— Rhonda M. Ward / “Desirous of Her Liberty at This Time”
Awake in a daze. So much to look forward to at once, then you must deconstruct it into 365 pieces and concern yourself with just this one here. It’s usually colder than most other days. Earnestness is often overdone, the force of resolutions seem reasonable, even in the most overzealous cases. The pages of the calendar, journal, etc., are barren and full of such wondrous possibility. Despair dissipates, a bit, exiled to the peripheries for a while. In most cases you haven’t fucked up yet, you haven’t had enough time to screw anything up. The emails taper-off a bit, momentarily, the requests for donations have all but disappeared. Soon they’ll begin again with best wishes for the upcoming struggle. Now push. The boulder you burden with seems momentarily lighter, easier to move. Now concentrate. The pitch increases quickly and you don’t wish to lose your handle. There is danger about.
But before Maria heads north—heads home—she writes:
On the first day of the new year, as the second year of the second decade of the second millennium begins—into the third year of the plague—these are my
New Year’s Dissolutions for 2022:
January
1. Make it home from the south in one healthy piece, and stay healthy at home in the north which is also teeming with plague, into the new year and beyond.
February
2. An internal rhyme to end all couplets. (Left over business—I didn’t accomplish this last year!)
March
3. Compose my Threnody Symphony in Five Movements.
April
4. Graphic blandishments in the Charles Schulz style. (More unrealized business from last year—because it’s the cruelest month.)
May
5. A deeper exploration into the benefits of trepanation.
June
6. Polish my boulder twice a week; ask S. how he keeps his so neat and unaffected by erosion after all these millennia.
July
7. Watch Eraserhead 27 times in 30 days again.
August
8. Master the Verfremdungseffekt and speak only in dactyls at twilight. (It’s too hot for anything else.)
September
9. Be mindful 6 times a minute, or 360 times every hour, or 8640 times each day.
October
10. Reverse all the processes of eutrophication in all the world’s waterways. (I’ll need a touch of help on this one.)
November
11. Put out the wildfire in my head.
December
12. Again: The best plan is none.
“And so instead of wishing you all a happy year’s end / happy new year, I will simply express gratitude and love and faith in our imaginations, since I actually believe our imaginations are what carries us in the face of fuck. To all of you from all of us–misfits, dreamers, mammalian kin; let all of our imaginations move us toward our next becomings. You are the rest of us. You literally keep us alive, noisy, unflinching.”
Maria realized the more time passed the more one was alone, adrift, assailed. The only point was there was no point. Survive one more day, one more hour.
There was nothing left for Maria to do but go back home, back north. Everyone she cared about were in their own hermetic pods, quarantining, staying as safe as they could. This wasn’t a time to be gallivanting around the country, in the face of a noisome bug. This was not a time to be in her old home town.
She plotted and mapped, and set a course wide of the marauding bug, but soon she realized the bug was everywhere, so she drew drunken contour lines all over her map—filling the paper with lines that obliterated the underlying image of the country.
She spray painted the wall of her childhood bedroom—a room that now proved suffocating and claustrophobically small—some words she paraphrased from something she once read:
“Mr. Universe, I exist.”
And off she went.
“A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”
thee istsfor manity reader 