out of mind

Posted on December 20, 2021 by istsfor manity

A Step Forward

Maria considered the storm clouds occluding the southern sun. She could not obliterate what had happened to her before, but she was dead set on changing her course forward, despite returning to her home town.

She swallowed her pills. She set her daily course. She wandered about the ghosts of the past. Her old haunts. The old taunts. The old bloodstains brown with age. The abandoned lots where her homes once stood. There was endless detritus to consider and quickly move out of mind.

It was a shaky first step, but it was auspicious as it was a step forward out of her past.

“I have rain in my eyes and can no longer see. My eyelids are now umbrellas.”

— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory

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calling her again

Posted on December 19, 2021 by istsfor manity

Unspools

Maria heard the sirens calling her again to her home town by the sea. Another trek the length of the country was in order at the height of the plague years.

Who in their right mind does this? She wonders, and wanders, on her zombie track.

Don’t you blink until you see the whites of Maria’s eyes as she hurtles south through the freezing rain, the billow of viral curtains, the piles of roadkill, and the states where Jesus loves you the most!—it says so on the billboards.

“What is this place?” She asks as if dropped onto Planetoid Sassafras.

“Trump 2024” bumper stickers are spotted with greater frequency, and the farther south she drives the further back she timetrips to the glorious antebellum that never was.

Her heart fractionally congeals the lower the latitude—a crack in her attitude.

She must see family, but images of Odysseus swallowed whole by Charybdis—the furrowed brow, the agonal scream—impinge in an alternate version that unspools on the darkened screen of her mind’s deserted theater.

What fate awaits her, she wonders, as the heat and humidity thicken?

“Despair is the truth. This is what
mother and father know. All hope is lost.
We must return to where it was lost
is we want to find it again.”

— Louise Glück / “A Children’s Story”

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i’m serious here

Posted on December 18, 2021 by istsfor manity

Posthaste / Post-Punk

Handbills posted in Maria’s neighborhood say:

Every first Thursday Jesus Drinks Free: free Soul, R n B, Country, and Gospel starting at 8pm at the Jeannie Johnson Pub and Grill, 144 South Street, Jamaica Plain.

Another says:

“Baby Born with Sun Ra Tattoo…”

Bubbling brain cells at the bar, the corner pub without right angles or corners, and she’s back in flesh, back in flesh and you can’t tell her what to do. No, you can’t tell her what to do. Well, fuck you!

I’m not waxing nostalgic for punk, post-punk, new wave, or no wave; I’m seething with abstemiousness, rankled by random name generators and somewhere beyond broadcasting at 7am with breaks every hour on the hour and half.

There is nothing I desire but a desire that eats the heart down to its left ventricle, and then hatches out a clutch of stink bugs in synchronicity in a swale near a swag at the foot of a spur. I’m not writing this for nothing. I’m serious here. I’m the writer here.

Maria says posthaste when she means post-punk. It has something to do with the wiring in her head.

“Joyful—now there’s a word
we haven’t used in a while.”

— Louise Glück / “President’s Day”

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interstices interstices interstices

Posted on December 17, 2021 by istsfor manity

Interstices

INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES INTERSTICES

“You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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it signifies everything

Posted on December 16, 2021 by istsfor manity

Weight to the Ether

My dream analyst wanders knee-deep into a slurry of images sluiced out of my subconscious.

It signifies everything if one knew how to unpack dreams, she says. They give form to the formless, substance to the shadows, and weight to the ether.

So what about the legations of ancient popes, actually concerned with the souls of people, taking electric toothbrushes apart piece by painstaking piece, I say.

She says, don’t you think someone needs to insure our dental health in our dreams?

Then it’s time to go as my phone’s gorilla glass turns pasty and my fingers get caught in the clutch.

A dozen alarm clocks discharge their bells and chimes in ascending waves of clangor.

It’s going to be a day of sorts.

“In Idaho there is a desert cricket that makes
a clock-like tick-tick when he flies, but he

is not a god. The only god is the sun,
our mind, master of all crickets and clocks.”

— Dan Chiasson / “The Sun”

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in my neighborhood

Posted on December 15, 2021 by istsfor manity

I felt a crack in my spirit and all the heat seeped out

Your lower case specialness sorted it into the proper dream categories

I crashed my way out of sleep and ate breakfast earlier than usual

I warmed up my rock and rolled it up the mountain

My spirit patched up
(for now)

“Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what returns is not
what went away—“

— Louise Glück / “The Denial of Death”

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don’t brown out

Posted on December 14, 2021 by istsfor manity

Your Head Can Be A Prison

Don’t Overthink It and Don’t Brown Out

“By the time we die, we know everything we need to know.”

— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory

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you flay me

Posted on December 13, 2021 by istsfor manity
images: risd museum

Ode to the Heat & the Hate of the Gorham Fish Fork, 1879

O O O O that Pincer-ean rag…
O, you striker of fish
Impaler of Ichthys
Hypocrite Lecteur, Mon semblable
You 3-tined piker!

You make rampikes of gills—
Disassembler and de-scalator of flesh—
Flake the filet of my so(u)le,
Flout your hegemonic “H”
Flank your ethnocentric “C”

You flay me
with your stained
stainless gilded gluttony.

O O O O how you fork
Flesh on its manifest destiny
To your Victorian pouch
full of bile.

“Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself in the end.”

— Samuel Beckett / The Unnamable

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please call often

Posted on December 12, 2021 by istsfor manity
Press the play button above to watch my short film “it’s my birthday, too, yeah!” (1:10)

Fugu-Flaker

The days whir and zone by—fast as light—light / dark, light / dark, light / dark (so mournfully dark), light/ dark, light … you see. The end of a month is here before you know it. Month / month / month / month … and here we are at the end of another year that has clamored by. Where did it go? When did that happen? Another year shot. So she places a gravid tambor in the freezer—she is known as the Puffer Fish Queen: a fugu-flaker, fast scene maker. She is trim and gelid. Chromium spangled, angular, sharp-edged taker of the fringe. Bleak is the channel of quiver / meek is the trammel of pain. Bring me bowers of mbu puffers. Saxitoxin. Call often. “Thee talent of ‘Mangacious!’” Towers of tetrodotoxin. Please, call often! Please, please, please call her with the edge of her cleaver—into actions she abhors. To the indiscriminate tang of desire. She’s paid her penance for the hour. Another anniversary of her birth come and gone. She gets on with her life.

“…the little candles poke
holes in the blackness.

A time to eat fat
and oil, a time to gamble
for pennies and gambol”

— Marge Piercy / “Season of Skinny Candles”

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fate was fatal

Posted on December 11, 2021 by istsfor manity
Press the play button above to watch my short film: doppelgänger (2:24).

Our Minute

I am the keeper of the Doomsday Clock.

I know what will happen to us.

I know how the world ends, but I don’t tell you.

I keep you in the dark.

I stopped the hands on the doomsday clock at 11:59.

When we met I thought I would turn back the hands on the clock—that I might set the pendulum in reverse.

But you said our fate was sealed and our fate was fatal.

I was smitten.

I’ve set the the works in motion once more—the cogs thunder.

I’ve chosen our minute.

This is fall in Jamaica Plain, MA, on 12/11/2021, at 11:02 am.

“She passed a sign:
‘YOU ARE NOW ENTERING HOPELESSNESS.
POPULATION: EVERYONE’”

— Garth Simmons / Hole Punch

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