She wrote in minuscule
Handwriting—
On a cuneiform roll
She cut and pasted silly
Putty—
In canted abandon
She printed the word
Anocracy—
A word unknown
She layered a palimpsest
Thick—
With self-inflicted pain
She built the word piles
High—
She tried.
She failed.
She failed again.
She failed better.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
— Samuel Beckett / Worstward Ho!
This is what winter looked like in the southern city which was once her home town. She’d forgotten the mild summer days that passed for winter down by the sea in a southern clime.
There was nothing to do—just be. Open. Spacious. Free. Slough off the past.
But she couldn’t.
These places were too charged with resonances of the past—excited molecules bearing negative charges, rutted neural pathways, implicit understandings, explicit emotions—redolent of failures, dead ends, and endless cul-de-sacs. Every corner a lack in her character—a stunted ambition—an opportunity missed.
Then she remembered why she left all those years ago.
But now there was this issue of a first winter day that felt like a mild summer day. Weren’t all winters moving forward going to be mild summers?
A palm tree festooned in Christmas lights.
She reeled herself in and whispered: breathe, just be.
“The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including more deeply within myself.”
— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory
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
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”
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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“You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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”
“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”
“By the time we die, we know everything we need to know.”
— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory
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
thee istsfor manity reader 