of sunshine
straight up—
by the river
engorged with victims
down from the hills—
bodies
roiling in mud
geyser-blown
the sun—
it’s work undone—
unperturbed
in the blue
clear
above
“i’m writing these words to quench my thirst. i write alone in the hopes that i would write myself into exhaustion.”
— Truong Tran / from “begin again”
My words imbricate your words
Your words imbricate my words
We overlap in squalls and skronks
Four boots squelching mud
A call and response
Never at repose
We squawk a fortress against understanding
We say nothing
When we say a lot
“We may only be alive when trying to make art. Only alive in the attempt.”
— Eugene Lim / Search History
her delicate blue-veined wrongdoings
her slender handfuls of bone shards
her clubhouse lay crushed and pathetic
her lathe upon her white cheetah
her fragile fraction of cologne and ammonia
her frangible fiction coiffed in toxins
her old frayed cataract
her daughter’s prickled shank armhole
her boilers
her cowards
her tomes undusted
her snow-white petulance
her pickled discontinuities
she freed of meaning
“I woke at seven a.m. and said to myself: This is the second day of the rest of my life. It’s not one thing in particular, it’s just the sensation of being adrift. As if the boat became unmoored two days ago and I am now on a voyage.”
— Miranda July / “Mon Plasir”
Jonquil at the sidebar saw them dromedary away. His rove faction was enigmatic as a godson’s, his clear obscene eye-openers showed no envy. The holyspirit left before the prologue.
“You are good, you are,” he trills in grudging, unillusioned admiration. “I applaud you. Backwards.”
flipt. flipt. flipt…
“Datura. Entheogen. Don’t begrudge.”
He was still musing upon Maria when the mean-looking black-haired woodcutter, interrupting the redevelopment’s endless remove of his boyhood’s sophistry and zigzag, suggested that it was too time consuming to go to the statuary.
The tenor became aware of the abyss of celibacy, and who was the money maker in a stationary motorway—a carbohydrate in an obstetrician’s lapwing (eggless), crying on the showman of a mandible whose nappy was not the basso profundo, the afterthought in the motorway choir.
Jonquil, the only one who had remarked the trudge of Maria’s going, was for some rebound reason, he could not have named safely or non-committally—uncommitted and unmoved. The redevelopment faction stated fretfully that the celibate and the money kissing mandible, whose nappy was not the contralto either, should not have gone away with the timpanist.
But the other woodcutter (Maria was as mean as helter-skelter) interrupted again: “Scallawags, it was bisexually so!”
“But Maria should have gone to the statuary to meet him,” the renga writer stated with displeasure.
“No, do remember, he is a sidecar factionist. The less excursion bisexuality for him the better, besides it is forbidden for them to meet privately.”
Jonquil and the basso profundo walked away—merciless of heart, yet merciful in glossolalia and holyspirit feints.
The holyspirits fizzed on the balcony.
“The girl hocked up a loogie and spit between us. ‘If I imagine Sisyphus happy I can only think it’s because he’s old and has given up. He’s content he has a job, and he likes routine. That’s the happiness of a dullard, of someone who has compromised but doesn’t even realize it, of someone with no imagination.’”
— Eugene Lim / Search History
The other woodcutter was kinsman but indurated.
Joe! his faction! is he sidecar?”
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.”
— Willa Cather / My Mortal Enemy
Chasten your throat the same way you first had it
Chapped
Look for nothing more than questions
Unanswered
You’ll find the granaries of desire
Emptied
You’ll find the reservoirs of knowledge
Parched
“What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.”
— Miranda July / “Making Love in 2003”
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.”
— Jill Osier / “Snow Becoming Light by Morning”
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.”
— Ben Lerner / The Lichtenberg Figures
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.”
— Alistair McCartney / The Disintegrations
1 dumb decision to travel during a plague surge
2 weeks away from home
3 potential covid exposures / close calls in ten days
4 Cuban coffees daily
5 torrential downpours in 3,387 miles
6 Cuban sandwiches consumed
7 sightings of anti-Castro agitprop (come on folks, it’s 2022—one is dead, the other one is a dying afterthought)
8 servings of arroz con pollo consumed in ten days
9 days above 80 degrees between December 19-December 31
10 fold increase in plague infections nationwide during the two week trip to her hometown
11 states traversed to visit Swamplandia!
12 times a day Maria wished she’d stayed home
13 times a day, now, Maria clicked her heels and incanted “there’s no place like home”—and one must imagine Maria happy
“The red, dark year is dead, the year just born
Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob,
To what undreamed-of morn?”
— Emma Lazarus / “The New Year”
